White Knight...Shoes too Tight": a double bill of encounters with Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, the masters of Victorian Nonsense
Two programs, written and performed by Howard Burnham, outlining the life and works the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) the author of the Alice books and Edward Lear ‘dirty landscape painter and writer of bosh
WHITE KNIGHT: Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland
In 1865, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s hand-written and illustrated “Alice’s Adventures Underground” (that he had given to Alice Liddell, as a souvenir of a boating trip taken two years earlier) was first published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under his nom de plume of Lewis Carroll. Discover how a stuffy Oxford mathematician and gifted pioneer photographer created a childhood classic ‘all in a golden afternoon’ on a river jaunt with a college colleague and the three Liddell sisters.
“HIS SHOES WERE FAR TOO TIGHT”: A SELF-PORTRAIT BY EDWARD LEAR
At the end of his wandering life, Edward Lear, artist, poet, humorist, is looking for his beloved cat, Foss. He proceeds to tell a group of American visitors the story of his life from comfortable early childhood in London, though the trauma of his father’s bankruptcy and his own development of epilepsy to his salvation through art – first animal painting then landscapes – to his hilarious encounters with an Italian policeman, Queen Victoria, and the monks of Mount Athos, and ending with his gentle exile at San Remo with Foss (“the owl and the pussy-cat”).
A humorous and wistful encounter with the author of the immortal “Book of Nonsense”
The two programs run c. 45 minutes each with a ten minute interval
A portion of the ticket sales will be donated to Monterey County Theatre Alliance.