It's just 48 hours before the Prior Performing Arts Center’s premiere of “Curiouser & Curiouser,” a theatrical adaptation of the works of Lewis Carroll, written and directed by Lynn Kremer, distinguished professor of the humanities in the Department of Theater and Dance. And you might expect that, at this late stage, someone would show a spark of nerves or a flare of tension.
After all, “Curiouser & Curiouser” is based on Lewis Carroll’s famed literary nonsense novels “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and "Through the Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There." Chaos could be excused where animals speak, hatters are mad, and “Off with her head” is a brand statement.
But, no, the vibe is calm, which is really the only top-down aspect of this production. Calm is Kremer’s default state (unless you’re inclined to criticize her students; then, watch out). And it’s about her approach to teaching. This is devised theater.
Sometimes referred to as “theater without a roadmap,” devised theater takes a collaborative and flexible approach to the staging of a theatrical production. All involved are encouraged to contribute. There is no fixed text — even when said text is penned by your professor and has gone through 10 major revisions. Even then, Kremer says, a rehearsal can be an experiment and a refinement, even two days before opening night.
“The script, music, staging and design evolve together,” Kremer says. “It’s less like I have one vision and I’m going to implement it and more like a great train is moving that we can all jump on.”
Joining Kremer and her students are alumni Karl Hinze ’10 and Christian Krenek ’12. Hinze composed the music and lyrics for “Curiouser & Curiouser.” Christian Krenek ’12 is the play’s dramaturg, an expert literary adviser and script editor.
At a time when AI’s principal value proposition is content creation at a breakneck pace, “Curiouser & Curiouser” is iconoclastic. Kremer spent 15 years writing and revising the play.
Her play borrows liberally from Carroll’s work but uses the familiar storyline and iconic characters to tell a fresh and of-the-moment story.
There are two Alices in Kremer’s play: One is an elderly Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves (the real-life person on whom the character of Alice is based) who is struggling to recall her relationship with the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Carroll’s actual name) and the fantastical adventures the book chronicles. The other, younger Alice enacts these adventures, recalling many of the novel’s most beloved characters and scenes. This telling of one woman’s story at two stages of her life invites the audience to think all at once about childhood, aging, memory loss and madness.
“Young Alice is lost, too, right?” Kremer says. “She’s seeing all these things and trying to make sense of it. Everybody she’s encountering is like, ‘Well, this is all totally normal for us. This is how things work here.’ I think that does really connect up.”
Kremer’s inspiration, in part, is drawn from an incident in 1932, when an 80-year-old Hargreaves accepted an invitation to speak at Columbia University on the 100th anniversary of Carroll’s birth. When accepting an honorary doctorate, Hargreaves said, “I shall remember it and prize it for the rest of my days, which may not be very long. I love to think, however unworthy I am, that Mr. Dodgson – Lewis Carroll – knows and rejoices with me.”
The anecdote set Kremer to thinking about the mercurial nature of memory and a person’s place in the world. And so we have Alice split in two: One, elderly, struggling with dementia, the other, younger, back in Wonderland experiencing it all for the first time. “Curiouser & Curiouser” blends fact with fiction. Carroll is creator and character in Kremer’s play, which also pays homage to the novel’s origin story:
The story goes that on July 4, 1862, Dodgson invented the Alice stories while on a boat ride with Liddell and her two sisters. Liddell’s father was dean of Christ Church College, where the 24-year-old Dodgson was a mathematics lecturer and resident scholar. Alice, who grew easily bored, asked Dodgson to tell a funny story. Allegedly, Alice begged Dodgson to write it down. He did so in 1864 and published his manuscript in 1865.
“So that was also a trigger. She didn’t want to forget those times with Dodgson,” Kremer says.
‘Lynn’s always about building you up’
Hinze has collaborated on other devised projects with Kremer both when a student and now in a professional capacity.
“Not only is there a bunch of Lewis Carroll poetry that wanted to be sung, but there were some gaps where there should be music,” Hinze says. “The Cheshire Cat is a great example. I thought, ‘If I'm composing, I can't have the Cheshire Cat on stage without a Cheshire Cat song. So, I treated some parts as kind of traditional musical theater moments, and the rest are a little bit more kind of artistic concert music, you know, choir and solo.”
Six months before the production, Krenek was on an unrelated campus visit when he saw a poster announcing “Curiouser & Curiouser.” He slipped a note under Kremer’s door, offering his assistance. Dramaturgs research a production to help with the world-building necessary to stage it. Lewis Carroll’s works, Krenek says, fall into the category of most-adapted in literary history. It could’ve been an impossibly heavy lift, but Krenek had begun researching the author’s works when still an undergraduate at Holy Cross.
“I wanted to help build this world. I have such a wonderful relationship with the Department of Theater,” Krenek says. “Getting to come back and take what she taught me and carry that into the world is wonderful.
Everybody is welcome in Lynn's classroom. And Lynn’s always about building you up,” Krenek continues. “It doesn't matter your skill level. And she’s always emphasized that she doesn’t grade you on how good you are as an actor. She grades you on how much you commit to the work and how much you improve over the semester.”
Put another way, in Kremer’s classes and productions, a participation grade is what you contribute of yourself.
“My actors are doing all sorts of things. They're singing, dancing, moving puppets, moving set pieces,” she says. “They are a very busy group when they're on stage.
“And I really listen to them, too.”
