Audience indulges in Black Light illusions

ORONO – Poor Gulliver. His tales were so tall (literally), and his travels so wild and wondrous that nobody wanted to believe him.

But Lilliput’s gentle giant got his due when National Black Light Theatre Prague came to town Thursday night for a performance at the Maine Center for the Arts. So did another lost traveler – Alice in Wonderland – and her trip through the looking glass never looked so, well, trippy.

Part musical theater, part optical illusion, the troupe’s “Fantasy Travellers” was a visual feast that mesmerized the all-ages audience. The performance combined animation, film, mime and lip-synching in a dizzying performance that felt like a magic show.

It required a heavy dose of suspended disbelief from the grown-ups in the audience. Still, at intermission the most popular question in the lobby was, “How did they DO that?”

To be technical, the flying actors and dancing props relied on the “black box trick.” Because the human eye can’t distinguish black on black, actors dressed in black – or black cables lifting an actor through the air – become invisible.

And the invisible becomes visible. The actors move behind a sheer scrim, which appears opaque when images are projected on it. When the actors move into the spotlight, also located behind the scrim, it looks like they’re part of the projected image.

But in the end, the “how” becomes irrelevant. The real reason the audience was so rapt is simple: The precision of the acting and choreography made the illusion real. When Gulliver was trapped in a glass jar, and the jar started to roll, he rolled with it. When a pair of flowers lifted Alice up for a dance, she was walking on air.

There were a few instances where the illusions fell short, whether through bad timing or a prop snafu. But the audience didn’t seem to mind. They wanted to buy into the illusion. To think that a sip of elixir could make Alice grow tall. Or that a big, menacing fish really did eat Gulliver only to spit him out into the ocean.

If only for an hour or two, they wanted to believe. They wanted to be swept away with these “Fantasy Travellers.” And who could blame them?