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Newspaper Articles 
A 'modern, urban Wonderland:' an Alice like no other 
Star Tribune
Published: April 26, 2002
By Rohan Preston
Peer through the looking glass at this "Alice in Wonderland" and you are likely to see one of the most inventive and radical versions ever staged in the Twin Cities. It's concocted by Theatre de la Jeune Lune Dominique Serrand, who's directing at Minneapolis' Children's Theatre Company for the first time.
For starters, this staging of the already magical show features five Alices (including an inanimate one), different versions of how she sees herself during her journey.
The four human Alices are played by a motley quartet: two girls, one woman and one man. The last, "Big Alice," is depicted by Brian Baumgartner, wearing a pair of red size-13 sneakers. He represents Alice in the moments when she decides to be a thunderous man.
"The reason there are four Alices is because, in her mind, she's constantly transforming herself into all these different people," Serrand said. "This is not logical -- she sometimes grows younger -- but it's a luminous story. Sometimes both parts of her are there at once. It's like saying to embrace parts of you that you thought were gone but are still hanging around."
Entering a riddle
Adapted by Sharon Holland from Lewis Carroll's original story, "Alice" is the saga of a girl's journey outside herself. She travels in and out of time, going to unusual places and meeting people, animals and things with such names as the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, Tweedledee and the Duchess. The last character is played by Gerald Drake, who is marking his 30th season with the Children's Theatre.
Serrand has assembled a first-rate team, including costume designer Sonya Berlovitz, scenic designer Scott Bradley, lighting designer Marcus Dillard and choreographer Matt Jenson.
Serrand said he sees "Alice" as a journey into the young character's mind and soul. He aims to put us into Alice's free-associative dreaminess.
"It's really about Alice creating a world and reacting to it," he said. "The thing is to see it from her standpoint -- how she sees the time and space. It's about entering a riddle and living in it for a bit."
Serrand makes extensive use of video. A camera planted in the fly space above the stage streams images that are projected onto a screen with a green background.
The mix of video and live action is used to establish scale and to create a sense of place. An onstage character might be captured by the camera, for example, then projected to appear on a dish next to a butter knife. While we are watching him in three dimensions, he's a two-dimensional morsel in somebody's mind.
"This is how kids think," CTC artistic director Peter Brosius said as he watched a Sunday technical rehearsal. "They have intense size issues -- one moment they want to be micro, another moment they want to be big, and Dominique has tapped all of that magic, that mystery, that intense imagination."
Real and surreal
Serrand said he is trying to capture the dislocating wildness of what it means to be outside yourself. "It's about the transforming imagination and the reinvention of language -- you know, that thing I do."
Arguably the nation's leading exponent of the physical theater aesthetic created by Jacques Lecoq, and a founding artistic director of Jeune Lune, Serrand is known for his visual inventiveness, his supple creativity and his prickly sense of play.
In "Alice," he marries the surreal with the real and the physical with the metaphysical to bring out the story's dreamy possibilities. Serrand has re-imagined "Alice" not as a fairy tale set in a faraway place, but as an urban story about a little girl's growth to adulthood. He does not seek to take us away from our urban realities into some farfetched fantasy, just take us deeper into it.
"Dominique has brought a wonderful physical theater vocabulary, a strong visual sense and a magical use of technology to capture the dislocating wildness of what it means to be outside yourself," Brosius said. "It's exciting to have this wonderfully fresh take on a classic story here."
Copyright 2002 Star Tribune.
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