Writer/Director

JAMES LAPINE WRITERIDIRECTOR It seems to be a time when people are interested in re-evaluating their personal histories. This inevitably brings people back to their childhoods: back to the books they read, and the stories they heard as children. I am fascinated by what is read to children and how susceptible they are to it. I started reading fairy tales and asking myself how children heard them, and what they thought. You can read analysis by someone like Bettelheim who will give you psychological justifications for the moral and personal transgressions presented in these stories. But I started to wonder if there really was any justification. I started to imagine how kids today might interpret these stories. I don't know if my having recently had a child has anything to do with my work, I tend not to be analytical about how, or why, I do what I do. I remember though that one of my earliest impulses for doing this piece came when I asked a friend of mine who has a little girl if she was going to teach her daughter table manners. And she said: "I don't care about table manners, but I am going to teach my daughter the difference between right and wrong." I was so moved by this and I thought, yes, what's important is trying to teach people that there is a difference-not to give any answers, because obviously that is subjective, just to recognize that there is a difference . It seems so ironic to me that in today's world we should keep repeating the same mistakes. Into the Woods is about not repeating the mistakes of history. Fairy tales are by nature very matriarchal worlds in which fathers are traditionally irresponsible or absent. I wanted the Baker to break that 54 behavioral pattern, to recognize that he was doing what his father had done before him and say, "No, I don't have to live like that." The Narrator is what the fairy tale is about. I tried telling the stories without a narrator and it just doesn't work. A story needs a storyteller, and the storyteller is the ultimate figure of authority. Originally we wanted a public figure, not an actor, to play the Narrator: Walter Cronkite, or Tip O'Neill -someone who disseminated information and points of view. Then when we got rid of him you would see that the news was now being reported by the newsmakers, not the news reporter; decisions were being made by the people, not the politicians. Ultimately, we defined our narrator as a kind of intellectual, a Bettelheim figure; I wanted to get rid of Bettelheim! In the fairy tale world, the individual is liberated by his own choices and behavior; in the real world we are more dependent on each other. If you read Bettelheim, or even the Jungians, they say that the issues presented in fairy tales are about individual or collective psychic development. It seems to me that the real world is about being part of a whole, where as in the fairy tale world, you are the whole and what makes up the stories are your varied parts. EXTERIOR DROP WITH THREE PORTALS THAT LIFT TO REVEAL THE FAIRY TALE HOME INTERIORS 55 ...