Mountain Theatre Company Triumphs with A Wrinkle in Time

Written By: Luke Osteen | Issue: Whats News

The exuberance and anxieties of adolescence are examined through the lens of the special properties of space-time irregularities in Mountain Theatre Company’s bracing A Wrinkle in Time. 

That may sound ponderous and as passionless as a post-graduate lecture by Heidegger at the world’s saddest university, but the production is delivered with all the verve and unpredictability of a stone skipping across the Galactic Plane.

Madeleine L’Engle’s timeless (time is, of course, relative as Dr. Einstein reminded us) tale has been cherished by misunderstood children (aren’t they all?) and the glorious adults into which they transform for 60 years. 

This adaptation by John Glore strips the story to its basics and zips through the Cosmos with abandon. 

When the frenetic (and just this side of zany) Mrs. Whatsit (Shoshana Canali) invites 13-year-old Meg Murry (Kaléa Leverette) and her genius brother Charles Wallace (Veronica Vale Duffy) and their new friend Calvin (Ben Butters) to her “abandoned” home. There, she introduces them to her equally fringe-y companions, Mrs. Who (Anquanizia Hall) and Mrs. Which (voiced and animated by Jacob Elliott) and the dazed and confused troupe plunges headfirst into a maze of tesseract-connected planets.

Along their journey, the children witness a frightening dark cloud called The Black Thing that threatens to consume all that’s good in the Universe. Against this, they realize, are generations of historical figures who will not retreat from the darkness, and they inspire the travelers to use their inherent goodness to continue the fight. 

If this all sounds like a lost episode of The Twilight Zone, with its heart-on-its-sleeve humanity and its testament to the transcendent power of Love, well, I’m certain that Rod Serling is smiling at this very moment.

But this valentine to the best of Humanity simply wouldn’t work if the performances were anything less than stellar. 

Ms. Leverette’s portrayal of a 13-year-old is so convincing that I had to check the cast credits twice to confirm that she was, indeed, an adult. All the confusion, all of the courage, all of the whipsaw mood swings that comprise the adolescent mind are on display. 

And Veronica Vale Duffy’s Charles Wallace is a thing of wonder. I don’t know how she did it, but she somehow conjured my greatest childhood friend, Harry Nathan Blake, taken away at 13 by a drunk driver. And there he was onstage, enrobed in that quiet confidence and reveling in his undeniable quirkiness. Ms. Vale Duffy made me feel young again, and alive, and for that I’m grateful. 

And I can’t leave out Mr. Butters. If Ms. Vale Duffy somehow managed to inhabit my beloved Harry Nathan, Mr. Butters did her one better – if you’ve ever wondered what kind of kid Luke must have been, well, there he is. I’m as astonished as you are. I’ve probably read A Wrinkle in Time a half-dozen times over the decades, yet I somehow never saw that Calvin could be a clone for Young Luke. It’s a bit disconcerting yet heaps of fun as well! (Plus, he’s really bad at Calculus!)

And though I’m pushing my word count, we can’t ignore the talented Ms. Hall, Ms. Canali, and Mr. Elliott. They animate a dizzying variety of characters (according to my back-of-the-envelope tally, the six actors play 12 distinctive roles). 

Ms. Hall’s Aunt Beast is truly astonishing. Garbed in a full body robe and an imposing mask, she’s a marvel of performance art and she effortlessly conveys waves of compassion and an undeniable poignancy. 

Ms. Canali’s Man with Red Eyes is menacing with only limited movement and a voice that drills directly into your cerebral cortex. The sense of Evil he exudes drifts all the way to the back of the theater.

Jacob’s Elliott’s Father is a rarity in 20th/21st Century Pop Culture – a Man of Science whose pursuit of Truth has not blinded him to the verities of Love and Family. Mr. Elliott makes it all look easy. 

And though I’m really, really pushing the word count – There’s no way I could leave out the talented production team: Projection and Costume Designer Scott Daniel; Production Coordinator Gary Hostetler; Sound Designer Stephen Kraack; Production Stage Manager Morgan Lee; Lighting Designer Christian Ricci; and Graphic Designer Julia Rifino. 

I wanted to note the splashes of purple, shading into violet, that highlight the stage, and which evoke the color shifts of captured matter hyper-accelerating as it spirals into a black hole. I’m not sure whether this was a clever nod to the hard truths of astrophysics or a lucky reliance upon artistic instinct and insight, but take a bow, someone!  And the set is adorned with cubes of different sizes that can be configured into any use – a remarkable reproduction of carbon atoms, whose four electrons allow them to form all sorts of interesting elements. 

And riding herd on all of these elements and bringing such an airy confection to the stage is the show’s director, Lindsay Garner Hostetler. In lesser hands, this could have slid over into an unpalatable mess of mawkishness, yet the whimsy and the charm at the heart of this production is never diminished. If the prospect of tackling such a project, which has won a cherished spot in the hearts of generations of “Tessers” ever weighed upon Ms. Garner Hostetler, it’s not evident in the finished product. 

And, finally, finally, let me express my gratitude to the generous men and women of Mountain Findings. They provided a generous grant to Mountain Theatre Company that’ll allow the show to be seen by students in Macon, Jackson, Transylvania, and Rabun Counties. 

As the editor of The Laurel, I keep in contact with editors of magazines serving similar artsy, deep-pocketed communities here in the US and in Great Britain. We here on the Plateau have come out of the Pandemic Years with healthy artistic organizations and ecosystems, but from what I’m hearing from my compatriots, we’re the exceptions. A lot of towns and cities are emerging to sadly diminished landscapes. Thank you to all the local organizations and individuals who’ve ensured that the curtain remains up for years to come!