It's not your ordinary laboratory. There is a distinct lack of beakers and not a centrifuge in sight. But make no mistake about it -- serious research is under way in Mallinckrodt 100.
"Today, class, we're playing with toys," Jeffery Matthews announced gravely at a recent session. Matthews, an artist in residence in the Performing Arts Department in Arts and Sciences, gestured to the juggling pins and jump ropes, the foam snakes and stuffed monkeys and plastic bric-a-brac that lay scattered about the room. "Let's make some chaos."
Welcome to Drama 321, otherwise known as "Topics in Theatre: Staging 'Alice in Wonderland.'" Over the course of the fall semester, Matthews and his 20-odd students have unleashed a bit of their chaos on the Lewis Carroll classic, creating an original stage version that will debut next spring in Edison Theatre. What makes the production unique, however, is that everything, from researching and writing a script to composing original music and designing sets and costumes, will be completed by the students themselves.
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"Whatever it ends up being, it will truly be ours," Matthews noted wryly while waiting for class to begin one recent Thursday morning. So truly, in fact, that one entire session will be spent with a copyright lawyer discussing the legalities of group authorship.
"This is kind of a dream for me," Matthews added as students bearing scripts and musical instruments shuffled in. "It offers all kinds of great problems for a class to solve. It requires them to make real decisions about every aspect of staging a theatrical work."
Since late August, the students have been immersed not only in the world of "Alice" and "Through the Looking Glass," its companion volume, but in Carroll scholarship and, more broadly, in other children's literature of the period. Though by the end of October they had about 35 pages of material written, it took almost a month of preparation before they were ready to put pen to paper.
The class' first creative assignment was both vague and vital: to conceptualize a central metaphor or motif that would provide a unifying structure for the entire production.
"The students really put themselves out on a limb," Matthews recalled. "It was very heartening. We were all over the map -- one student even suggested placing the show on a bombed-out, post-apocalyptic yellow brick road. In the end, though, we settled on the idea of games; that is, every scene will be based on a different game, on musical chairs or charades -- whatever fits."
By this time the class had pulled itself into a rough circle, and two students, juniors Brooke Kleinman and Danielle Stein, had passed out copies of their recently completed script for a scene titled "The Caucus Race," which they conceived as a game of ring-around-the-rosey. Matthews assigned the half-dozen necessary roles and the actors launched into their first reading.
In many ways, the results were what one would expect of a first reading -- awkward pauses, unreliable accents and a herky-jerky, stop-and-go rhythm. Yet things nevertheless seemed promising. Carroll's clever word-play translated well (DORMOUSE: "Mine is a long, sad tail.") and the dialog flowed with a comic briskness. But perhaps most striking was the ruthless editing process that almost instantly erupted. Actors generated and dismissed ideas even as they read, weighing and judging efficiently and with remarkably little ego.
"In a process like this, 99 percent of the ideas that get thrown around get thrown in the trash," said Robert Neblett, a graduate student in the Performing Arts Department who serves as dramaturg for the class and has written a couple of scenes. "But you'd be surprised at how the remnants of discarded ideas keep creeping back in as community property of sorts. I think everyone in the cast feels that, one way or another, their ideas are being used."
The class took a short break. Four students prepared to rehearse the "Mad Tea Party" while the rest demonstrated their collective mastery of orchestrated chaos. On one side of the room a nonchalant juggler tossed pins while on the other two students managed to keep a ball in the air with ping pong paddles. A Nerf ball was balanced on a nose; four musicians composed a spontaneous ode to Alice.
Matthews restored order by doing a few turns with the juggler's pins himself -- "Not bad," murmured the juggler -- and the "Mad Tea Party" commenced.
The scene, by senior Jaclyn Shufeldt and junior Paul Pagano, was based on the game musical chairs and already had achieved a considerable polish. Alice, the Mad Hatter, the sleepy Dormouse and the March Hare chased each other around a table with great silliness, the Hatter asserting suitably absurd propositions with great punditry. The band, meanwhile, accompanied the action with improvised riffs and noises and through it all one began to sense what the final production might look like.
Afterward, Matthews declared himself pleased and, gesturing with an oversized plastic baseball bat, began issuing rapid-fire suggestions. "That's lovely, guys," he called to the musicians. "Let's just stay focused on the spirit of the scene. And maybe you could try to be choppier in your speech," he said to the Hatter, pounding the table in a quick, emphatic rhythm. "And you," he added, turning to the Dormouse and dropping his head to the table, "try not rising at all, like this." His eyes closed in an exaggerated pantomime of sleep.
The class geared up for another run and then another and by the end of the morning the scene was decidedly, well, madder. It was quicker, tighter, the gestures and dialog more fluent, the whole illogical tableau more internally logical.
"Very nice," Matthews announced. "Very nice. What we've got here is great, it's a lot of fun. But what if... ."
And so the research proceeded.
