Alternative Reality

McCarter Theatre stages the dark fairy tales of ‘The Secret in the Wings.’

By: Susan Van Dongen

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TIMEOFF PHOTOS/MARK CZAJKOWSKI
‘The Secret in the Wings’, written and directed by Mary Zimmerman (above), plays in Princeton through Feb. 13.


   Fairy tales are not for the faint- hearted. The Disney versions may be heavy on the beautiful princesses, their gowns and gala weddings, but the originals have a fair share of danger, difficulties and dysfunctional families. Their plots usually involve confinement, a terrifying journey through a dark, frightening place, and an uncomfortable confrontation with an enemy.
   Kind of like life.
   Writer-director Mary Zimmerman has been said to focus on the dark side of fairy tales, but she believes her view is the legitimate take on the subject matter.
   "Some fairy tales are quite melancholy," says Ms. Zimmerman, speaking from her home in Chicago. "Although they have happy endings, some of them are ‘mixed’ happy endings. But I do think that a lot of fairy tales are cautionary — they’re about the fact that there is danger in the world.
   "In ‘The Uses of Enchantment,’ (psychologist) Bruno Bettelheim bemoans the fact that fairy tales are being diluted, that we’re afraid to expose children to being frightened," she continues. "The whole lesson with fairy tales is that you are frightened, there are bad things in the world, but you can triumph over them. You go into a dark place, but you can emerge from it — rather than saying, ‘Don’t be scared, that dark place doesn’t exist.’"

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Mark Alhadeff (left) and Tiffany Scott in The Secret in the Wings.


   Theater-goers will get a taste of Ms. Zimmerman’s haunting visions of rarely told tales with The Secret in the Wings at McCarter’s Berlind Theatre in Princeton through Feb. 13.
   The Tony Award-winning director, who McCarter audiences might remember for her spellbinding version of The Odyssey, interweaves a handful of fractured fairy tales — Three Blind Queens, The Princess Who Wouldn’t Laugh and Beauty and the Beast — with humor and visual inventiveness. Ms. Zimmerman, a graduate of Northwestern University who studied with Dr. Leland Roloff — an internationally known Jungian scholar and practitioner — also probes the mythic, archetypal elements of these tales. Their meaning and potency reaches way beyond the boundaries and scope of childhood.
   "I responded to the archetypal symbolism in all these stories," she says. "I feel that pretty deeply."
   But on another level, Ms. Zimmerman is just a grown woman who happens to love myth and fairy tales.
   "It’s something from my childhood," she says. "As a child, I lived in England for about two years, and there were woods behind my house. England is kind of the land of fairy tales. That kind of forest-y, lost-in-the-woods feeling was a part of my childhood. I’ve always loved fairy tales. I think they led me to theater rather than the other way around."

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Raymond Fox (left) and Louise Lamson star in The Secret in the Wings.


   As in The Odyssey, Ms. Zimmerman brings a stunning look to The Secret in the Wings, literally drawing on her dreams for some of the ideas.
   "I have very powerful dreams and they definitely inform my work," Ms. Zimmerman says. "I’ve had sets or parts of sets that have been based on dreams. But really, the line between the conscious and unconscious life doesn’t have firm demarcations — it’s a gray area. A lot of imagination is an in-between state of consciousness and unconsciousness, where you’re open to associative thinking. (It’s especially helpful) in creating theater, which is a kind of alternative reality."
   In an interview for Berkeley Repertory Theater in California, Ms. Zimmerman spoke about how, as a child, she wanted to invent a machine to record her dreams so she could watch them in the morning. "Or hire someone to draw the things I had in my head, because I knew I didn’t have the skill to do it myself," she says. "Theater is that machine. I can make these images come to life and actually walk around inside them for a while."
   The structure of The Secret in the Wings is a little bit like a busy night of dreams. The stories are brief and have a plot line that’s interrupted by the beginning of another story, then another and another. At the center is a full story, then the fairy tales pick up their endings and conclude, one after the other.
   "The stories are very brief and if you just tell them in a row, there’s going to be a kind of repetitive rhythm," Ms. Zimmerman says. "And, if you completed each story one right after the other, there would be a diminishment of the stories’ depth and meaning. But by dividing them in half and separating the ends from the beginning, there’s a feeling of suspense and suspension that spreads over the whole (play).
   "Then, what’s interesting, is that all of the endings start to come one right after the other," she continues. "I remember after doing ‘Secret’ the second time, the movie ‘Love Actually’ came out. It’s not a really great film, but it has about six or seven plots and they all, in the last 20 minutes of the film, start concluding. It has a kind of cumulative emotional effect that none of the little stories or plots would have had by themselves. I hope (the play) does the same kind of thing."
   In the interview for Berkeley Rep, Ms. Zimmerman also speaks about how this fragmentation echoes a child’s perception of story and time.
   "Because of the way they are fragmented, the audience may get a little lost in the stories, feel for a moment that childlike, lost-in-the-woods feeling of ‘where am I?’" she says. "My great teacher, Frank Galati, taught that it is good to get a little lost sometimes, to lose the trail of breadcrumbs in the forest, ‘For enchantment lies that way,’ he said."
   An assistant professor of performance studies at Northwestern, Ms. Zimmerman is an ensemble member of Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company, and an artistic associate of the Goodman Theatre, also in Chicago. She is an artistic associate with Seattle Repertory Theatre. The 1998 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Ms. Zimmerman adapted or directed The Odyssey, The Secret in the Wings, The Arabian Nights, S/M and Metamorphoses with Lookingglass. With the Goodman, she has adapted/directed The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Journey to the West and Mirror of the Invisible World. She won a Tony Award in 2002 for her direction of Metamorphoses.
   The Secret in the Wings premiered at Lookingglass in 1991 and some members of the original ensemble are in the McCarter production. However, Ms. Zimmerman says the play has evolved with the cast and the passage of time.
   "I write in the hours between rehearsals," she says. "I’m inspired by every rehearsal and I allow the rehearsal process to shape the script. The text grows up along the whole process of doing the show. It’s more tied to individual circumstances — what the set is, who the people doing it are, what their talents are, their personalities, what they could contribute. All of this goes into the play, plus whatever is happening in the world at the time. All of this helps shape the text instead of the text being the primogenitor of everything else."
The Secret in the Wings plays at the Berlind Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center, 91 University Place, Princeton, through Feb. 13. Performances: Tues. 7:30 p.m. (no shows Jan. 25, Feb. 1); Wed.-Thurs. 7:30 p.m.; Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 3, 8 p.m.; Sun. 2, 7:30 p.m. (no 7:30 p.m. show Jan. 9). Tickets cost $40-$48. For information, call (609) 258-2787. On the Web: www.mccarter.org