Chatterbox: Down to Earth

Alice in Wonderland play: Who was in one?

So on the AE Chat Thread, I realized a lot of us have been in play or musical versions of Alice in Wonderland and Alice in the Looking Glass! So here's a place to talk about Alice in Wonderland and Wonderland-concerned theatrics. We can even talk about the actual book, or stuff like Heartless by Marissa Meyer. (No spoilers!)

Below are a few questions to answer; you don't have to complete all of them at once if you don't want to. You can answer whichever ones you want.

1. What was your AIW-related play called?

2. Play or musical? (Or other.)

3. Do you know who wrote the script? (Maybe some of us have performed the same version.

4. Were you a techie, actor/actress, or alternate? 

5. Continuing #4, what did you do? (Tell us about your job or character.)

6. Tell us about your play. 

7. Do you have a funny/interesting/surprising story about the play?

8. What was the play for? (Meaning was it a school play, a community thing, a competition, etc)

9. When someone says a line from the play, do you have the strange urge to say the next line?

10. Do you feel weirdly sentimental about anything AIW-related?

11. When did you do the play? 

My answers:

1. Alice in Wonderland.

2. Play. Although it did involve the Mad Hatter "singing" a poem, but the way she did it doesn't qualify as singing XD (I'm not being mean; it's supposed to sound bad) and when my character comes onstage I sing one verse.

3. I don't have the script with me, so I can't answer that now.

4. Actress! *strikes dramatic pose*

5. At the beginning of the play, I was an actor like everyone else. I actually had the opening line, which was kinda cool. As the Duchess, I'm in three scenes. This may not seem like a lot, but it's one of the second largest roles you can have...Alice is in every scene, and everyone else is in either three or two scenes. Oh, and I form a gate in like the third scene. But my main role is the Duchess. By Wonderland standards, she's pretty sane. She throws her baby up and down and calls it a pig, and values the art of living backwards. When we did a character analysis, I came up with an intricate backstory as to wh she acts this way, which I'd love to post later. Anywho, the Duchess is dramatic, and holds herself with pride, but in a very different way from the Queen of Hearts (who is stiff, regal, angry, loud). I had a lot of fun playing the Duchess.

6. It's "a play within a play." It starts out with a troupe of actors in a theater who are putting on Alice in Wonderland, but they don't have an Alice. They stumble upon a young girl who happens to be named Alice, hiding behind the curtain. They recite a poem as they begin to build the world of Wonderland around her, and she actually thinks she's in Wonderland. She meets all sorts of characters, while looking for the white rabbit. She hears about a croquet game, and characters keep pointing her to the Duchess to find out about the croquet game. The characters she meets are: the White Rabbit,  the Mouse, the Frog Footman, the Fish Footman, the Duchess and her cook, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and March Hare and Dormouse, two cards painting a white rose red, the Queen of Hearts, the King of Hearts, and the Knave of Hearts.  After the tea party (that was when she met the Hatter) she goes to a (hilarious) croquet game, then to a trial (the Knave of Hearts is on trial) in which some of the characters she met earlier come back as witnesses. Then she has a monologue, and she falls asleep. The actors come back onstage and talk briefly about how they're so happy they found a girl to "play" Alice, and Alice sleep-talks some more conclusion-y stuff, and everyone returns to the spots they were in at the beginning.

7. I have lots of stories! Not right now, though.

8. The advanced theater class at my school did it. (It's made up of 7th and 8th graders btw.) We worked on it almost the entire semester. It was for a competition. (Yes, competitive theater. Kinda weird, isn't it?) Basically all across the state schools had to perform a 40 minute or less play. There's a zone competition, and if you make it past that, you perform again for finals. For the first time ever, our school advanced to finals. There, we competed against 8 other schools. We didn't place (1st, 2nd, 3rd) but it was still an amazing experience. 

9. Yup! The entire cast is like that, and the techies too.

10. Yes. Anything AIW related, I smile and think, "That's my play!" It was a very bonding experience.

11. This year. We started working on it in September, and performed early November for the competition. Then in December we performed at our school two more times.