"Zelda Wonderland" is the kind of play that makes me want to rush right home and sit down and write about it - which is what I did. (The only reason I didn’t post last night is that I wanted to sleep on it and maybe do a spell check.)

What about the production inspires this mad dash?

Partly the desire just to get the word out - this is, after all, an intimate production by a relatively new company, Sandbox Theatre, at a time of year literally bursting with theater productions everywhere one turns.

Mostly, however, it’s simply the urge not to talk too much about it with anyone else before I get my own thoughts down on the page - because this is a very personal production as well, one which will affect everyone in the audience in a different way. Talk about it people will, and should, but there are so many ways to try and wrap words and feelings around this production that I felt the need to try and grasp my own before they evaporated or got tangled up in someone else’s.

Hence the dash homeward. Apologies to anyone who thought I deserted them.

If I tell you "Zelda Wonderland" is about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s infamously unstable flapper of a wife, performed by a theater company just as interested in movement in space as in performance of text, you’ll think you know the kind of evening you have ahead of you. You’d be wrong. I was.

And I must say I’m quite happy to have my expectations so thoroughly confounded.

Sandbox Theatre’s signature style is there, to be sure. But this isn’t a production as easily summarized and dismissed as Zelda herself was in life. Zelda Wonderland is probably the best recent example I can think of for the argument that some theater simply needs to be experienced. You don’t get the full effect from just reading the words, or listening to the music and sound effects, or visually taking in the stunning images of the design. It is its own fragile little world - tremulous, hopeful, colorful, menacing, funny, absurd, romantic, and deeply sad all at once.

If you’re worried about not knowing your lilterary or American history, that you’ll be lost if you don’t know the life of Zelda, fear not. This is first a story of human beings in love, often against their better judgment, and is easily relatable whether you know the background story or not. For those who like to do their homework, program notes are provided, but not necessary to enjoy the proceedings.

Another fear might be that the show is a relentless parade of misery and disappointments, that the heroine would demand your sympathy rather than simply earn it. Again, an unfounded worry. The production takes nothing for granted, and earns every emotion it gets, both high and low, no shortcuts, no cheap shots. This is a fully realized portrait, not a Cliffs Notes version of a person’s life.

It begins with Zelda (the fearless Heather Stone) holding court in her bathtub, attempting to get through an interview about herself for a change - but being quickly overshadowed, both figuratively and literally, by her more famous husband the novelist. Finally, she asserts herself by simply standing up and demanding to be looked at, to be answered, to be evaluated on her own terms. This moment of nudity is brash, rather than erotic, and is a prime instance of the fact that the production cannot be described fully in words. Simply put, you had to be there to get the full effect.

After this, for an experimental theater company, the story is surprisingly - dare I say reassuringly - linear. We go back to Zelda and F. Scott’s first meeting and follow their ups and downs until the end. It is not a biography. It is not laden with expository detail - and thank goodness for that. The trajectory of their individual lives and their joint relationship is revealed through a series of episodic impressions, flowing from one to the next.

There is the flurry of partying and booze which was so central to their lives together - really just one party that keeps resurfacing - the dialogue on each revisitation becoming more fast and disjointed until it simply comes apart at the seams.

There are Zelda’s obsessive compulsive attempts to carve out a creative reputation of her own - first dance, then painting - each ultimately a disappointment to her. The chief accomplishment of all this is that it moved Zelda for me out of the realm of the pathetic and into the category of something much more human. She had her own talents, many of them. There was just always somebody better, and the last name Fitzgerald constantly put her up against legends. If she’d simply been evaluated on her own merits, against other flesh and blood ordinary human beings, she would have stood out, and perhaps gotten more of her due. And really, isn’t that what we all want? To be seen for who we are, rather than in relation to someone else’s outsized and perhaps completely unrealistic expectations? I’m not married to anybody famous, I didn’t live in the Roaring 20s, but I can relate to that.

There is a text, a gathering of words from various sources, but a standard script isn’t the blueprint of this production. It relies just as much, probably more so, on visuals and movement. The set by Joseph Stanley, the costumes by Andrew Lawrence Schiff, the props by Ryan Hill and the artwork of Lisa Moreira and Patrick O’Connell play primarily in a soft palette of blue and pink and white, with accents of green and gold. Blue defines the space, and sometimes the mood.

Rotating panels of enormous paisley patterns in jagged shapes spin playfully fast or ominously slow, depending upon who is in charge of them.

A white quilted blanket can evoke a picnic or a padded room. Zelda, standing in the middle of the quilt at one point, appears for a moment not to have any feet, as if they had been cut off. The production is filled with many such fleeting but vivid images.

Flowers shift from being a tribute to the living to a tribute to the dead.

A finger touching a nose can be either a romantic endearment, or a clinical diagnosis on the mental ward.

Montana Johnson’s sound design is wonderfully subtle. It intrudes when required, often with music, but mostly it contents itself to stand just off to the side, invading the corners of your brain as you watch the action - a creaking of doors and floorboards, the suggestion of flames. This is not a world where sound is reassuring. It gets under your skin.

Director Lisa Moreira gets some really solid ensemble work out of this cast. Megan Campbell Thiede, Peter Heeringa and Lina Wiksten manage, with only three bodies, to help populate the entire world around Zelda across decades. It’s a lot of fun to watch. Wade Vaughan and Ryan Hill stand out, as they should, in the larger than life personas of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, respectively. But these are men first and literary lions second. Their rivalry is most vividly acted out in a supposedly playful boxing match where punches are thrown with both words and fists - and you get the impression they’re not sure which ones hurt more. Ernest and Zelda may not be in a standard love triangle battle for F. Scott’s heart, but they definitely each want his emotions and full attention.

"Zelda Wonderland" isn’t a feminist screed by any means, but the upshot of Zelda’s unnecessarily wasted life is clear. If a woman had been allowed by society in the first half of the 20th century to stand on her own, rather than as an accessory to a man, and a man’s reputation, things might have ended better. Trying to label and categorize a free spirit, force her into acceptable modes of behavior, runs the risk of killing the very thing that attracts one to her in the first place.

Zelda may have ended up a little crazy - but she was driven there, and others were always in the driver’s seat. Unfortunately, she was never allowed to take the wheel. Still, for the audience, at 70 minutes, it’s a swift and satisfying ride, full of evocative images and emotional moments that resonate long after the lights go down.

Very highly recommended.

"Zelda Wonderland" continues its run this weekend and next, through Saturday, November 18th, 2006 at the Red Eye Theater - 15 West 14th Street in Minneapolis.

Tickets are $16; $12 for students/seniors - Cash or check only. For reservations please call 612-554-1302.

Show times are 7PM on Sundays, 8PM all other shows - November 10-12 and November 15-18 remain.

For more information on this and Sandbox Theatre in general - past, present, and thankfully, future - visit www.aboutthisplay.com

****************

Friday, November 10, 2006 at 7:39 AM
Filed under 5 Star Shows - Life Altering Experience