Tejas Karthik ’28 brought a lifelong love of tabla to Millville — then found a community where music, friendship, and a willingness to try something new opens unexpected doors.
November 12, 2026
The SPS Theater Company stages an inventive Alice in Wonderland
BY KRISTIN DUISBERG
A teetering tower of chairs, a horizon of brilliantly colored umbrellas, and a ghostly projection-screen Cheshire Cat helped transform the New Space Theater into the whimsical world of Alice in Wonderland for the SPS Theater Company’s modern take on Lewis Carroll’s classic story, staged Nov. 5 through 7. Created in 1852 by Carroll (the pseudonym of Oxford mathematician Charles Dodson) to entertain a friend’s young daughters during an extended boat voyage, the children’s story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is widely recognized as a masterpiece of literary absurdism, populated with vivid characters that include the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Caterpillar, and the Queen of Hearts. For the St. Paul’s School play, a cast of 18 students took on those roles and others, serving up the familiar story in sometimes unfamiliar ways, with acrobatic blocking, playful engagement with the audience — and even some original music by AP Priapattarakul ’28, who also served as the production’s Lewis as well as the White Knight.
In choosing the play for the Theater Company’s fall production, Director of Theater Meg O’Connor was inspired by the question of what it means to be human in the age of AI. “Podcasters and news anchors keep using the phrases ‘we’ve gone down a rabbit hole’ and ‘we’ve stepped through the looking glass,’ O’Connor wrote in the program’s notes. “I found myself getting curious about the cultural response during the Industrial Revolution. Sure enough, as the Victorians became obsessed with efficiency and mechanization, a few writers, including Lewis Caroll, kicked back by creating art that celebrated the desultory and the absurd. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a novel is episodic and dream-like, intentionally eschewing an orderly plot for a sprawling and baffling series of encounters. Instead of language that efficiently pushes events forward, readers float in a pool of neologisms, nonsense, and word play.” It is art for art’s sake, O’Connor noted, designed to arm us with more creativity and imagination to meet the challenges of our world.
Of the experience of bringing the show to life, O’Connor says, “The actors were excited to see so many faculty children in the audience during the show. Watching the youngest members of the community lean forward and belly laugh brought so much joy! Now we’re looking forward to starting over on the next production.”
