Alan Lance Andersen
The Mad Tea Party and Other Festival Skits offers schools and small theatre groups an opportunity to stage short humorous scripts that have been produced at Renaissance Faires and street festivals around Iowa and the Midwest. Alice in Wonderland was written for British readers in the 19th Century, and there are a number of things that modern Americans need to know if they are to capture the book’s full wit and flavour. In The Mad Tea Party, author Lewis Carroll attempts to remedy the problem by inviting the fictional Alice and some of her mad friends from Wonderland to re-create the notorious tea party while he attempts to explain a few of his little inside jokes -- with unexpected results when his own characters don’t exactly go along with the plan. Oliver’s Birthday Picnic brings to the festival stage a number of beloved characters from the Golden Age of Comedy, including Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy; Barcelona is an offbeat medieval adaptation of the old Vaudeville favorite ''Slowly I Turned.''
