It’s no surprise that A Wrinkle in Time didn’t work as a movie. Madeleine L’Engle’s classic young adult novel follows one girl’s adventures across space to rescue her father and her brother. The story follows some of the beats of the call to adventure, but her indelible details are hard to commit to film. The story reaches its climax when Meg, a stubborn, angry, loving thirteen-year-old, faces down “IT”—a totalizing monster of conformity that has all of Camazotz, plus her brother Charles Wallace, in thrall. IT is instantiated by an enormous, repellant brain in a room of pulsing, rhythmic lights.
On the page, and in Meg’s head, it’s terrifying. But on film, it quickly becomes ridiculous. At Arena Stage in Washington DC, I 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 to match L’Engle. The leads are talented, but it’s the musical’s ensemble that is key to the staging’s magic.
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, the chorus makes audible what cannot be shown. The layered harmonies of Heather Christian, the composer and lyricist, 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.
The standout achievement is the staging of Meg’s encounter with Aunt Beast, who shelters and heals Meg after she loses her first battle with IT. In the book, Meg arrives too frozen to speak and has an entirely psychic encounter with an alien characterized primarily by fur and a good scent. The musical is willing to take its time, with a long, wordless chorale in light so dim that the characters on stage can barely be seen. As the audience squints, few notice that three enormous puppets are coming down the aisles. At the staging I saw, one person screamed when a creature brushed by them in the dark.
L’Engle’s book is by turns meditative, terrifying, and beautiful. And, as Meg discovers, all these traits may be found in a friend. The false note in the production came in the climax, when the adaptation was less willing to submit to the full sublimity and strangeness of L’Engle’s story. It made the victory simpler and cheaper than it was in the original.
We must not assume that hope is limited by our own strength.
In both the book and the musical, during the final confrontation, Meg is able to rescue Charles Wallace only because she has something that IT does not. She struggles to hold her own in the face of IT’s pressure and pulsating. Her hate for IT and the genuine evil it has done blazes forth, but hatred is easy for IT to assimilate into itself, and IT nearly takes in Meg along with it. It is her love for Charles Wallace that 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 escape and bring their father home from his long exile across the universe. The musical is determined to deliver a bigger victory. Meg gives her love to Charles, and then, with the upper hand, is able to, through IT, give her anger, her stubbornness, and her capacity for love to all the people of Camazotz. IT’s power is completely broken. Meg and Charles shepherd the long-enthralled people, wobbly as fawns, into their new freedom and quiet.
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 their medium owed more to the Camazotzians. The seven ensemble actors give life to the all-alike people of Camazotz, and they cannot fade out of the story. In the book, the final confrontation is between Meg and IT in a closed room. In the musical, the chorus is still there, providing the rhythm of the battle, and they will remain on stage to animate the terror of tessering across time and space. For Meg to win back Charles, their voices have to either become silent or break into a new song. 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) to effect. We must be faithful in the work in front of us and strive to will what he wills, and we must not assume that hope is limited by our own strength.
She felt the necessity of love alongside the impossibility of it. It was God who bridged the gap.
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 as her final benediction before sending Meg back into danger. When Meg realizes that love is her weapon, she pauses for a moment, unsure where to aim it.
If she could give love to IT perhaps it would shrivel up and die, for she was sure that IT could not withstand love. But she in all her weakness and foolishness and baseness and nothingness, was incapable of loving IT. Perhaps it was not too much to ask of her, but she could not do it.
It’s unusual to see a hero or heroine acknowledge that something might be necessary but beyond her. It matters that Camazotz is left in shadow, and that Meg recognizes that she doesn’t have it within herself to save it. Maybe she would if she’d made different choices a long time ago. Maybe she will one day when she’s grown. Or maybe, in the great relay race of redemption, Camazotz is awaiting someone else.
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 Ravensbrück. Corrie survived internment, 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. She could not even lift her hand to make an outward show of amity. As she wrote in her memoir, The Hiding Place, 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. If we are fortunate, we will never need to offer personal forgiveness for as great an evil as ten Boom did. We may never confront the enormity of evil that Meg saw face to face. But each of us will find a moment where what is asked of us is more than what we can offer. If we can only offer ourselves. L’Engle’s story gestures at the scandal of the cross in a way the musical can’t quite imagine. Still, I’d love to see the team behind this musical try. Their staging trusts the audience to want to see through a glass darkly. I believe they have the tools to deliver a more open-ended conclusion, one that loves Meg as she is, even when she is insufficient.