The adventures of a curious youngster who wanders into a surreal world of discovery and danger is a universal tale but it has perhaps never been given to the universe as completely as now at Theatre North West.
TNW is about to offer local audiences a choice: take the blue pill and you stay at home and are none the wiser. Take the pink pill and away you go through the doors of the local pro theatre where an impossibly plausible cast takes you to Wonderland, hand in hand with a hero named Alice.
"Everybody goes down this rabbit hole, baby," said Jack Grinhaus who is TNW's artistic chief but for this production is also the director of the production. He is gleeful about the creative splendor Alice In Wonderland provides any theatrical team, and certainly it is one of the most hungrily devoured stories in literature. It has lasted the ages since it was published by Lewis Carroll in 1865 (Alice's Adventures In Wonderland it was then entitled, followed by the sequel Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There published in 1871) and it has even surged in interest in recent years. There is something unshakable about how, through the eyes of youth, the adult realm seems strange and at once inhospitable but also exciting.
Also unshakable since it was first published is society's mental image of what Alice and the story's strange collection of characters looks like. There were more than 30 illustrations in the original book, but artist John Tenniel's version of things is not specifically supported by the text and the actual girl to whom Alice was dedicated looks nothing like the long-haired blonde that has come to be the Alice lookalike cliche.
Well, thought Grinhaus, if we are all going to go down this tunnel of discovery together in 2016 Prince George, why not make it truly a treat for the interpretive senses? So, the casting call was thrown as open as could possibly be, for Alice, and all other characters, too. All ethnicities, all skin tones, all sizes and heights, all body types were on the table.
The one chosen for the role of Alice turned out to be far from the old stereotype but perfect for a modern Canadian adaptation. She is assertive, she is stage-confident, she is clearly not of European descent. This is the Prince George debut for Toronto actor Sharmila Dey.
Audiences may recognize her from her television work on shows like Flashpoint, The Listener, The Border and Remedy, or the dramatic film The River You Step In.
As an indication of her high-calibre versatility on the live stage, Dey was chosen for the world premiere (and subsequent remounts) of the new opera Sanctuary Song, was in the cast when Shakespeare In The Rough did a production of Much Ado About Nothing outdoors in Withrow Park in Toronto, was one of the leads in Theatre Direct's family production of Walking The Tightrope, and worked with Parahumans Dance Theatre on a mixed-genre original production called My Mind Is Going.
Her talents and experience are wide-ranging to say the least, with an especially pronounced emphasis on scripts that emotionally challenge young people.
Alice? Just a walk in the very weird park.
"This is one of the most ideal roles I could imagine playing, right now," Dey said.
"I feel that Alice is questioning everything, she's been thrown into a world that's upside down and forces her to push for answers, including about who she is and her place in the world. So as an actor, as a real person, I'm led to naturally ask myself the same questions as a part of preparing for the role. It's so good, so healthy, to ask yourself those basic questions about who am I? Where do I really come from? What am I really doing in life?"
The acting profession is an upside down world, by its creative and imaginative nature, but that was not one of Dey's questions in life. She took to the formative trademarks of drama and performance as a child and naturally grew towards the stage trades.
Recently she has been in the touring cast for companies like Theatre Direct and Roseneath Theatre that have taken her all over Canada and the United States to the biggest of cities and smallest of villages and First Nations communities.
"I feel so grateful that I've been let into those new worlds, I've been given the gift of discovery at almost every turn, always confronted or perhaps a better word is exposed to different people and different ways of life. That is exactly what's going on for Alice," she said.
The theatre profession is unpredictable, at best, but there are a few standards. The men in the field typically dream of getting to play Hamlet, for example, or meaty fictional males like Oedipus, Stanley Kowalski (A Streetcar Named Desire), Big Daddy (Cat On A Hot Tin Roof), or Tevye (Fiddler On The Roof).
Women have, in the old-school drama canon, been poorly served by playwrights.
Supporting roles like Ophelia, Juliet and Lady Macbeth are there, to be sure, in Shakespeare who also provided Cleopatra.
Musical theatre offers roles like Dorothy, Mary Poppins, Maria in The Sound of Music, the cast of Chicago, Sally Bowles in Cabaret, and that lot.
Dramatic theatre, however, is thin on clear-cut female protagonists. Helen Keller is there and paired with Anne Sullivan, and The Ecstacy of Rita Joe, and the eponymous Shirley Valentine. Beckett gave us Winnie in Happy Days, and Tennessee Williams created Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. Steel Magnolias and Misery are in consideration.
New playwrights significantly added to this litany during the past 20 years or so and the forward momentum is heavy.
But Lewis Carroll's Alice was one of the first stories in the English language in which a girl was the central figure whilst romance played no part. Indeed a young lad could easily be interchanged with a female actor, and the tale still stands on all its same legs.
So why, then, ought the part have been relegated over the decades, to fair-skinned, blond-haired girls? Grinhaus made this question more than rhetorical and Dey admitted she never grew up imagining she might one day get this credit to her name.
"Jack has talked a lot about this whole season at Theatre North West being about strong females and that is exactly what Alice is, and that wasn't common when it was written," said Dey. "I love exploring her sense of discovery; she has really opened my eyes to being present in the moment. She just takes it as it comes. Everything for her in Wonderland is strange and new and she doesn't prejudge any of it. To experience that in the form of a story is quite cathartic."
Alice In Wonderland opens Friday at TNW, running until Dec. 5. Tickets are on sale via the TNW website or at Books & Company.
