Alice in Wonderland: A Dramatization of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass

Long before Alice appeared on screen, she appeared on stage. This 1916 theatrical adaptation transforms Lewis Carroll's two legendary novels into a single, shimmering production, collapsing the rabbit hole and the looking glass into one continuous dream. Alice Gerstenberg, a pioneering Chicago playwright, crafted this version to capture what Carroll's books achieve in prose: that uncanny sensation of logic turned inside out, where conversations spiral into paradox and the rules of reality dissolve like sugar in tea. The play follows our curious heroine through encounters with the White Rabbit's flustered urgency, the Mad Hatter's eternal tea party, the Cheshire Cat's cryptic wisdom, and the Queen of Court's murderous demands. What makes Gerstenberg's adaptation distinctive is its theatrical confidence. Rather than attempting to reproduce Carroll's verbal alchemy on the page, she translates his nonsense into scene and staging, letting actors embody the absurdity rather than merely describe it. The result is both a time capsule of early 20th-century theatre and a fresh lens on a story that has never stopped feeling strange. For readers who love Carroll but have never seen his worlds staged, this offers something genuinely new: the chance to watch Wonderland unfold in real time, with all its whimsy and menace intact.