Down the Rabbit Hole

Alice in Harlem Land nods its head to classic blaxploitation films.

Comments (0) Thursday, Apr 30 2009

In high-school psychology class, we took an IQ test biased toward black men growing up in the 1970s. Oddly enough, I got a perfect score, primarily because I had watched every black-themed film of the time, from Shaft to Foxy Brown to Blackula. I couldn’t get enough.

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And now I’m in luck again, at least for a bit, with Alice in Harlem Land, an original multi-media theater tribute to those films, directed by University of Colorado Denver student Ryan Bell. The plot involves Alice, a rich girl from Brooklyn Heights who’s offered a drug called “white rabbit” and ends up in a Harlem gutter with a briefcase. “The entire time, during her journey through Harlem, she’s carrying this briefcase, which represents her addiction,” Bell says. Although primarily a stage performance, multimedia aspects include an original score, live music by the Cheshire Cat (straight from the Cheshire Lounge), and a stage billboard that doubles as a projector screen for (among other things) a Cadillac montage and a Foxy Brown-inspired opening-credits sequence.

Alice runs Fridays and Saturdays, May 2 through 9, at the UCD Production Studio inside the King Center on the Auraria campus; all shows start at 7:30 p.m. Admission is the donation of a non-perishable food item, a $5 donation, or a receipt of online donation from www.foodbankrockies.org. Proceeds benefit the Food Bank of the Rockies. For more information, call 303-556-2296.
Fridays, Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Starts: May 1. Continues through May 9, 2009