Interview: the creators of Coraline

MOMMIE WEIRDEST Greenspan channels a freaky mom sans drag.

Photograph: Rob Hann

If you haven’t already heard of Coraline—the plucky preteen who faces down wicked powers prowling in her own home—then I envy you on your recent decade-long nap. Heaven knows, her creator, novelist Neil Gaiman, has done his part to introduce her: Coraline has been a book, a graphic novel and a 3-D animated movie. Now, she has even become a musical, courtesy of MCC Theater. But don’t cringe, darkness lovers! This will be no saccharine Disneyfication; there will be no appended exclamation mark. Witness the adaptors: Eeyore-ish genius Stephin Merritt (animus of the Magnetic Fields and other morose pop entities), writer-actor David Greenspan (the Obie-winning prince of swish) and director Leigh Silverman, who, grinning behind her dead-black hair, looks just like Coraline all grown up.

Gaiman’s 2002 novel about a girl who encounters a spooky alternate family has already got the kiddie-lit theorists heralding the return of the truly creepy children’s story. The period of bowdlerizing fairy tales may finally to be coming to a close (although most kids still don’t know that the original Cinderella’s stepsisters took saws to their feet, and Rumplestiltskin tore himself in two). Gaiman—best known as the sci-fi novelist behind American Gods and the Sandman comics—honors the long history of subversive bedtime stories by writing insidious, atmospheric yarns like Coraline or The Wolves in the Walls. In both, a child is sweetly, patronizingly ignored as she warns of danger. In both, the consequences are horrific (at least for a while).

“Our intention is not to frighten children,” protests Greenspan, who adapted the book and plays the Other Mother, Coraline’s would-be kidnapper. “We don’t want to give them nightmares—or if so, only in a delightful sense.” Greenspan has no love for horror. “As a young child, I had to leave the room during The Wizard of Oz,” he recalls with a shudder. “The witch frightened me so much.” In fact, Greenspan and Merritt’s focus doesn’t seem to have been on children at all. “Stephin hates children,” director Silverman says with a laugh. “He’ll say so. And while we were rehearsing, I forgot that we were working from a children’s book! It’s very sophisticated, and so it came as a shock in previews to see kids there, enjoying this perverse Alice-in-Wonderland story.”

Of course, Silverman can be excused for forgetting, since there were never any young’uns in the rehearsal room. In a casting gesture that Silverman admits “will tell you what kind of evening you’re going to have,” 56-year-old Jayne Houdyshell, familiar as the housebound mother in Lisa Kron’s Well, plays the gamine Coraline. Age in the production becomes a liquid concept, as does gender. Greenspan switches sexes to play the seductive, terrifying Other Mother, and does it without resorting to a stitch of drag. His caressing drawl is, as ever, unfazed. “I just played a cross-dressing governor from colonial New York, so I’m used to having my foot in this pond, so to speak.”

Merritt, who takes dryness to Serengeti-like extremes, responds to questions about Houdyshell and Greenspan’s performances with perplexity. “I don’t really understand the nontraditional casting thing,” he deadpans during postshow Q&A. “I mean, half our characters are animals, and people burst into song. Those aren’t hallmarks of realism right there.” And realism, in this production, is the real bogeyman. So what’s the goal?

“Otherworldliness,” Greenspan responds. “We’re interested in the artificiality, the pretend element of all theater.” He and Merritt share a distinctly experimental aesthetic, and certain rules (no microphones, no moving scenery) help distinguish this effort from the typical tuner. All of Merritt’s music is played live on various-size pianos, including the so-called “prepared” piano, which sounds like a cross between a junkyard and a baby grand. Songs refuse to resolve (among other things, Merritt hates big musical finishes). At a recent preview, junior spectators seemed fine (despite one isolated whimper). This one unsettles the adults.

In Coraline’s epigraph, Gaiman quotes G.K. Chesterton on why we believe in fairy tales: “Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” The stage version has a moral too. In this quintessentially theatrical world, there’s a tacit argument for resourcefulness, imagination and valor. “We put four new numbers in last week during the day, and did a preview at night,” says Silverman, about to dash back with notes for the cast. “Jayne will turn to me right before she goes onstage and quote the show: ‘Be wise, be brave, be tricky.’ And every time, I think: Exactly!?”

Coraline is playing at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.

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