~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alice Under Water

by Kish Song Bear
review by Michael Scott Moore in SF Weekly November 18, 1998

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Weirdness Fo Alice

Another example of the ongoing local obsession with Dario Fo is
on display at Exit Stage Left, where Kish Song Bear and a few
members of ArtStreet Theater are staging an amalgam of the
original Alice in Wonderland and Fo’s Alice in Wonderless
Land. Anyone familiar with ArtStreet’s movement-and-cutup
productions like R&J will not be surprised that Bricine Mitchell is
playing Alice. She has the long hair, the delicate manner, and the
strange sense of humor necessary for dealing with Cheshire cats;
she also has the ability to contort herself in a controlled way and
make you think she’s suspended in water. (“I wish I hadn’t cried
so much,” Alice says, famously. “I shall be punished for it now by
drowning in my own tears.”) In this version of the story, Alice
sinks to the bottom and meets her maker, Lewis Carroll, who
courts her and tortures her and in general joins the fun with the
Dormouse, the Mad Hatter, and the Queen of Hearts.

The plot isn’t easy to describe. Roughly, Alice plunges through her
tears into Wonderland, where she meets Ophelia, who introduces
her to the sleeping Author. “He’s dreaming about you,” says
Ophelia. “If he were to wake up, you’d go out with a bang.” The
Author does wake up -- or else enters his own dream -- and gives
Alice something blue to drink, which smells like cherry tarts.
Instead of making her happy, as she expects, the drink makes her
“blue,” and in a blue light she twists in jerky, watery movements.
This happens more than once. Soon she’s transported to
Wonderless Land, where she makes erotic movies, and a Monkey
is an intellectual artist who wanks by scratching his head. The
Author narrates Alice through some abjectly sexual episodes
before the Queen of Hearts arrives and starts her pig-circus trial.

And so on. The show is willfully weird, full of non sequiturs and
not-always-well-acted bouts of madness. Mitchell does a good job
as Alice; so does Juliet Tanner as the Queen of Hearts -- she
looks like a tough chick on the cover of an old pulp novel, and has
an especially good scene near the end, chanting a Native
American-style song with two other cast members and then
undercutting their chant with filthy stories. But the show also feels
yoked to its own formal symbolism. It ends more tragically than
the Carroll story and leaves the impression of having dredged up
the roots of insanity in romantic love; but all that dream material
isn’t always vivid, and Alice Under Water leaves you strangely
dry.

— Michael Scott Moore

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