January 20-26, 2005

art

Grim Fairy Tales

confederacy of dunces: Just one of the clever scenes from McCarter's. The Secret in the Wings. Photo By: t. charles erickson

by David Anthony Fox

It begins with goodbye. Young Heidi's parents, snazzily dressed in evening clothes and desperate to have fun, leave their daughter in a sepulchral room. More ominously, they place her in the care of a hulking, tailed neighbor (or an ogre? or a neighbor-ogre?) named Mr. Donahue.

"Heidi, will you marry me?" asks Mr. Donahue. "No," asserts Heidi, quite sensibly. The weary Donahue opens a storybook and begins reading.

The Secret In the Wings, a 1991 theater piece by acclaimed director/writer Mary Zimmerman, is a revisionist exploration of fairy tales. Those familiar with Into the Woods or, even better, the works of writer Angela Carter, will find parallels.

Like Into the Woods, Secret is a pastiche of cross-pollinated children's stories. Like Carter's books, Secret dwells particularly in the perilous world of a young woman's puberty.

It's a landscape more grim than Grimm. Violence abounds — still more, the threat of it. Lecherous princes think nothing of loving-and-leaving. Their abandoned wives resort to desperate survival measures, including cannibalism. Even seven beautiful swans come freighted with tragic history. Parents and children — siblings too — are as likely to be cruel as kind.

While the kingdoms of Secrets are set in a deliberately ambiguous time period ("Like I'm so totally sure," says one princess, rather jarringly), Zimmerman seems especially drawn to Edwardian Britain. Dapper princes look like Noel Coward characters, and the opening scene unmistakably parallels the departing Darlings of Peter Pan.

On the subject of Peters, Zimmerman wants to show us how much of her "secret" is sexual. The piece is loaded with images — tails, eggs, blinded eyes, voracious appetites and, of course, Donahue's marriage proposal, repeated several times — that take on heavy symbolism.

There's intellect aplenty in Secret, but it's often confusing. Zimmerman's tales intersect, but there's so much going on you're likely to lose track. Much of it seems like a code we can't always crack. For example, I have no idea why some characters take on the names of their actors (one Christopher Donahue plays the ogre), while others (Heidi) do not. Ultimately, Zimmerman seems only intermittently in command of her storytelling.

But, oh my, what she knows about stage pictures! Scene after scene will take your breath away with its visual imagination — not the cheap-thrills, throw-money-at-it kind we're used to in the theater, but something of deep creative beauty.

It's that creativity that makes me glad I saw Secret, and I imagine you will feel the same. I should add that the cast — many veterans from Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre Company, Zimmerman's home base — is superb.

The Secret In The Wings Through Feb. 13, McCarter Theatre, 91 University Pl., Princeton, N.J., 609-258-2787