Editor's Note

Editor's Note by Jim O'Quinn

Andre Gregory's Alice in Wonderland is one of those productions with a fat aura, a show that those who saw it (usually numbering in the few) treasure jealously in the memory, an event that over time has accumulated adjectives like "seminal" and "legendary." If, like me, you were otherwise engaged in 1970 and '71 (perhaps you lived in Arizona, or hadn't ever heard of Off-Off Broadway, or weren't born yet), you may feel a stab of envy when Todd London's captivating profile of Gregory at 70 turns to the subject of "the great delinquent lunacy" that was the Manhattan Project's Alice.

Critic and author Margaret Croyden was there. "The play was performed in a room that allowed only a hundred spectators, who entered through a 'hole' in the wall," Croyden remembers in Lunatics, Lovers and Poets (1974). "There, in a shabby, half-darkened space, hung an old parachute which seemed, ominously, to threaten the audience." Six Grotowski-trained actors (led by Angela Pietropinto as Alice) enacted "the savagery of Alice's dream" with "fast and fluid animal characterizations, mad game-playing and imaginative acrobatic movements," using umbrellas, newspapers, croquet mallets and a ping-pong ball as props. Other observers called the production "manic-depressive," "an actual nightmare filled with Freudian implications and references to drugs"; one encyclopedia entry warily notes, "Most critics had to admit it had the maddest Mad Hatter's tea party ever seen."

Descriptions of the Alice experience become footnotes, though, in the presence of Richard Avedon's dazzling photographic account of the production. Shot in a dozen all-day studio sessions and collected in a long out-of-print 1973 volume, the great photographer's 100 silvery black-and-white images comprise, London suggests, "the finest collection of photos of a single production in the history of the American theatre." Shortly before his death last fall, Avedon presented Gregory with a selection of framed enlargements from the collection; they line the dark green walls and lean in the cluttered corners of Gregory's basement office in his West Village apartment.

Along with photographer Ken Collins, I visited Gregory there on the day of our shoot for the article. He padded about in stocking feet among the Avedons, telling stories about the actors in the pictures, still astonished, it seemed, at the potency of these images from his work of 35 years ago. "That was a great moment," he mused, gazing at a print of Pietropinto hoisted aloft by a pyramid of actors, "see how Dick captured that." For a moment I felt I'd been there, too. —Jim O'Quinn