‘Carroll’ Through the Looking Glass

“I want people to think they spent some time with him,” said Dan Bredemann of the title subject in “I Am Not Lewis Carroll,” a one-man show which opened Friday at the Itchey Foot Cabaret.

Bredemann, who has been assembling the piece for four years, draws on the author-mathematician-children’s photographer’s most famous works, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” as well as a legendary collection of letters written by Carroll (a.k.a. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898).

“I’d like to say I read them all,” Bredemann said, “but there seems to be about 100,000 of them. And they’re hilariously funny. He’d write eight hours a day, always revising. He never sent out a first draft. He categorized, numbered and cross-filed each one so he would never repeat news. And he was not an outgoing person: He was shy and fussy and stammered with adults. But he melted with children.”

The actor-writer admits that much of the piece is a leap of faith.

“The words are 80% to 90% Carroll’s,” he said, “which I’ve woven together. The greatest compliment I’ve received is people saying they can’t tell which parts are mine and which are his. Doing this, I want to become him, convey the spirit of this strange, delightful man. Everybody asks me what drugs he took (to write “Alice”). Well, the facts just don’t support (that claim). The work came from his own mind, his own genius.”

TWO TOGETHER: It’s autobiography plus art in Raymond J. Barry’s “Once in Doubt,” opening tonight at the Cast-at-the-Circle Theatre.

“One day five years ago, I wrote a monologue about a guy making a painting,” said the actor (a former Open Theatre member and Obie winner for his performances in “Leaf People” and “Molly’s Dream”). “It was about an artist and his work. I thought of it as a long poem--or something that could be a theater piece. Meanwhile, I began writing a dialogue between a man and women, almost like a diary. A lot of the scenes were emblematic of my life then.”

Some time later, Barry began splicing the two pieces together. The resulting work was staged at his New York loft in 1986; he has only recently begun reworking the play. With a new partner, Kim O’Reilly (who co-stars here with Barry and Harvey Perr), he added a second act and a third character. “What I did was very much a trial and error process,” Barry said. “So some of it is non sequitur, non-linear--and some of it isn’t. It’s a real collage.”

CRITICAL CROSS FIRE: A pair of Ralph Hunt one-man one-acts, “L305” and “Siamese Twin Kills Brother For Bad Breath” is playing at Stages under the umbrella title “Two Alone.” Guy Giarrizzo directs Dan Mason and Carl Bressler.

Said The Times’ Don Shirley: “Sometimes the word monodrama sounds like a contradiction in terms. Too many writers of solo pieces, absorbed by their own voices, neglect the conflict that’s inherent in the drama. ‘Two Alone’ sounds as if Hunt might have fallen into this trap. Yet he avoided it.”

From Polly Warfield in Drama-Logue: “Both plays show how fearsome it can be to be alone with yourself. . . . Both are literate and well done, but the poetic professor (Dan Mason in “L305”) definitely outclasses the Siamese twin.”

The Herald Examiner’s Clifford Gallo found that while the piece “features strong performances, it suffers from a number of weaknesses that cannot be overcome by its cast. The essential conflict is basically subconscious and the plays lack a dramatic payoff.”

In the B’nai B’rith Messenger, Madeleine Shaner praised “a movingly focused performance by Dan Mason,” yet felt that “Siamese Twin”--while “creative and clever, played hard for laughs without getting close to any truths.”

Deborah Klugman of the Reader preferred the “more interesting” “Siamese Twin” to “L305”--which she found “accurate in its human essence” but with “a predictable sameness.”

And from Ezrha Jean Black in the L.A. Weekly: “Both plays’ failure is not a matter of character delineation, but their unwillingness to probe the thorny issues of truth and personal responsibility underlying the crisis of identity.”