Sunken Garden Spins Their Yarn

Although they are ostensibly “fairy tales,” the stories of the Brothers Grimm are often comically inappropriate for children. The German brothers removed much of the overt sexuality from their retellings of traditional folk tales, but they seemed to have a soft spot for dismembering their younger characters and feeding them to the wolves. This Saturday, Harvard’s Sunken Garden Children’s Theater will bring twisted Grimm humor to audiences of all ages with their performance of “The Three Spinners.”

Choosing a Brothers Grimm story for children’s theater is not uncommon, and the tone of this play isn’t unprecedented within the Sunken Garden’s repertoire. Given that past Sunken Garden performances have addressed decidedly Grimm topics such as decapitation, their interpretation of “The Three Spinners” may not be the sanitized Disney version.

This will be the Sunken Garden’s 12th performance at Arts First Weekend. Their annual productions, held in a small outdoor theater near Longfellow Hall known as the “sunken garden,” manage to keep the attention of a notoriously fidgety demographic.

“We just try to focus on making the show kid-friendly,” co-director Alison H. Rich ’09 says. “Everything is bigger and louder and has more ribbons.”

Last year’s adaptation of “A Tale of Two Cities” replaced the guillotine with barber’s scissors, echoing the story of Samson and using hair as a symbol of the French aristocracy. In the group’s 2002 production of the Shakespeare classic “Julius Caesar,” the title character died of a paper cut.

The cast, recruited through the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s Common Casting, began rehearsing three weeks before the show. Because many of Sunken Garden’s performers are involved in other performances over Arts First weekend, the production schedule is relaxed and relatively low-commitment. “It’s a pretty chill process,” Rich says.

In the classic fairy tale chosen for this year’s production, a mother convinces a queen that her daughter possesses extraordinary spinning skills. The daughter, who is actually lazy and loathes spinning, is offered marriage to the prince as a reward for spinning an entire room full of flax in three days. The lazy daughter cheats, and as punishment for her deception, she is forbidden from ever spinning again.

The moral of this story is somewhat unclear and seemingly encourages laziness. The only certainties about this show are the playful comedy that SGCT brings to every production and, according to Rich, “fun, fun, fun!”