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“Heidi, will you marry me?” 

“No, Mr. Donohue!” 

“‘Once upon a time...’” 

On a set lit like a cross between Piranesi and Edward Gorey, these lines become a refrain, plaintive and funny at first—like one facet of the fairy tales Mary Zimmerman has chosen to elaborate in The Secret in the Wings, now at Berkeley Rep—then more and more transparent as the tag to introduce the stories, a vignette, one tale interrupting the other . . .  

The hook’s as simple as the tag it sets up: Heidi, whose frivolous (even silly—in fact, they seem like actors) parents are going out for the evening (a real dark and stormy—), is apprehensive about being left in the care of the next-door neighbor. “The ogre? He has a tail!” He also has a tale, or a few, and after the preliminary spurning, opens a huge tome, intones the proper formula—and the enchantment is to begin. 

Zimmerman—whose Journey to the West and The Da Vinci Notebooks were past hits at the Rep—this time has chosen (and chosen well) a handful or so of the old Grimms’ Fairy Tales-type of stories that parents, especially since Dr. Spock, have been reluctant to tell to children. Zimmerman leaves them in their phenomenal strangeness; like the old Border Ballads, like medieval allegories, they are not only filled with dismemberings but are disjointed compared to modern narratives, wayward—you can never tell where they’re going. These are told and acted out by a cast accomplished at the job, bringing their own special talents (often highlighted for a moment) to the mix, switching parts and changing costume at the drop of a bodkin.  

But there are problems in tone and in development. Maybe adapting an accumulation of tales instead of an integral work (as with Journey or The Notebooks) makes the show more wayward than the tales themselves, which after all have a completely mysterious and disarming integrity of their own. That’s mostly preserved—but at the cost of the hooks and tags wearing thin: a chorus of schoolgirl rhymes, actors’ exercises at “doing” animals, bad jokes to represent bad jokes . . . a whole slew of “stagings” to set these tales make what comes on as a tour-de-force unravel into a pastiche, a workshop piece. 

The tales themselves are fascinating, but untouched—finally elaborated only by the staging as it switches attack, and a hint of psychology (for which folk and fairy tales, myths and dreams have long been fair game). The waywardness of the tales—the ways in which they change direction and narrative shape, just as their characters change form—provides an amplitude of their own signature, intuitive meaning that isn't met by the play’s coquettishness. 

Since Plato, the classic attitude for this kind of material has been twofold: ironic (which preserves the story in suspense) and anachronistic (retellings which employ the old-time story to comment on the present). This was canonized in the Renaissance and by Romanticism. Popular forms do a fair job of it for every generation, from the Fractured Fairy Tales TV cartoons of the ‘60s to Sondheim’s Into the Woods. 

But there’s little resembling irony in Zimmerman’s syncopated repetitions that are a little too on-the-beat: They begin to grate. It’s not à la Gertrude Stein, whose operas at least evolve the inner meaning of the stories. Here, it’s too much that passé gesture of an anachronism, “putting on a show.” 

And that show can be impressive: Costumes, sets and properties are lavish and inventive, the actors play with considerable energy (though finally it is only Christopher Donohue, playing his namesake, the-ogre-next-door, who captures a tone both ironic and anachronistic—and very droll) and the tales are, again, fascinating, if a little stripped of fabulousness. 

There’s even an element of fun in all this insouciance, but it’s just not the excitement that comes from the tales themselves. At the end—and hinted at during the course of the show—there’s a play between generations, the fears and monstrous dreams of one projecting into the fun and stories of the next—or next again. Interesting, but undeveloped, as so much of The Secret is—a gesture towards theater that doesn’t quite make vaudeville or burlesque. Maybe its undisclosed secret is that it's really cabaret.