Down the Rabbit Hole

You think you know, but you have no idea…

At the start of the play, a young professional woman escapes to her childhood home following a painful break-up. With her parents out, she opens a bottle of wine and begins an evening of wallowing in self-pity while rediscovering her old bedroom, a shocking vision of pink sheets, giant fluffy rabbits, fake tiaras, Barbie dolls, Disney detritus and fairytale collections. She opens up a copy of Cinderella and skips to the end: “They got married and lived happily ever after … Bleurgh!”.So far, so obvious. Then something interesting happens. Jividen strips to her underwear and walks over to a clothes rack. She just happens to have a rack of dress-up clothes in the corner. A quick transformation, a music and lighting cue, and she becomes a sexually frustrated middle-aged Cinders, married to a homosexual20Prince. The song that follows – “I’m in love with a man who can’t love me; simply because I sit down when I pee” – quiets the audience for just a moment before they start falling about. Though outlandish in content, each rhyme addresses an issue women face.
Some, like the Cinders song, are frivolous. A few are deadly serious. For example, an anorexic Goldilocks is locked up for the theft of porridge, and sings plaintively from her cell about her binge-eating problem. It sounds odd, and it is. It is also powerful, and strikes a chord with the crowd.Each character, comic or tragic, develops the theme of female empowerment, as the freshly heartbroken protagonist rediscovers in the stories her will to live and love again. Tinkerbell is presented finally as the ultimate symbol of the independent woman who doesn’t compromise but waits for true love to arrive.Red Riding Hood, hailed as a survivor, wears an oversized red hoodie that shadows her face. She raps her tale: a member of a New York gang, the “Red Hoods,” she is transplanted to the countryside to live with her grandmother, where she hires the wolf to take out Grandma so she can live on her wealth. As an actor, Jividen’s ability to transform is uncanny, and there is masculine swagger and a palpable sense of threat to her delivery. Again the plot sounds funny, but there is real poetry here. Impressively, Jividen wrote all the text and music herself…