The New Renaissance Players present 'Alice' at the Shea

TURNERS FALLS -- “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas, only I'm not esure exactly what they are.” So says Alice, the eternal woman child caught forever in the backwards land of dreams, as she reads the most famous nonsense poem of all time through the looking glass at the Shea Theater on Sunday, while the uffish jabberwock went whiffling through the crowd, burbling at the skeptical children and their rapt, wide-eyed parents. Alice (Ashley Blom) led the audience on a merry chase through the distorted realm of Wonderland, where glue sniffers, mushroom fanciers, and other revelers on the forbidden fruit of fantasy waited round every episodic corner to make her smaller, taller, to blow her mind and nearly take her head off ... all on a golden afternoon. It was a very blustery day, as we approached the Shea, and signs and wonders were everywhere, from the balloons festooning the facade of LOOT on the far side of the Avenue to the solitary kestrel hawk with a sparrow in its claws standing still as a sentinel in front of the Colle. A flurry of feathers swirled in a biting wind in the doorway of the Shea, as mothers with young children tucked one under each arm ushered them into the theater to watch the New Renaisaance Players unfold the familiar tale of Alice and her descent down the death-defying rabbit hole. But under the innovating handling of director Jillian Morgan, the shopworn pursuit of the waist-coated white rabbit was dispense with in favor of Alice, after the briefest of intros, walking directly into the mirror image world, where both Lewis Carroll's brilliant and transgressive Wonderland and his Looking Glass sequel changed places and perspectives with fast-paced and riotous glee. High above the fray, like a retro deus ex machina from Hoboken, Daniel Hales, and his frost heaves. laid down cool and brilliant backing tracks to keep the action hopping. There were too many standout performances to detail, almost too much of a muchness overall, but Alice managed to thread the deranged needle in pinafored aplomb. “It's all very well to say, 'Drink Me,'” notes Alice, yet she bravely does, and before her chin hits her toes she guides us into the magic, hidden garden where whitewashed roses are stained blood read, where overweening, brilliantly costumed caterpillars instruct uus in didactic tones to keep our tempers and force us to recite fractured poesy from days of yore. We've all played croquet games like these, with unstable authority figures, rigid pink flamingos and evanescent hedgehogs, at peril of our lives. And we've become almost too familiar with the caucus races of pompous dodos and daft lories and their frumious feathered friends who run in dripping circles toward the crazed right wing of their mad Tea Party. The shrill tones of kim Overtree in her dominating role as the Queen of Hearts quite dwarfed her myopic but sympathetic husband, Brendan Kenny, and would seem to have left little oxygen on stage for other monarchs. But Christina Doe, as the delightfully simpering White Queen, and Jenny Silver, as her most awe-inspiring Red Highness, found more than enough space to breath wondrous vitality into their larger-than-life personas, even so. Yes, it's a children's classic, and Sarah Hodge-Wetherbee remembered this especially well as she directed her lachrymose Mock Turtle's performance to the children in the front rows, entrancing them with her sad, sad “Beautiful Soup.” The kids nodded in sublime recognition as she reeled off the branches of arithmetic they were all too familiar with from their own classrooms: ambition, distraction, uglification and derision. And White Knight Joe van Allen kept the young ones enthralled with his manic Milli Vanilli star turn, lip synching a frost heave tune on the baffling chessboard of looking glass land. Heath Verrill was inspired as the ovoid Humpty Dumpty, delivering a truncated poem before falling off the wall for good. And Emily Eaton pulled off the amazing role reversal of making everyone else on stage disappear the moment she crawled onto it in the guise of one scrumptious Cheshire kitten. Nevertheless, it is disorienting to be gripped tightly in the clutches of a disordered dream you can never quite wake up from. Children know intuitively that the road of life is pitted with impossibilities, detoured by the demands of imperious adults, and subject to inscrutable rules. So it is no wonder they identify so well with Alice, as she steadfastly insists on rationality in a mad, mad world. Even so, after the two and a half hour play had finally run its course, some of the actual children in the room had grown quite restless, or laid their heads down on their mothers' laps for naps of their own. But their parents remained wide awake through it all, reveling in their own sweet memories of childhood.

This post originally appeared in The Montague Reporter.