We're all mad here: Western presents "Alice in Wonderland"

When theatergoers head to Western Wyoming Community College for the Performing Arts Department's first production of the fall semester, they may feel like they've fallen down the rabbit hole along with Alice - all six Alices.

The stage is set, literally, with a child's playroom, although the dark and mysterious lighting adds an eerie feeling from the start. Multiple versions of Alice enter and the story begins, with the Alices shifting into all the other iconic characters, from the Mad Hatter to the Blue Caterpillar to the Queen of Hearts.

"It's six actors playing 36 characters," Director Eric de Lora explained. "So they all play Alice, but then they also play four or five other characters too, and they're constantly shifting and changing. . . They're not one thing at any given point."

While constantly having to shift their mentality and physicality to match the character they're playing at the moment, the actors also have to keep up with 36 costume changes, most of which happen on stage as the story keeps up a breakneck pace.

"The show's great because it's a real acting challenge," de Lora said. "It's fun for actors to do once you've figured it out."

Figuring it out was a bit of a challenge at first, especially for new students who've never done a show like this before. Adjusting to the format and learning how to switch between characters was a "hill climb," according to de Lora.

Another challenge was the fact that the cast only had about six weeks to pull everything together. Students started classes on a Monday, auditioned on Tuesday and Wednesday, and started rehearsals Thursday, and have been working hard ever since. The first show of the fall semester has one of the shortest time frames before the performance, according to de Lora.

Despite the challenges of the production, everything started to come together in the past week or two.

"They were at the point where they were making sense out of it, and then it started to really come to life in their characterization and whatnot," de Lora said. "Sometimes we just have to throw them a little curveball."

One of the purposes of the college's theater department is to allow students to be a part of a variety of shows, de Lora explained, so sometimes that means doing an entirely new type of show and letting the students explore it.

"It's been tough, but it's also very rewarding," de Lora said, "both for me as a director to watch them kind of figure it all out and then get it and make sense out of it, and for them it's also a good challenge to have too, so there's a real sense of accomplishment when they have figured it out."

Now that the cast has figured out how to present the story, it will be up to the audience to keep up with it. This play is a non-musical version of the familiar story, based on both "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" by Lewis Carroll. It's not the Disney version, de Lora pointed out, but he hopes people will be familiar enough with the story and the characters to keep up with the continual scene changes and character changes.

This particular adaptation of "Alice" was created in the 1970s by Andre Gregory and the Manhattan Project, a New York theater company, de Lora explained, and was designed to have a small cast essentially playing dress-up.

"They created it specifically in that way so that it would be this kind of amazing experience for the actors, but also for the audience to watch actors act and do all the changes and the transformation and various characterizations and things," de Lora said. "So it's rewarding, I think, both for the actors and the audience."

The unique and somewhat chaotic presentation of the play also lends itself to telling the story of Alice, de Lora believes, which is itself a somewhat chaotic and surreal story that is heightened by the nature of the production.

"It does add this sort of layer of craziness and weirdness," he said. "Alice goes down the rabbit hole at the beginning of the story and she's in this world that is completely bizarre. The way we've done it is also to kind of reinforce that sort of bizarreness and weirdness."

The weirdness is all part of the fun, according to de Lora, and he hopes the audience will be prepared for silliness and be ready to be taken on a journey.

While the story is full of strange and surreal elements, the production also frames it a group of children playing together and acting out the story, which de Lora believes adds an aspect of child-like honesty and innocence that echoes the themes Carroll wove throughout his books.

"It's a little more honest and real and in tune with the books but it's also, I think, a little more fun and playful, because we really try to maintain that childlike playfulness at the same time as the honesty too," de Lora said. "I hope audiences will get both aspects."

"Alice in Wonderland" opens tonight at 7:30 p.m. and will have additional performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, as well as a 2 p.m. matinee Saturday afternoon. Tickets are $13 for adults and $8 for youth and seniors, and are available online or by calling the Box Office at (307) 382-1721.