Royalty: King of Hearts (Shawn Parr) and Queen of Hearts (Heather Lea Anderson Boll).

There's something curious about the summer heat: It elicits a condition that causes those two most Freudian of pre-Freudian girl-children to proliferate on our stages like dandelions.

At Cain Park, The Wiz's urbanized Dorothy has just completed her rhythm-and-blues "Ease on Down the Road." Meanwhile, at Porthouse Theatre, that New Age Orson Welles, Matthew Earnest, is attempting his third local foray into Mad Hatter reinterpretations of the classics. He's adapted and directed the twin Lewis Carroll Alice books as what appears to be Alice in Undies, an Abercrombie and Fitch take on Wonderland.

Last year Earnest turned Barrie's Peter Pan inside out, shining a neon light on the subtext and bringing to the forefront Peter's stunted sexuality and Wendy's nubile cravings, and rendering Neverland as a punk asylum. Admittedly flawed but semi-brilliant, that show managed to intrigue even the most ardent Barrie-ite. There, however, our eager auteur had a proven script to hang his interesting oddity on, so that some sense lingered beneath the madness. Contrarily, our advice to the attendees of this year's premiere of Alice... is to re-read the books. You'll need a recent encounter with the sublime original phantasmagorias as a road map to this inchoate theatrical jumble. For on the Porthouse stage is a decided first draft of a work that still needs copious hours of workshop development.

In trying to condense the two novels into an approximately two-hour-and-40-minute theater piece, Earnest has fallen woefully short of his ambitious aims. In its present form, Alice... is an evening that is sometimes clever, but rarely Carrollian. Eschewing any inspiration from original illustrator John Tenniel's magnificent grotesqueries or Disney's pastoral whimsy, our adapter has instead sadly opted for visual representations that suggest an unfortunate allegiance to the shrill sexuality of the Marquis de Sade and D.H. Lawrence.

It's only in the enchanting, enthusiastic innocence of Emily Pote's face and performance as the title character that we can sense Carroll's rhapsody to the wonder of childhood. And it's only in the surrealistic, overpowering hamminess of Nick Koesters' Cheshire Cat that we get something of the original's indelible absurdity. There also seems to be a conspiracy to sabotage the rest of the company. Those who aren't defeated by the salacious costuming (for example, what is that 6-foot-plus muscle man doing in a petticoat?) are rendered helpless by unclear staging that buries rather than dramatizes Carroll's inventive fancies. And to finish off the perversion, there's the malicious rather than joyful tone of the entire evening.

Trying to choose among performance art, dance and musical, Earnest gives us a schizophrenic Alice. The result doesn't build but just careens. Worst of all, it confirms a century of slanderous gossip that one of the English language's greatest stylists was merely a Victorian Humbert Humbert spinning tales only to entrap a would-be Lolita.

Alice...: Through July 19, by Porthouse Theatre at Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, 330.672.2497.