CARROLL is photographing her; a painstaking and elaborate process in 1863.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND strikes an identical pose.

CARROLL goes about the minutiae of his task.

ALICE: I smell the chemicals still… Bromide and chloride dissolved to make the solution for the negative… Then like magic out comes the polished glass plate, which had to be perfectly clean, I’ve never seen anything cleaner, no dust, no imperfections, like the skin of a baby, fresh like youth, I don’t know like what, like innocence!

PETER: (Laughs.) Oh God!

ALICE: Don’t make me laugh, I’m supposed to be standing still… Then he carefully brushed the solution on the glass with a darling little sable brush I always coveted.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND: (Re: sable brush.) Oh! It’s ravishing!

CARROLL: Don’t move! Just a little longer.

ALICE: Then he whisked the plate into the darkroom to dip it into the silver nitrate and then so gingerly back into the camera, like a surgeon those hands, those soft hands, then a final adjustment to the lens… (To CARROLL.) … I want to move.

CARROLL: You’ll ruin it all.

ALICE: Lorina’s making faces!

CARROLL: She’s a very silly goose and you’re my Queen! Hold still, Queen Alice!

ALICE: Then the moment! Hold your breath! Lens cap off. Time… stops.

Everyone holds their breath.

A few frozen moments.

ALICE: Lens cap on! Move!

CARROLL: Come with me, Alice! Double quick!

CARROLL and ALICE hurry into the darkroom.

Light almost disappears. They are now lit by the muted glow of the darkroom.

ALICE: Into the darkroom! Shut the door. Like being lost at the bottom of the ocean, submerged in the deep dark.

PETER PAN: With the sea creatures!

ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Are you happy now?

ALICE: The plate eased into the solution of acid and sulphate…back and forth, back and forth… What could be more thrilling than to see the negative gradually take shape, yourself gradually take shape?

ALICE IN WONDERLAND: There you are… But in reverse, topsy-turvy, like everything in Wonderland. You and not you.

ALICE: Even now, all these years later, the odor of certain chemicals brings me back there, to that room, on that day… This was the second and final time we were alone.

CARROLL: Look, I’m starting to see you…

ALICE: Can’t my sisters watch?

CARROLL: The door’s shut now. We’d ruin everything… There’s your face emerging…

ALICE: I don’t know that I like my expression. I seem a bit dour.

CARROLL: You seem precisely you, precisely now. It’s this moment, captured forever, never changing.

ALICE: Only it’s that moment back there and I’ve already changed.

Beat.

CARROLL continues to develop the picture.

CARROLL: Do you think you’ll change much as you get older?

ALICE: I should hope so. Who wants to remain the same forever?

CARROLL: Do you think you’ll remember me?

ALICE: I don’t know.

CARROLL: Ah.

ALICE: I’m bound to meet lots of people in my life, and some very memorable. I should think you would be one of the most memorable, but I can’t say for certain.

CARROLL: It’s a fleeting time, this we have… When you’re like you are now.

ALICE: You mean when I’m eleven?

CARROLL: P-p-p-partly that.

ALICE: Is that why you take so many photographs? So you won’t forget?

CARROLL: I’ll never forget. But you will. You’ll move on to your adulthood of ways and means, of fancy dress balls and that bluff good fellow you’re going to marry, all the things that will make up the sum of your life. And a happy life it will be I know… But no reason to be sad for me. For I have this, don’t I?

ALICE: But that’s not me… I know that’s not really me.

Beat.

He continues to work on the picture for a moment.

CARROLL: You’re coming along nicely… You see how you are? … Never growing older, never growing wiser… Like in my heart.

ALICE: (To PETER.) I didn’t understand fully.

PETER: But you understood enough.

CARROLL: I have a wish for my child-friends. Do you know what it is?

ALICE: That we always stay like we are. But I don’t understand why.

He stops.

He considers whether to go on.

CARROLL: In the place called Adulthood, there’s precious few golden afternoons. They’ve gone away to make way for other things like business and housekeeping and wanting everyone to be the same, just like you, all the lives lived in neat hedgerows, all excess banished, all joyous peculiarities excised. It’s grim and shabby. There are no Mad Hatters and there are no Cheshire Cats, for they can’t endure the suffering of the place.

ALICE: Please stop…

CARROLL: That’s the p-p-p-place called Adulthood… I’m there now. You’ll be there soon enough. And you’ll never leave… But here and now, in this room, and on this glass plate, and in the story I’m writing, you’ll never be there… And you’ll never be hurt. And you’ll never be heart-sick. And you’ll never be alone… You will be beloved.

ALICE is near tears.

ALICE: I have to go.

CARROLL: It’ll ruin the picture.

ALICE: May I go?

Beat.

CARROLL: Go, Alice.

She quickly leaves the darkroom, moves away from CARROLL, trying to recover her equilibrium.

PETER PAN: (Disappointed.) That was an awful story!

ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Shhh.

ALICE looks at CARROLL.

ALICE: Poor wounded soul. Everlastingly tormenting himself about a sin that didn’t exist, but was completely true… I think the photographs were just a way to give him a safe framework to explore some unknown and dangerous landscape. He transformed his desires into paper and silver nitrate. What could be more innocuous?

PETER: Perhaps we all do that when we grow up. Find safe ways to make dangerous trips.

PETER PAN: Generally the pirate lagoon is more dangerous than the Indian camp.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Except when it’s the other way around.

PETER PAN: Exactly! … It’ll be dark soon. Help me find some wood for a campfire.

PETER PAN and ALICE IN WONDERLAND assemble a campfire.

ALICE: I went home that day and told my mother of our conversation in the darkroom. What I could understand of it… She didn’t let us see him after that. She made me burn all his letters.