It’s no surprise that “A Wrinkle in Time” didn’t work as a movie. Madeleine L’Engle’s classic novel follows one girl’s adventures across space to rescue her father and brother. The story reaches its climax when Meg, a stubborn, angry, loving 13-year-old, faces down IT – a monster of conformity that has all of the planet Camazotz, plus her brother Charles Wallace, in thrall. IT is seen as an enormous, repellent brain in a room of pulsing, rhythmic lights.
On the page and in Meg’s head, it’s terrifying. On film, it’s ridiculous.
At Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., I recently saw a much better retelling of the novel’s story as musical theater. The heightened staging that musicals allow lets the story be almost as unsettling and moving as it needs to be.
Whether Meg and her friends are flying above a garden planet on the back of a winged centaur or overwhelmed by the psychic force of IT or folding time and space in a tesseract, a chorus makes audible what cannot be shown. Its layered harmonies give texture both to Meg’s thoughts and to the magic of the world around her. A countertenor in the chorus helps convey the piercing beauty and strangeness that animates the novel, which is by turns meditative, terrifying and beautiful.
A win without total victory
The one false note in the production came in the climax, when the adaptation made victory simpler and cheaper.
In both the book and the musical, Meg is able to rescue Charles Wallace only because she has something IT does not. At first her hate for IT blazes forth, but hatred is easy for IT to assimilate into itself – IT nearly takes in Meg along with the hatred.
Meg’s love for Charles Wallace, though, is utterly alien to IT. She loves her brother with all the force of their small traditions, their great adventures, loving even the strangeness of him that she cannot fully compass. It is enough.
But it is not enough for Camazotz. In the book, Meg and Charles Wallace escape and bring their father home. The musical is determined to deliver a bigger victory: Meg gives her love to Charles, and then is able to give her anger, her stubbornness and her capacity for love to all the people of Camazotz. IT’s power is completely broken.
The climax is well staged, and I would have found it satisfying if I weren’t familiar with the text.
Perhaps the adaptors felt that the seven actors who portray the chorus and Camazotztians cannot fade out of the story on stage. In the book, the final confrontation is between Meg and IT in a closed room. On stage, the chorus is still there, providing the rhythm of the battle, and will remain on stage to animate the terror of tessering across time and space. It isn’t simple to leave them behind.
Making Meg’s victory total, however, inadvertently undercuts one of L’Engle’s clear Christian themes: There are acts of reconciliation that are beyond us – but not beyond God. We must be faithful in the work in front of us and must not assume that hope is limited by our own strength.
The chapter where Meg rescues Charles Wallace is titled “The Foolish and the Weak,” and the connection to First Corinthians is made explicit by one of Meg’s guides, who quotes from it.
When Meg realized that love is her weapon, she paused for a moment, unsure where to aim it. If she could give love to IT, perhaps it would shrivel up and die. But she, in all her weakness and foolishness, was incapable of loving IT. She could not do it.
It’s unusual to see a heroine acknowledge that something might be necessary but beyond her. It matters that Camazotz is left in shadow and that Meg recognizes she can’t save it.
In real life, A Nazi seeks forgiveness
Meg’s moment of insufficiency reminded me of a real-life moment of impossible love. During World War II, Corrie ten Boom and her family hid Jews from the Nazis in the Netherlands.
When they were caught, she and her sister Betsie were sent to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Corrie survived, but Betsie did not.
After the war, ten Boom cared for concentration camp survivors and collaborators. At one event where she was preaching on forgiveness, she came face to face with an SS officer from Ravensbrück.
The former Nazi put out his hand and asked for her forgiveness. Like Meg, ten Boom did not feel that she had it in herself to forgive this man or to offer him love. As she wrote in her memoir, she prayed, “Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.”
Accepting she could not move her heart herself, she tried to just move her hand, and “into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.” Her own insufficiency was immaterial. She felt the necessity of love alongside the impossibility of it. It was God who bridged the gap. As ten Boom concluded, “When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”
When we limit our tales to the victories we can achieve on our own, we make our stories too small.
We may never confront the enormity of evil that Meg and Corrie ten Boom saw face to face. But each of us will find a moment when what is asked of us is more than we can offer. L’Engle’s story gestures at the scandal of the cross in a way the musical can’t quite imagine.
Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of “Arriving at Amen” and “Building the Benedict Option.” This is condensed from an article at www.wordonfire.org.