The Christian Science Monitor
June 21, 1982

Off Broadway Taps 19th Century -- Lewis Carroll to John Wilkes Booth

By JOHN BEAUFORT

Off Broadway has been looking back to the 19th century of late. ''The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs'' recalls widely divergent manifestations of life and literature in the British Isles of Queen Victoria's day. The same is true of the recently closed ''Looking-Glass.'' On the other side of the Atlantic, ''Booth,'' another short-lived production, grappled once more with the bizarre and ultimately fatal behavior of President Lincoln's murderer...

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Looking-Glass
Play by Michael Sutton and Cynthia Mandelberg. Directed by David H. Bell.

''Looking-Glass'' attempts to brighten up the gloomy Entermedia Theater with a biographical fantasy whose lively stage effects outclass its dramatic invention. Michael Sutton and Cynthia Mandelberg have written a delightful first act, in which diffident but slyly humorous mathematician Charles Ludwige Dodgson (John Vickery) enrolls at Oxford, where he falls fortuitously into the clutches of fellow students Robinson Duckworth (Nicholas Hormann) and William Hayden (Richard Peterson).

These genial conspirators discover the manuscript of ''Alice,'' persuade Dodgson to let it be published, and help create the nom de plume and persona of Lewis Carroll.

According to Sutton and Mandelberg, the break with the Liddell family after the discovery of the nude photographs Dodgson had taken of the real Alice (the little girl to whom the stories were first told) had a shattering effect on the author. He renounced his pseudonym, became adamantly reclusive, and wrote no more children's books for many years. In historical fact, Carroll's principal works for children and their dates are ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865), ''Through the Looking Glass'' (1872), and ''The Hunting of the Snark'' (1876). He also wrote mathematical treatises and was mathematical lecturer at Oxford from 1855 to 1881. So much for the basic record.

Not surprisingly, ''Looking-Glass'' is at its most entertaining when it abandons pseudo-biography for fanciful imagining. The playwrights borrow scraps and snippets from the Carroll texts. The actors transform themselves into creatures and characters from the Alice stories, entering enthusiastically into the fun and games devised by director David H. Bell. Mr. Vickery is as engaging a Dodgson-Carroll as the script allows.

Besides the unflaggingly upbeat Messrs. Hormann and Peterson, the supporting players (most of whom perform multiple roles) include Tara Kennedy (Alice), Richard Clarke and Tudi Wiggins (the Liddells), Innes-Fergus McDade (Alice's governess), and Robert Machray (Carroll's vengeful rival). The Carrollesque interludes are brightly enhanced by designers John Arnone (scenery), Frances Aronson (lighting), and Jeanne Button (costumes). David Spangler and Marc Elliot wrote the incidental music.

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