Fuddy-duddy adults can descend into Hemsley Theatre down a flight of steps, but little ones can shoot down a slide. While there's plenty of conventional seating, there are also furry rugs that allow little ones to sprawl out and get closer to the action. As a disco balls twirls gently, sparkles of light graze the walls, and the three girls in the play enact a sort of wordless ballet as the audience gets seated.
One girl lives in the desert, occupying herself by daydreaming and doodling in her huge drawing pads. The other two are literally "falling girls": they plummet out of the sky from a distant planet. Whether you want to see them as real or as a figment of the first girl's imagination is up to you.
Winningly played by Katelyn Brown, Arrie Callahan and Megan McGlone, the girls tell stories of their planets but also interact and occasionally annoy each other as young children actually do (one girl likes to proclaim haughtily that "My father is the boss of everything!").
But to try to summarize the plot of Falling Girls would be both misleading and beside the point; while observations are made about friendship, imagination and other topics, this is not the sort of children's theater in which a clear-cut moral emerges. Instead, it works on a more intuitive level.
Throughout the show, the girls' dialogue and movement is punctuated effectively by live percussion from composer Jonathan Brooks, who is visible onstage just behind the jungle-gym-like apparatus.
The all-white costumes designed by Katelyn Brown fall midway between old-fashioned and space-age. Each girl's outfit is different, but the effect is almost like bloomers with a futuristic edge, which works well for a tale that mixes timeless pleasures (drawing, storytelling) with more fantastical ones (hurtling through space).
In her program notes, director Manon van de Water places Falling Girls, written by Dutch playwright Moniek Merkx, within the context of a growing movement towards theater for the very young in Europe. Yet I hope audiences of all ages will give this charming show a chance and surrender to its dreamlike logic.
