THEATER

Cat in the Hat fuses Seuss

Ben Gibson (left) as Boy and Sharon Combs as Sally perform a scene from the Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre production of The Cat in the Hat.
Ben Gibson (left) as Boy and Sharon Combs as Sally perform a scene from the Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre production of The Cat in the Hat.

Actress Courtney Bennett is going to have a hard time fitting through doorways. Not to mention negotiating the fairly low ceiling in the green room behind the stage at the Arkansas Arts Center.

Bennett is playing the title role in The Cat in the Hat (adapted by Katie Mitchell from the Dr. Seuss classic), which opens Friday and runs through March 29 at the Arts Center Children's Theatre in Little Rock's MacArthur Park. She will be beneath an 18-inch-tall red-and-white-striped chapeau just like the one the Cat wears in Seuss' illustrations.

The Cat in the Hat

7 p.m. Friday, 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, with special spring-break matinees 2 p.m. March 24-27, Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre, MacArthur Park, East Ninth and Commerce streets, Little Rock. Adapted by Katie Mitchell from the book by Dr. Seuss

Tickets: $12.50, $10 for Arts Center members. Pay What You Can Night, 7 p.m. today

(501) 372-4000

ArkansasArtsCenter.…

In the meanwhile, she's rehearsing in a top hat less than half that size, a fat pack for her front and a tail.

"It's amazing how much a tail changes things," she says. "When we did Go, Dog, Go earlier this season, we got our tails late in the process, and we kept stepping on them, tripping over them, knocking things over."

The Cat makes its entrance as two bored kids (Ben Gibson as Boy, aka "Javier," and Sharon Combs as Sally) are looking for something to do on a rainy day. The feline's activities, abetted by its two hench-things (Aleigha Morton as Thing 1 and Lauren Linton as Thing 2), are sure to dismay the children's mom, and certainly alarm the sensible family pet (Mark Hansen).

The script, says Bennett, follows the book pretty closely for the most part, although it introduces (but doesn't focus on) characters from other Dr. Seuss books. (Morton and Linton, for example, also play Kittens 1 and 2. "We help create some of the illusions," Morton explains.)

"The script is pretty open to action," says director Katie Campbell. "It retains the imagery of the book and the stage directions come directly from the book."

"I don't feel constrained at all," Bennett says. "There's not a lot of information given [in the script], so there's a lot of room to make choices."

Combs adds, "It forces us to be more creative within the constraints."

Seuss' illustrations are essentially an end point of an arc, Campbell says; it's her and the actors' job to "create what's happening up to that picture."

Hansen faces probably the hardest physical challenge: He's playing the Fish, which involves operating a piscine hand puppet in a fish bowl (with a leap at one crucial point into a teapot).

"Katie has been working on me to make sure where my focus goes," he says.

Bennett says Seuss' use of rhymed couplets makes her lines easy to memorize: "It's like Shakespeare. He uses a different meter than Shakespeare, but it's the same feeling as doing Shakespeare in verse."

Set and prop designer Miranda Young, too, has the book's illustrations as a staring point. "The set is more inspired than constrained" by the illustrations, she explains. "I like to work closely with children's books."

Meanwhile, stage manager Rivka Kuperman has to keep up with more than 200 sound and light cues, including 70 voice-overs. "And the show's only 45 minutes long," she says.

Weekend on 03/05/2015

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