Exciting and terrifying and wonderful

St. Norbert College will present a brand-new show written by its very own theater professor April Beiswenger, putting a new twist on the classic tale of Alice in Wonderland.

“We have been thinking about doing Alice in Wonderland for a long time,”said theater professor Stephen Rupsch. “We’ve been trying to figure out some way to do it but we couldn’t find an adaptation that we really liked… One of the more stressful things we do here is decide what shows to do and we were at that point last year and someone brought up the idea of doing Alice in Wonderland again and I was like, ‘We can’t find a good adaptation.’ April said, ‘Well I’ll write it.’ And I kind of dared here and she said okay and she did it over the summer and it turned out to be a really fun and powerful process of putting this thing together.”

The process, Beiswenger said, wasn’t as easy as one might expect.

“I know Alice in Wonderland pretty well because I’ve read it a couple times and I’ve seen adaptations…” Beiswenger said. “The first draft was kind of a recreation of what was going on in the first book and I gave it to Stephen and he read it and he asked, ‘Why? What about this is going to speak to our students and speak to our audience?’ So it wasn’t working that well. And then we had this discussion about who Alice is and what she is going through. What if Alice is a college student? Why would she go to Wonderland? What is there in Wonderland that’s our college students want?”

From those discussions, the story of Wonderland was born.

“[Alice] became a 20-year-old college dropout who is a follower of festivals,” Beiswenger said. “She’s this type of person whose whole lifestyle is just following music festivals around. She wants to go to the Wonderland Music Festival, which is kind of based a little bit on Bonnaroo, a little bit of Summerfest and a little bit of Burning Man. There’s two spins — in the first half of the show she’s trying to get into the show and the second half she’s part of the show. Every character from the book she meets is a different musical act or stage manager or roadie for it. And then it culminates when she gets invited backstage by the Queen and King of Hearts.”

So what is it like seeing your work brought to life by your students?

Beiswenger described the process as “exciting and terrifying and wonderful.”
The story isn’t the only new element of this week’s performances, though, as no tickets will be sold for the show, allowing audiences — and especially other students — to attend at no cost.

“We’ve been talking about it for years,” Rupsch said. “In college and university theater, it’s a little different from place to place, but some places depend on their box office for their future budgets. We don’t, so our main thing is to make sure that as many students see the show as possible. We love everybody else seeing the show, but I would love for all of our students that attend the school to see at least one show before they get out of here.”

Performances of Wonderland will take place Nov. 6-9. More details can be found st snc.edu/tickets.