Arden Children’s Theatre presents Madeline L’Engel’s A Wrinkle in Time, adapted by John Glore

I had just been musing to my plus-one that it’s been decades since I read Madeleine L’Engel’s enduring 1962 YA sci-fi novel, and I remembered only the broadest strokes. “I’m following, but barely,” I said. “I wonder how the kids in the audience, who might not know the book at all, are doing.”

To be fair, I was having a rough day on a bad night’s sleep, but if my attention span was imperfect, maybe I could compare it to the normal faculties of the dozens of school-age children in the audience. And they, like my old friend, were eagerly pouring back into the theater. I resolved to watch the second half of the play channeling that enthusiasm. I’m glad I did.

Lush design

Sasha Jin Schwartz’s scenic design features hundreds of brightly painted household items hanging suspended over the stage and well into the audience. Twinkling lights intersperse, pulsating and flickering and creating a sense of magical mundanity. Waiting for the metaphorical curtain, since there wasn’t a real one onstage, I couldn’t help but keep my eyes on the theatrical heavens.

As the show commences, the visual design (Schwartz’s set, as well as Maria Shaplin’s lighting and Nikki Delhomme’s costumes) is lush, attention-grabbing, and an essential part of the storytelling, especially when it comes to the treatment of the story’s “Ws”: Mrs. Whatsit (Doug Hara), Mrs. Who (Julianna Zinkel), and Mrs. Witch (Steven Anthony Wright). Playing multiple characters, these actors are in and out of costume so many times that the cast seems twice as big as it really is. The wardrobe and the lights are tools the performers use to fully transform themselves between roles; sound design by Mel Hsu sometimes enhances the effect as well.

A disorienting start

But despite the captivating design, I sometimes struggled to follow the action in the first half. When the lights come up on Rebecca Wright’s production, the cast takes to the stage and presents the opening of the play by taking turns speaking a single word or phrase. I found myself so focused on tracking who was speaking that I didn’t process what they were actually saying. The popcorn-style narration may have matched the smell of popcorn trickling in from the lobby, but it was disorienting.

Of course, disorientation is, in some ways, central to the story of A Wrinkle in Time, so maybe director Wright intended this effect. But later in the first act I frequently felt, if not disoriented, then at least a little muddled. Whether because of direction or the script (adapted from L’Engle’s original by John Glore), the finer points of just how the Ws send Meg (Mersha Wambua), Charles Wallace (Jayson Brown), and Calvin (Daniel Burgess) off on their intergalactic journey, for instance, were lost on me.

But maybe they didn’t matter all that much; after all, the kids in the audience seemed perfectly willing and able to accept that intergalactic travel was happening, without getting caught in the finer details.

A re-read in my future

Whether from my intermission-adjusted perspective or the work itself, I found Act II much easier to follow in both action and performance, and therefore much more (personally) enjoyable. Of course, the cast made a difference here, too. As the hypnotized Charles Wallace, Brown performs with his whole body, walking across the stage in a shoulder-stuttering, robotic goosestep that I’ve been trying to replicate since I got home. Burgess’s big golden retriever energy as Calvin and Wambua’s guileless sincerity as Meg contrasts Brown’s performance beautifully, and I found myself truly rooting for them in the end.

After the show, the lobby was crowded with ecstatic kids and the day’s chores were pressing, so I left without getting a chance to ask my old friend if he thought the second act delivered as strongly as the first. But it didn’t matter. Despite the speedbumps in the first act, some of them likely my own, I left A Wrinkle in Time glad that I saw it, and wondering whether it’s time for a reread of L’Engle’s novel.