Salvador Dali went to work for Walt Disney once. As if that weren’t enough to feast any fly on a wall, playwright Kira Obolensky imagines that he works in the same office that is producing Alice in Wonderland. What results is the appropriately named Lobster Alice, which Second Thought Theatre has brought to life in the studio space at Water Tower Theatre. They’ve risen to the challenge of this flight of fantastic fancy, but for all its surreal sound and fury, it follows the familiar office romance formula of uptight boss and yearning secretary. Only this time, a little dose of Dali and they’re both in Wonderland.
Kara Torvik is delightful as Alice Horowitz, the iconic bespectacled office frau of the forties. Her Alice is all wide eyes and lilting accent through which she makes it clear to her boss her desire for love and adventure. She shares with us her experience of the wonders that Dali delivers, and we cheer her transformation. On the other side of the spectrum is Jim Kuenzer as John Finch, the aforementioned buttoned up boss. As open as Torvik is, Kuenzer is closed. His Finch is more cartoon than cartoonist. We never buy this fear adverse, lover of vanilla until late in the play when he blows his top. On the other side of the rabbit hole, he is more comfortable playing the fussy Finch and consequently more affecting. The last few moments between these two show us what might have been.
Joel McDonald brings everything you could hope for in a Salvador Dali look-a-like, but that gets in his way. His performance is impersonal because it’s impersonation. It may not be the actor’s fault. The script drifts upon his entrance and the audience steps back. We rely on the actors to tell if something is magic or mistake. If they don’t acknowledge the unusual we can’t tell the difference between terrific and terrible. Dali’s entrance begins the bizarre which brings mistrust onstage and the audience becomes guarded. Soon after, when Alice comes on with lobster claws for hands, we begin to watch the show from a safe appraising distance. When the show breaks down completely into Dada non-sense, we feel vindicated for our vigilance waiting for something to make sense again.
The triumph of the show is the fully-realized production of this Dali in Disneyland play. The set is designed by the director Jeffrey Schmidt and he gets it to do anything he wants. A simple split-level cartoonist office does tricks that would make Cirque de Soleil proud. “When you bring a cannon onstage you have to fire it,” says P. T. Barnum. With all the stage trickery in this play there are cannons going off everywhere. But after the cannons go off, the audience is distracted, trying to figure out the trick. The trouble is that Obolensky orders the wizardry, but they don’t mean much more than “We’re not in Kansas any more.” For all the effort there is little insight. The ground is plowed but unplanted. And illusion without illumination is just a magic show.
Lewis Carroll employed a device called portmanteau in achieving his literary non-sense. It is the combination of two words resulting in something different. An example would be the combination of flimsy and miserable i.e. mimsy. Dali is quoted as saying that all he wanted to do was put two images together such as they would never be the same. Obolensky has done something like these two with surrealism and romantic comedy. In the end, it is neither. Second Thought has pulled a rabbit out of a hat and chased it down the hole.
Photo: (From Left) Joel McDonald, Kara Torvik, and Jim Kuenzer (Credit: Duane Deering for Second Thought)
