The fantastical world of Mad Hatters and “Eat Me” sweet treats from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a delectable escape once imagined during a summer boat ride in England. Unbeknownst to many, the titular Alice was inspired by a real girl of the same name: Alice Liddell. This story—Liddell’s, that is—collides with a Shakespearean classic, The Tempest, in Slightly Askew Theatre Ensemble’s Tempest in a Teapot, an original play written by Shualee Cook and directed by Rachel Tibbetts, opening September 18 at The Chapel.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, author of the Alice tales and better known under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, was well-acquainted with the Liddell family. In an attempt to amuse Liddell and her two sisters on a boating excursion, Dodgson spun the tale of a girl named Alice who fell down a rabbit hole, discovering a realm of whimsy.
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Cook’s play opens more than a decade after Dodgson was inspired to write the first Alice book. Now 21, Liddell no longer identifies with the childish tale named after her, nor the societal bounds of Victorian England. Out of suggestion by Carroll (Dodgson) that she read The Tempest, she retreats to Wonderland one final time to perform the play with her fantastical friends, seeking an answer to the question of her true identity.
Around 2014, Cook was adapting Through the Looking-glass, and What Alice Found There, the second and final book in the Alice series, into a musical for a children’s musical theater class at the St. Louis Jewish Community Center. Simultaneously, she was acting in a production of The Tempest put on by St. Louis Shakespeare. Rehearsals and script lines eventually blended together, and the St. Louis playwright noticed parallels between the two stories that felt like “interesting, fertile ground.”
“I tend to have a deep desire to know the stories that often get lost to history,” Cook says. Tempest in a Teapot examines Liddell’s constructed narrative of the young girl who served as a muse for Carroll’s successful books.
“As a queer, trans person, I was kind of writing this play at a time when I was really rethinking my own identity, and it did end up becoming a way for me to explore so many different ideas of womanhood, and the very limited scope of that that we tend to be presented through art,” Cook says.
These stories of rudimentary female archetypes are familiar territory explored by Slightly Askew Theatre Ensemble—for which Schwetye is also co-producer—the production company behind Tempest in a Teapot. SATE’s former productions Brontё Sister House Party and Mary Shelley Monster Show have centered around female protagonists questioning their multifaceted personae.
“It just feels like we’re looking and talking about life—regular things that we all as humans and artists deal with everyday as we go through this world,” Schwetye says.
Audiences can expect the play’s inquisitive, thought-provoking foundation to be merged with the fantastical elements of Alice in Wonderland. Schwetye describes part of the set as a “big, long tea table” at which the audience will be seated like guests at a tea party.
Through whimsy and comedy, Cook invites audiences to reevaluate the origins of storytelling, how certain characters are portrayed, and why specific stories get to see the light of day.
“I’m hoping that it engages the audience to think critically about the stories that we’re told, the examples of other lives and paths that were given in them, and whether those examples are big enough for the whole of us,” she says.
Performances of Tempest in a Teapot will run Wednesdays through Saturdays from September 18-28 at The Chapel, 6238 Alexander.
