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Magician's cabinets, puppet theatres, and endless transformations: Theatre Labyrinth's "Never Speak to Strangers" is an evening full of low-budget spectacle and theatrical tricks. In its latest company-created adaptation, now playing at Pilgrim Congregational Church in Tremont, the group takes on another children's classic -- J. M. Barrie's "Peter Pan" -- and mines it for esoteric meanings and offbeat visual jokes.
The greatest pleasure of this deconstruction is how wryly playful it is. Director Raymond Bobgan has led the company down a lighter path, beginning with a vaudeville-like prologue that pokes fun at the experimental company's own reputation for being dense and hermetic. Not this time, claims Kurtz (Brett Keyser), an flamboyantly oily impressario. To better please, his band of time-traveling spirits have temporarily taken over the bodies of the Theatre Labyrinth cast. "Sentiment!" they promise with wicked grins, "and a nice thought wrapped up in a bow!"
Well, not quite. All the Theatre Labyrinth signature touches are still there: ritual rhyming, haunting a cappella singing, innovative staging, clean design, committed performances -- along with a kind of cheerful muddle in the text that feels like the work of too many cooks. But even when "Never Speak to Strangers" wanders off in its metaphysical maze, there's a delightful oddball theatricality that engages your attention and continues to appeal.
The structure is somewhat complicated, though the Story Theatre presentation makes it more accessible. Kurtz's traveling players, who present scenes from "Peter Pan", are being chased through time by two Punch-and-Judy-like Interrupters: Madame Zeal (Rebecca Spencer) and Lantern Leatherhead (Mike Geither), who abuse each other while searching for their runaway daughter (Holly Holsinger). Their play-within-a-play is parallel to Mr. and Mrs. Darling's loss of Wendy (Holsinger), who has been abducted by the trickster Pan (Keyser). Both include journeys of transformation -- for the women and for the trickster himself, who continually morphs between Hero (Pan) and Shadow (Hook).
If this sounds like Jungian murk, it frequently is -- but it hardly matters. There's nearly always something whimsically interesting to look at. Karin Randoja is blonde pagan malevolence as Tinkerbell, and her two veiled ladies-in-waiting, Catherine Ho and Elizabeth Rucker, are mysteriously compelling in their antique gowns. (All the costumes are wonderful.) Their miniature puppet show of Wendy's abduction, using Victorian paper doll cutouts, is priceless.
Holsinger is a marvelous Wendy -- especially as the storytelling "Mother", whose obsessional stories all seem to turn into monologues about housework. "I don't like that story," pouts Pan, "it's not about me." And director Bobgan has a delicious cameo in the notorious "Death of Tinkerbell" scene, which is so sentimental that the haughty Keyser refuses to play it, leaving his Lowly Apprentice (Bobgan) to plead for Tinkerbell's life.
Though it flirts with deeper themes, "Never Speak to Strangers" doesn't really go to the Shadowland that Bobgan seems fascinated with. Its transformations are more whimsical than primal; it's a trip to a pre-adolescent "Cleverland" that feels playfully cool rather than dangerous or erotically charged, with a fairytale ending. For all its mysticism, I suspect much of it would be suitable for children after all.
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