A WRINKLE IN TIME
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On a proverbial “dark and stormy night” Meg and Charles Wallace meet three enchanted ladies in a haunted house. Mrs. Whatsit is a literal former star who wears a rainbow-colored cape and can transform herself into a huge white flying creature. Mrs. Who, a time traveler, loves to offer pithy aphorisms in foreign languages. Mrs. Which, as her name implies, knows all the right spells. Most important, the threesome have learned the art of “tessering,” gliding through the title’s fifth dimension to visit other worlds.
Meg and Charles are joined by Calvin, a high school junior who’s a “popular big shot.” They need his confidence. Meg is a self-declared oddball; nagged at and picked on, she’s always angry and fearful. Five-year-old Charles pretends to be a moron to conceal a fearsome intelligence and telepathic powers. He and Meg want to find their father, a government physicist who mysteriously disappeared when he learned how to penetrate the “tesseract” time warp.
I usually cringe when adults play children, but the sharply defined Lifeline trio performs with dead-on earnestness and contagious conviction. Sandy Snyder gives Meg a klutzy energy that’s all the more poignant for its gawky indecisiveness. Lenny Grossman proved his affinity for child parts when he portrayed a very real five-year-old in Blueprint Theatre Group’s Found a Peanut; his warmhearted Calvin is a plucky scrapper out of a Horatio Alger novel. As Charles, Steve Totland does his best work yet; hilariously humorless, his kid resembles Calvin, the subversive tyke in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.
