"Why is the Munchkins' favourite colour blue? And why even mention it?"
With that simple question, the show began to solidify in my mind and, I hope, in the minds of many of the students.
The answer, of course, is because Dorothy happens to be wearing a blue dress.
Staging such a familiar story is both simple and challenging; it is easy to default to the age-old story elements and allow a general cultural awareness of the film to define our production, and also difficult to form new understandings and ownership over such an iconic story. We are constantly aware of the pre-conceived expectations both the audience and the company bring with them, and must balance when to satisfy this with when to subvert it.
Part of untangling this has been finding story elements that speak to me and feel underdeveloped in my previous readings, that can give the actors some spark to ignite their creative work. I have focussed in on Dorothy's age and keeping her adventure firmly in the realm of the imagined. I was curious how age helps define what we see. Our memory of the film probably puts her age somewhere between 12 - the age specified in the film notes, and 16 - Judy Garland's real age at the time of filming. But L. Frank Baum's source novel portrays a much younger Dorothy, around 8-10, living with a richly imaginative inner-life. Dorothy was partly inspired by Baum's young niece Dorothy, who died in infancy, and influenced by Baum's reading of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It was interesting to compare these stories, recently working on my sister Riley's production of Alice for Dreamcoat.
The details of Dorothy's dream-adventure begin to take shape in the context of her age and the loss Baum's family experienced; she imagines a supposed utopia which (as is so often the case in speculative fiction) turns out to not be. It is a realm of people predisposed to love her, who instantly proclaim her a hero, yet she quickly discovers it's even more dangerous and confusing than Kansas. As in real life, there seem to be rules to this place, but ones she doesn't understand. Her sub-conscious fills it less with the dream-logic of Alice, but with the imaginative-tendencies of a young child processing grown-up difficulties.
Dorothy doesn't understand Ms. Gultch, so casts her as a cruel force of malice with a curious fixation on her dog. The often sarcastic and overtly funny Witch is a puzzle, until we consider the perspective of a child, to whom sarcasm can so easily feel unpleasant and confusing. A bitter woman in mourning-dress unwilling to tolerate the happy family next door, a wealthy landowner coveting the last family-owned farm in the area, using Toto as a convenient (if tenuous) legal excuse; these hints at the real conflict mean nothing to Dorothy. She knows only that her uncle, as if under some spell, does the woman's bidding, her friends aren't smart, caring, or brave enough to help, and her aunt who she thinks all-powerful, offers no direct help.
The friends she meets in Oz are of course counterparts of these people, set to redeem themselves. We know, as the well-meaning fraudster of Oz reveals, they had all along what they seemed to lack. But these friends are also the parts of herself she needed. The lesson of maturity for the young girl facing hardships is that she always had these things. Just as this kindly man tries to send her home, both in Kansas and Oz, it's really her own two feet that take her there. The parts of herself - brains, heart, and courage - and the knowledge that she already had them, equip her to face her problems herself, without hoping some Fairy God-Aunt will wave a magic wand and make troubles disappear. She returns, no longer dreaming of a place without troubles, but instead of home and family.
Of course, the most rewarding part of this process from the beginning is watching these students discover this vision with me, and being part of all their light-bulb moments along the way. But we left some mysteries, still yet to explore: what's the story behind Dorothy living with her Aunt and Uncle? What real-life elements does her imagination draw from to create flying monkeys, or jitterbugs? And why ruby slippers?
-A Jackson Beam
