Teresa Qunell Senior Emjoy Gavino and fellow actor David Ige perform in Thursday night's performance of "Into the Woods." The React Theatre has evening shows of Into the Woods Thursday through Saturday and performances on Sunday afternoons. The play will be showing through May 30.

Where can you go to see all of your favorite fairy tale characters - golden haired Rapunzel, diamond-in-the-rough Cinderella, Jack and his giants' treasures, the wart-ridden witch and more? You can journey "Into the Woods."

The Repertory Actors Theatre's (React) multi-ethnic production of Into the Woods, a play based on the book by James Lapine, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, is currently being performed at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center downtown Seattle, under the direction of David Hsieh.

Into the Woods may seem familiar to attendees - the storyline combines many popular fairy tales to produce a comedic play that conveys several unique messages to its audience.

According to Hsieh, the play explores many themes: ethnic relations and parent-offspring interactions, among others. As Hsieh states in the program, Into the Woods asks, "When things seem most at odds, who do we blame? Who actually is to blame? What is right? What is wrong?"

Into the Woods opens on a stage strewn with extremely large books. The majority of the books are lined up bookshelf-style to form the back portion of the set. Some tilt, while others stand straight up.

Throughout the play these books will be used as everything from Rapunzel's tower to screens through which the audience can view certain portions of the story in shadow form.

In the left hand corner of the stage (from the audience's viewpoint) sits a fireplace next to a crimson armchair. This will be the home of the narrator for the majority of the play.

There are, however, four oversized books that are not lined up along with the others. One of these books lies flat at approximately the center of the stage; it is flanked on the left by a stack of two books and on the right by a single book. Just before the first act opens, the covers of the three topmost books in each of these stacks folds open to reveal, from left to right, Cinderella's fireplace, the shop run by the baker and his wife and the home of Jack and his mother.

As Hsieh said, the play uses "these books to start the stories off."

The book encasing Cinderella's fireplace is later removed, and the second book in the left stack is opened to reveal the ballroom.

Throughout the play, these books will open and close their covers, bringing the audience repeatedly back to these three main storylines.

The costumes shown in this production of Into the Woods blend together traditional costume pieces, such as Little Red Riding Hood's crimson cape, with costume parts of Asian inspiration, adding to the multi-ethnic contributions of the show. Of particular note in this respect are Cinderella's various costumes: Hsieh identifies Cinderella's rags as Asian-influenced, while Emjoy Gavino, a senior at SPU and the actress who plays the part of Cinderella, describes Cinderella's wedding dress as a Korean-style robe - bright red, "symbolizing luck and happiness."

The plot line of Into the Woods uses the stories of many fairy tale characters, most of who are taken from Grimm's stories, and molds them together to form an interlocking chain of events.

The audience learns several things that weren't mentioned in the original fairy tales; for instance, Into the Woods presents the primarily childless baker as the brother of tower-bound Rapunzel. It also presents the traditionally wicked Witch of the Rapunzel fable as both an antagonist and a protagonist. Into the Woods shows us that "Sometimes witches can be right," according to Gavino.

Gavino is one of two SPU students involved with this production. Sophomore David Crowley is a spotlight operator. The rest of the cast and crew are made up of community members.

One of React's goals is "to give artists of all skill levels additional opportunities to train and work together on established and new mainstream projects that they might not normally have access to because of ethnicity, gender or experience," according to its mission, stated in the program for Into the Woods. React also works to combine multi-ethnic and non-traditional casts.

Into the Woods is React Theatre's 26th mainstage show, appearing in the theatre's 11th season; this season's theme is "Spectacle!"

React began operating in the summer of 1993, at the initiation of Hsieh, React's founding artistic director.

According to Gavino, React is Seattle's only philanthropic, multicultural theatre.

The organization is non-profit, with some of its proceeds going to benefit the next production; other proceeds go to philanthropic organizations around the city, says Gavino. Hsieh adds that all proceeds from the box office are donated to charities.

According to Hsieh's director's notes, "Into the Woods is filled with fun and familiar characters, an ingeniously and intricately woven plot and Sondheim's spectacular music."