WINTERY TAILS
(2) You pay what you can for admission, which may make this the only show we can afford during the postholiday financial slump.
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(6) Kenneth Grahame’s “Dolce Domum”–“Sweet Home,” an excerpt from The Wind in the Willows–is the story of how Rat and Mole open up one of the latter’s long-deserted houses and entertain a band of carolers. This is a more complex narrative, and contains many quaint little details–Mole and Rat removing their hats, for example, to salute a statue of Queen Victoria–more easily appreciated by adults than children.
(7) The prospect of the gentle and affectionate Zlateh being sold to a butcher and the intense homesickness of Mole for old and familiar surroundings tap into our earliest childhood fears and longings, making our response painfully immediate. In children’s theater, the actors are permitted to pull out all the emotional stops: when they’re happy, they can clap their hands and jump up and down; when they’re sad, they can cry –and when they cry, we cry. It’s all right–we’re grown-up, we can cry when we damn well please.
(12) Contemplative audience members can consider the irony of the fact that Grahame’s son, for whom The Wind in the Willows was written, committed suicide in 1920, at the age of 15. The adolescence of a child reduced to a literary object cannot be an easy one (cf Alice Liddell and Christopher Milne).
