Alice’s Wonderland adapted and directed by Nolan Haims from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass set designed by Rick Paul lighting designed by Samantha Zimmer movement & choreography by Birgitta Victorson Edgewood School, Highland Park, IL When faced with the challenge of creating a show for a Chicago junior high school, I used the opportunity to examine Lewis Carroll’s stories and characters not from my perspective alone, but from that of a group of modern adolescents. The script was created over the course of three months in a workshop atmosphere by the cast of thirty. The genius of Carroll’s writings is that they may be, and indeed must be, interpreted on multiple levels. I quickly discovered that what these characters meant to these children was not always what I thought or what I had thought about them when I was their age. The focus of the production mirrored our own exploration of the text as it gradually found its theme of a search for meaning: Both Carroll’s characters and the students playing them find themselves in a tremendously regulated but confusing and disordered world in which one is always seeking answers and one’s place. And all this as one’s body and emotions are forever changing. A search for meaning led to a modern framework and a modern Alice character who finds herself literally pulled into the pages of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland where she meets Carroll’s 19th Century Alice who has been trapped in Wonderland for much too long. Our modern Alice also encounters a Humpty Dumpty who is more psychiatrist than egg, a new age Caterpillar who has eschewed smoking for meditation and a Mock Turtle song and dance man who leaves Alice with a question of the ages: What is the purpose behind a lavish musical number?