Rapunzel Alone
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
The 24th Street Theatre
Thru April 30
In 2013, the 24th Street Theater produced a play by British playwright Mike Kenny, Walking the Tightrope. It was directed by Debbie Devine and starred adult performer Paige Lindsey White as a little girl who visits her grandparents at the seaside every year. When she arrives one year and her grandmother, having passed, is nowhere to be found, the child is bewildered and bereft. The play is about the girl confronting death and grief for the first time, and about the joy of living. It was a wildly praised, memorable production.
Now comes Rapunzel Alone, another play by Kenny that was commissioned by this company in 2019, with the request that it embody the theme of isolation. The tale of Rapunzel was chosen as its foundation because it’s about a young girl imprisoned by a wicked witch — although very little else about the tale relates to Kenny’s narrative.
Ironically, as Devine notes in the program, this request was preface to a pandemic that lasted two years and was to bring about the experience of isolation for millions of people worldwide.
Co-directed by Devine and Jesús Castaños-Chima, Rapunzel Alone again tells the fictional story of another little girl, one of the 640,000 children evacuated from London to the relative safety of the British countryside during World War II. Lettie (Tara Alise Cox) is relocated to the home of a retired teacher, Miss Pearce (Jacquelin Lorraine Schofield). A woman of color, Miss Pearce is a stern, no-nonsense kind of person. She is also a recluse, unpopular in the community and the object of ridicule by her neighbors. She keeps to herself, and when Lettie, also a person of color, arrives, she isolates her as well.
Separated from her parents, and unable to read and write, Lettie is beset by loneliness and fear. Besides the chilly Ms. Pearce, she’s engaged in a war of wills with Gertrude the goose, (a puppet, designed by Keith Mitchell and skillfully and comically manipulated by puppeteer Matt Curtin) a noisy aggressive bird with a snapping beak that’s best avoided. Her only occasional companion is Conrad (William Leon), a country lad who delivers the mail in lieu of his dad, who is away fighting the war.
The production features the art of videographer Matthew G. Hill, whose projections, realized in sketchy white filigree images, create both the exterior and interior settings for the story, with even such details as the flame of a candle or the notes from a phonograph visible to our eye.
The well-cast Schofield is another of the show’s strengths; she’s reminiscent of that mean old teacher you had in grade or middle school who turns out not to be so bad after all. Leon’s simple, kind, curious Conrad brings lightness and humor to a narrative that holds quite a bit of darkness. His every entrance is welcome.
As Lettie, Cox’s performance is problematic. It takes a specific sensibility for an adult to play a child, and Cox misses the mark, substituting external gestures for deep-from-within realization. Her scenes with Leon’s Conrad play with the most truth.
Like most of the work produced at this company, Rapunzel Alone is designed to appeal to both children and adults. And so it is. Kenny’s bittersweet denouement is affecting, and the message carries home.
The 24th Street Theatre, 1117 West 24th Street, Los Angeles; Sat., 3 & 7:30 pm, Sun., 3 pm; thru April 30. Running time 80 minutes with no intermission. www.24thstreet.org
