A Les Plus production that has Alice visiting Wonderland and pondering same-sex values is playing in Beijing. Mei Jia reports.

When Alice visits Wonderland, she sees not the Mad Hatter or the Queen of Hearts, but the truth of love, religion and the origin of life.

Les Plus, a Beijing-based group supportive of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual) issues for women, has reinterpreted the classic fairy tale in the drama Rabbit Hole, which premieres on Friday.

"We use same-sex love as a backdrop, or a thread, but the theme is about women's self-recognition, caught between the dilemma of love affairs," producer Gong Yi says, after a rehearsal.

The play features Alice, a girl troubled by the breakup with her partner, who seeks an answer to her problems at a bar called Rabbit Hole. After drinking several glasses of "daytime dreaming", she has three adventures with bar owner Rabbit, in which she meets three same-sex lover couples.

To deconstruct a linear story, the play mixes real-life scenes with puppets dancing in masks, monologues, multimedia and drawings to create a surreal atmosphere, Gong says.

The show is a collective creation from a dozen first-timers, including Gong, who's a full-time designer. Though amateur, the six performers give sincere and passionate performances.

"All the actresses are (part-time) editors of Les Plus magazine," says the director, known as Yongchui Buxiu. "They're acting on their own understanding of the situation of gay people in China, based on stories they know of or have experienced."

Since 2001, homosexuality is no longer classified as a "mental disorder", but same-sex marriage is still illegal in China. Though there are no social or religious groups that are homophobic, homosexuals do face discrimination and misunderstanding from their families. Sociologist Li Yinhe suggests 3 to 4 percent of the population is homosexual.

The show addresses some of the key problems facing the community and offers fairytale-like solutions.

Alice's adventures include meeting a woman who conceives a child with another woman, a writer who imagines the origins of life derive from a tree in the grasslands and a Christian girl who struggles to reconcile her religion and same-sex love.

The playwright Chen San describes gay people as having the wrong gender switch and her characters announce the world is "composed by imagination. Things exist when the majority fancy it and don't when a few are doing it."

An original theme song, Rabbit Hole, created by one of the performers, plays during many of the scenes, and there is also dancing.

The show concludes when Alice leaves the Rabbit Hole, leaving a lantern.

"The lantern signifies everyone's questions," Gong says. "Alice seems to have got the answer or else the question doesn't matter anymore."

Even so, Gong says she encourages the audiences to have their own interpretations.

"I'm curious about the reaction from gay or straight people," she says.

You may contact the writer at meijia@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily 02/17/2012 page20)