Down the rabbit hole, “Alice By Heart” reimagines Wonderland

Audiences who grew up with the story of the white rabbit will recognize the path immediately, but in “Alice By Heart,” that path involved not curiosity, but fear and uncertainty.

This production sets Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” against the backdrop of a World War II London underground station, where bombs fall above and childhood is cut abruptly short. Alice, no longer simply a girl with time to wonder, clings to the familiar story as the world around her becomes increasingly unstable.

That’s the story that will play out at the Rio Grande Theatre over the next few weeks as Blank Conversations Theatre Company presents “Alice By Heart” with a cast and crew of up to 60 people.

Director Topher Lininger called in some favors in the local drama community to assemble the large cast and talented crew needed to do this story justice on the Las Cruces stage. The team extends beyond the usual reach of Blank Conversations.

“This one is kind of a mixed bag,” Lininger said. “We have people from all sorts of different organizations. Some of them are from here in the theatre, some of them are from the city, some of them are friends of friends.”
It’s a production that is really two years in the making. That was when someone originally brought the script to Lininger. They were looking at applying for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which was offering nonprofits up to $10,000 to do a musical, but there had to be a specific historical significance. That application was rejected.

“One of the board members, Gus Sanchez, brought it to me,” Lininger said. “I hated it at first and then slowly started doing more digging into it. My older brother used to be really into World War II so a lot of the stuff started really hitting home with me. The script itself doesn't read super well but when you see it with all the movement, it makes a lot more sense.
“I started to fall more and more in love with it so this last year, I resubmitted it and then thought, ‘I'll just do it with you guys in the theater. We don't have to apply for that grant to do it. So in June of last year, we started the process.”

Wonderland, in this telling, is not a whimsical detour—it is a refuge from grief, loss, and the terror of a future Alice cannot control.

At the heart of Alice’s descent is the looming loss of Alfred, her childhood friend and first love, whose illness threatens to take him somewhere Alice cannot follow. Like Carroll’s heroine shrinking and growing without warning, Alice finds herself powerless, watching the things she loves slip away. When reality becomes unbearable, she does what any seasoned reader of Wonderland might do. She opens the book and jumps in.

The familiar characters are there but altered by Alice’s fear. The tea party feels less like nonsense and more like a frantic refusal to acknowledge that time is moving forward. The Queen of Hearts’ famous cry of “Off with their heads!” echoes Alice’s anger at the world. The caterpillar’s question, “Who are you?” cuts deeper, as Alice struggles with the terrifying realization that growing up may mean letting go.

Lininger suggests those who come to the production come in ready for a new experience with a familiar story.

“The biggest part about this is that it plays on the stages of grief that everyone experiences,” he said. “The idea is that the best way to experience this show is to just walk in raw. Walk in fully expecting that you're going to connect with something at some point and it's going to hurt probably. It is definitely a tragedy, but it is about trying to find your way through those stages of grief when you can.”

Throughout the production, Wonderland is reworked based on Alice’s desperation. The whimsical tale is overtaken by tension: how long can Alice stay here? Just as Carroll’s Alice must eventually wake, this Alice knows she cannot hide in the story forever—no matter how badly she wants to stop time, freeze the tea party, and keep everyone exactly as they are.

Mattie Ruminer is key member of the team, as both the costume designer, and in the role of the Queen of Hearts. It’s a difficult double for her that she says she wouldn’t do again, but Lininger was looking for a particular sound for that character and just couldn’t find the right person.

“Topher has seen me perform before,” Ruminer said. “He was looking for a very specific vocal technique, and he asked me to do an example of it to show the music director what he was looking for so I submitted a video and he asked me to audition. He ended up giving me the part.”

Her bigger role is creating emotion through the costuming.

“This is probably one of the biggest costume shows that Blank Conversations
has ever put on,” Ruminer said. “What we were specifically looking for is almost, not necessarily DIY, but use whatever you can around you. They're in a very horrible, awful state where they're trapped underground and they're being bombed from above.

“Alice is using everything that she can around her to create this wonderland, to create this beautiful world where she's trying to save her friend, and so the goal here was like fantastic, but dirty, if that makes sense. The Duchess has created this really big, awesome skirt out of a parachute that the Germans used to drop bombs on. That’s one of my favorites.”
In the combination of movement, the sets, and costumes, Wonderland is transformed again. It goes beyond being a dream and becomes a study on love, loss, and the courage to live in a real world in which imagination is not enough.

For audiences who grew up with Wonderland’s strange logic, “Alice By Heart” combines the pleasure of recognition with the surprise of reinvention. It explores what happens after the tea party ends, when Alice realizes she can’t stay small forever. It reminds us why we fell down the rabbit hole in the first place: not just to escape reality, but to understand it.

The show opens Friday, Jan. 16 at the Rio Grande Theatre, with the closing performance on Sunday the 25th. Shows are Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.