We Like the Rats?

One of the important supporting character(s) in the story of Coraline in the original novel (and also this adaptation) are the Rats. These are unpleasant, vicious creatures that do the Other Mother’s bidding. They also sing several verses of a song, one excerpt of which appears below:

We are small but we are many We are many we are small We were here before you rose We will be here when you fall

One image I shared with the cast and crew to help get their imaginations going about the rats is the deeply unsettling painting "The Tourist" by HR Giger.

In this production we’re exploring further what the Rats really are and their relationship to the Other Mother. What is their function? I posit that they’re much more than mere rats; they’re some sort of amorphous, dark, destructive force. At least one of the characters in the Other World later turns out to have been constructed from or made of the Rats. All of their songs are about hunger, viciousness, and a terrible patience. When Coraline asks Other Father about the rats, he says in the play “We like the rats,” and in the novel “The Rats are our friends.” But in this production, I think that Other Father says that rather nervously, as if worried that the rats might be listening.

Here’s my conspiracy theory about the Rats that we’re running with in this production. What we call “the Rats” in this world is actually some sort of conscious dark matter, a primeval darkness that existed before the big bang and will once again “rise” or “rule” when they have devoured the universe again as it reaches total entropy. They’re not that different from the critters in the Stephen King short story “The Langoliers”; they are responsible for the devouring or destruction of the unused and abandoned places of the world. Since they revel in suffering and destruction, it suits their purposes to aid the Other Mother for now, to serve as the building blocks with which she constructs her world and the Other People therein. But for how long? And what becomes of the Other Mother after she finally loses to Coraline and is trapped forever in the Other World, just her….and the Rats?

I’d like to take a page from Grimm and give our villain a truly dreadful end. I hope you’ll come and see it!

-Ed Rutherford, Director

People Come And Go So Strangely Here...

In my previous post I mentioned that the story of Coraline is a descendant of the story Alice in Wonderland- a little girl goes through a magic door or sorts to a strange world where the rules are different, makes friends with a talking cat, etcetera. There’s also a quote from Alice that I find extraordinarily apt to describe this adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novel: at one point in the Lewis Carroll story, Alice observes “People come and go so strangely here.”

David Greenspan and Stephin Merritt’s adaptation is a very clever piece of story theater, with Coraline narrating most of the events that occur to the audience. There are times when there are sudden, even jarring shifts in the scene from one location to another; she says something like “I’m somewhere else now,” and indeed we do find ourselves in another place, with the characters from the previous scene wiped away. Nearly everything that happens in the play is experienced from Coraline’s point of view (except possibly for some moments with the Other Mother or the Cat when Coraline is absent or asleep, but after all, both of those characters make their own rules).

These kinds of lines and stage directions were some of my clues to interpreting the piece. In this production, Coraline is a memory play of sorts; the place that the play inhabits, while it may resemble a sort of attic with boxed up junk and rafters, is more a mental attic, where Coraline has locked up her memories of this crazy thing that happened to her when she was a kid. At the start of the play, a definitely adult Coraline comes to this place that we’ve devised - either a mental space or the literal house where all of these events once happenedand starts to unpack the memories she has. Bit by bit (during the overture, naturally), more and more of what happened to her comes to life and she becomes the little girl that she was when she first learned how to be brave.

Rehearsals start Tuesday night, and I can’t wait!

-Ed Rutherford, Director

Begin At The Beginning...

Well, here we are, about to launch into rehearsals for the Chicago (and Midwest) premiere of Coraline in a little over a month! As we get closer and closer to opening, I’m getting increasingly excited about embarking on this journey with all of you. But you might be wondering, why Coraline?

As a kid I was a bookish, withdrawn child. I would frequently retreat into fantasy stories, including stories like Alice in Wonderland, books by Piers Anthony and David Eddings, as well as work by one of my favorite authors: Peter S. Beagle, of The Last Unicorn fame. I also was an eager student of mythology and folklore of various cultures. As I got a bit older I was introduced to an author named Neil Gaiman, first through his seminal graphic novel series The Sandman and then via his other works, including Coraline. What excites me most about Gaiman’s work is the way he is able to rearrange the myths and fairy tales of past generations in new ways, in a contemporary setting. Coraline is no different: it tells a story that is a spiritual successor to Alice; we have a young girl traveling through a magic portal to a land where the rules are completely different, but this story also has darker overtones, weaving in some of the grimmer (or Grimm-er) parts of faerie folklore. More than telling a compelling story, Coraline is also thematically interesting, exploring the nature of true courage.

I was especially drawn to Stephin Merritt and David Greenspan’s adaptation of the novel because it is a version that seems very much at home on a Chicago storefront stage, despite originating in NY. The script incorporates heavy elements of narrated story theater, which originated in Chicago and has been pioneered by such Chicago greats as Frank Galati and Mary Zimmerman. It relies on a junk theater aesthetic, using the simple or symbolic to represent profound and fantastical occurrences. And finally, it’s just straight-up quirky and weird in a way that really gets under my skin and makes me eager to dig into the script and score in rehearsal.

Thanks for stopping by. I and others involved in the production will be posting more content here and on social media as we progress towards opening. I look forward to sharing this story!

-Ed Rutherford, Director