Alice: A Variation on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
By Ara Vito
Regional Premiere at AT&T Performing Arts Center with Plague Mask Players & Elevator Project in 2025
This story prioritized an all female or non-binary identifying cast, two Asian women as the leads, and a 90% female and non-binary crew.
Alice: A Variation on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is a new take on Carroll’s classic tales crafting a story of a young girl named Alice Pleasance Liddell. Overcoming her parents’ stifling indifference, Alice discovers her creativity through adventures on the other side of the looking glass. She confronts her deepest fears in the form of an imagined ensemble of emotionally complicated storytellers, including a Cat-who is also a poet, a Hatter hopelessly in love with Time personified, a Twin at peace with their missing half, and more! Through these characters, Alice’s world turns technicolor as she discovers her innate creative strength.
This production will be the Texas premiere of this exciting new work, and Plague Mask Players is thrilled to be the first to bring it to life for DFW audiences. The play received second place for the Harold and Mimi Steinberg National Student Playwriting Award through the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) and originally premiered at Belmont University in Nashville.
Featured in a Print & Digital Feature in The Dallas Morning News & digital article in The Dallas Voice
“We hold our shows to a high caliber. No one’s ever going to say we made a DEI hire. They’re going to say that was an incredible actor.”-Calatozzo Cobb
What Cobb captures here is not only a dreamlike scenario, but also a playful one. By playful I mean actual childhood playing. It made me remember those days when my swing set became a fortress and I could hide from pirates in a cardboard box. It was, to borrow a phrase from Willie Wonka, “a world of pure imagination,” and that is the atmosphere Cobb evokes.”
”Cobb’s clever staging make this Alice a trip through the looking glass you don’t want to miss, and it just might touch that inner child who is waiting to come out and play"“
“Alice is visually and sonically arresting, and vividly brought to life by a magnificent seven-person company. Believe me, you haven’t seen an Alice or a play quite like this one, and you owe it to yourself to catch it before it disappears.”
”What’s more, the action is so savvy and transfixing, and the movement so fluid and well-devised, that it’s not easy to tell where Calatozzo Cobb’s direction ends and Ania Lyons’ choreography begins.”
