Despite flattering myself that I’m a strong reader while admitting I am no actor, I’m sure that I would fare better playing a role in a play than taking part in a dramatic reading, such as the Alice in Wonderland Long Beach Shakespeare is performing now. And “performed” is the right word: This is not the hell you suffered every time your high school English teacher forced your unlucky classmates to mutilate a “classic” with their uninspired monotones. What’s going on right now at the Richard Goad Theatre is a performing art unto itself.

But when Susanna Levitt (narrator), Karen Huckfeldt (Alice), and Carl Wawrina (every other damn character from the White Rabbit right on through) come onstage impeccably dressed and coifed, take to their chairs, and begin, it’s hard not to expect a performance in the sense of what usually takes place in a theater. That’s your problem, though, and you’ll get over it. You get over it because, well, they’re good. Under director Helen Borgers’s dead-on dramaturgy (except, you know, for books), the three performers don’t walk the fine line between reading their characters and acting them, they hop and dance right along it. Sure they’re reading, but at the same time, in one sense, they’re literally fleshing out the words. It’s not so much that Huckfeldt is Alice, but that she’s animating that part of the text. And since Levitt and Wawrina do the equal justice to their portions, the whole damn thing just works. It’s also the right text for the job. A dramatic reading of, say, The Stranger—a great book!—would have people trampling each other for the exits.

As any Grateful Dead fan knows, the vibe between each of the players and between ensemble and audience can make all the difference. To some degree that goes for a dramatic reading, and it was interesting to watch the trio (consciously or unconsciously) look to strike the right balance. Opening night they already had meticulous down pat; I wouldn’t be surprised if the performance got a bit more “live”—slightly looser and ragged-in-a-good-way—as the run progresses. Their interplay is often at its most delightful when one reader’s lines slightly encroach upon another’s. Levitt might also fall more often into a narrator-cum-character orientation toward the text—which is hers, after all, and written that way.

If Levitt in some ways has the most thankless—and most difficult—role, Wawrina’s are the most attention-grabbing, not just for the sheer variety of voices he employs (all excellent), but for the times he’s a one-man conversation, two or three or even four of his characters talking amongst themselves without narrative intervention. If anything, a few dialog tags are superfluous for the distinctiveness of each character’s voice.

The book is told in chapters, and Borgers’s choice of understated quasi-dumbshows as laconic interstitial material is perfect. It is curious, though, that the show is billed “a dramatic reading with lights and sound” (emphasis added): aside from music during the dumbshows and a couple of songs—and, okay, the sound of the performers and the lights so we can see them—it’s a dramatic reading, period. Don’t expect Pink Floyd at the Laserium.

I’ll probably be all right never actually reading Lewis Carroll (I know I could give a damn about “Jabberwocky”), and I’ve never been able to sit through a film version of Alice in Wonderland (Cary Grant’s Mock Turtle surely would have consigned him to hell were it not for North by Northwest), yet I completely enjoyed his work this way. I even found myself touched as the piece closed with its meditation on the future Alice, the one whose childhood spirit would forever remain intact. Long Beach Shakespeare brings the spirit—the girl, the art, the wonderland.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND THE LONG BEACH SHAKESPEARE CO. @ THE RICHARD GOAD THEATRE // 4250 ATLANTIC AVE // LONG BEACH 90807 562-997-1494 LBSHAKESPEARE.ORG // FRI 8PM, SAT-SUN 2PM // $10-20 // THROUGH AUGUST 2

Tags: alice in wonderland, dramatic reading, Long Beach, shakespeare, theate