Susan Sontag has sounded off in many genres on diverse subjects, so it is not surprising to find her essaying the stage as well. Alice in Bed is, as she tells us in a postface, the conflation of her vision of Alice James, the gifted but neurasthenic younger sister of William and Henry, with her notion of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. The two have nothing in common except their first name and their century. But a determined conflator is undeflatable: had Miss Sontag chosen to meld Edith Sitwell and Edith Cavell, they would have proved equally miscible.
In most of the play’s eight scenes, Alice James lounges in the London of 1890 on a variable number of mattresses. Again and again a male and a female attendant come in to add or subtract from the one to ten mattresses Alice lies on or under. This presumably corresponds to the other Alice’s changes in size. Sometimes there is a nurse around for Alice to incoherently debate with about whether she can, shall, could, should get up or not. Sometimes she actually does rise. But then she talks a lot about falling into a hole, which corresponds to the other Alice’s celebrated leporine catabasis. The set, too, undergoes some meaningless permutations, though it remains Alice’s bedroom.
The set, too, undergoes some meaningless permutations, though it remains Alice’s bedroom.
Scene 3 is a memory flashback to twenty years before, with young Alice standing in her father’s library to seek permission