A.L.I.C.E.

A.L.I.C.E. is a new theatrical adaptation of stories from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, inspired by the emerging trends of immersive theatre and virtual reality. We wanted to explore Alice’s journey of “going down the rabbit hole” of technology, while staying true to the original story as a metaphor for growing up and finding one’s true self. The story invites a multiplicity of avenues for creative and interdisciplinary exploration, uniting Art, Literature, Information, Communication, and Engineering (thus the acronym, “A.L.I.C.E.”). Mark Reany, a theatre professor at the University of Kansas, describes theatre as  “the original virtual reality machine.” The idea of the “virtual,” at least in a philosophical sense, can be traced all the way back to antiquity and the allegory of Plato’s Cave, or perhaps even earlier. The stage has always been virtual because it is a place of a representation already inhabited by what Sergei Eisenstein called “distortion.” In a similar way, Wonderland is a place of distortion, a perfect metaphor for thinking about virtual reality. Last summer, I assembled a team of excellent writers who are students at MU to help me create this adaptation. Over the course of more than a year of meetings and revisions, what was produced is a (mostly) faithful adaptation of the stories that could fit on any stage, regardless of the concept. For this show, the designers and I were especially inspired by the idea of the stage becoming a sort of “paper theatre,” as the book unfolds into four dimensions with colorful illustrations from a well-loved children’s book. In fact, my greatest sources of inspiration have been the copies of these same books my mom gave to me months before her passing. These books still display a patina of doodles, scratches, and tiny fingerprints of my late mother and her Aunt Marcy (my mom’s namesake who also passed the books along to her). In the same spirit of joy that my mom passed to me, I pass this story along to you, dear spectator. With love, this production is dedicated to my Mom, Marcy McNeil.