Dalrymple MacAlpin presents:
Make Believe is loosely based upon the Wild Sisters who lived next door to the Brothers Grimm. From these 6 sisters the brothers, Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm, collected many of the fairy tales we know today such as Rumpelstilzchen, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel, etc.
Make Believe too concerns our audience with 6 sisters, each one different from the next. There is Wendel of paintbrush potions, Wanda of the riddles, Winky of tea cup sipperies, Florence of cartwheeling tapestries, Fern of superstitious rabbits feet & little Fand of book wormery word hoards.
The girls are in fact daughters of a fairy Queen, Theodora Willowand, born in the otherworld, the land of youth, the land under the wave. Yet as soon as they are born their malicious Uncle Thistlethorn Witherwand steals them & brings them to the human world where they are deposited on the steps of the lonely bird nest orphanage. There Thistlethorn disguises himself as the gardener & keeps watch over his nieces lest they venture forth & discover their true otherworldly origins.
Menwhile Theodora trades 6 of her tears for 6 conjuring candles, yet in so trading her tears she goes blind. However with the candles she is able to summon the mystical guardians of each daughter. One by one & before the light sputters its last flickering glow the guardians bring the girls home. The Greenman, The Great God Pan, GogmaGog, Baba Yaga & Willy Wonka. Thistlethorn tries to thwart each guardian & even attempts turning the girls into fish & eating them but in doing so he is cursed & goes blind just like his twin sister.
By the time Theodora gets to her eldest daughter Wendel, it is too late for she has just turned 18 & has remained so long in the world of humans that she has lost her fairy blood & has become completely human. So Wendel’s guardian becomes her own sisters as they sing to her the Yeats poem, “Come away oh human child to the waters & the wild, with a fairy hand in hand for the worlds more full of weeping than you can understand.”
Once reunited with all her daughters, Theodora finds her twin brother Thistlethorn & in his blind defeated rage he weeps. The tears are collected & each twin drinks of the others tears until there sight is restored. However by drinking Theodora’s tears, Thistlethorn is no longer able to deny the light which has remained hidden from him for so long, whilst after drinking Thistlethorns’s tears, Theodora is no longer able to deny the darkness which she has remained protected from. Each sibling becomes more potently powerful in this way & dies the death of one dimensionality to be reborn in both darkness & light.
Make Believe will feature actors Dawn McCarthy & Nils Frykdahl from well known bands Faun fables, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum & Free Salamander Exhibit. Costumes by Jill Kelly. Make Believe will also feature an orchestra of 15 musicians & singers. Bardic storytelling, avant garde ballet, whimsical poetry, symphonic orchestration & classical theater all comingle & conjoin together in the fairy tale fantasia of Make Believe. The play also coincides with the release of a double vinyl LP by Dalrymple MacAlpin, featuring all the songs from the play & cover art by Benjamin Vierling.