"To this day, people ask me if I am going to write another musical and I say, 'Did you see my last musical?'"

There have been other adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland in Chicago before. And before the 2004-2005 season is out, there will be another one, at Lookingglass. But none of these adaptations can match the scope, the daring, or the sheer terrifying logistics of Noelle Krimm's site-specific version opening later this month in Andersonville.

In Krimm's version, each chapter will be adapted by a different artist or theatre company, and performed in a different location in and around the Neo-Futurists' performance space at the corner of Ashland and Foster.

For example, visual artist John Randle will stage his take on chapter one in the room the Neo-Futurists call the Neo-Futurist State Park, that huge waiting area outside the Neo-Futurists' theatre. In the theatre itself, The House Theatre's Matthew Hawkins will do chapters two and three; director Ann Boyd will do chapter four in the nearby Las Manos gallery, and chapter five will be done by a group of actors (among them Dave Kodeski, Phil Ridarelli, and Rachel Claff) in Simon's Tavern. A team of white rabbit docents will lead various groups of audience members from chapter to chapter and site to site.

This is an immensely complicated production. Just writing about it makes the head spin. So what kind of person comes up with such a daring, and eccentric, take on Alice? If you ask her, Noelle Krimm, who has been a performer in Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind since 1999, will tell you she has a very traditional theatre background.

Born and raised in the conservative, rural world of Lakeland, Florida, a not particularly touristy corner of Florida, Krimm grew up loving Broadway shows.

Her parents loved musical theatre. They were music theatre majors in college and for a time taught music and drama in local high schools.

"My dad was a comedy writer," Krimm says. "He used to write these Burns and Allen type routines that he and my mother would perform at Barber Shop conventions around Florida." Krimm pauses and then adds quickly, "That's Barber Shop the singing style, not the place you get your hair cut."

"I think my Dad was a frustrated artist. I think he would have wanted to be a full-time comedy writer. So instead he did all the things that I see the actors I know in Chicago doing now. He took those jobs that would make him the most money without taking up his time. He installed TV antennas. For a while he built computers. Then he tried to be a videographer."

Krimm showed an interest in theatre from an early age and her folks encouraged her. "They put me on stage at five," Krimm recalls. "My dad wrote me into something he and my mother were doing. I remember I wore lederhosen and rolled a barrel on stage while a barbershop quartet sang ‘Roll Out the Barrel.'"

She did some theatre in junior high and high school. But much of her performing energy in high school went into the marching band. "We were the state champions, Lakeland High School. We also had one of those bands like in the movie Drum Line where there were 350 of us out on the field. We always had really elaborate marching routines."

Krimm played the French horn when she wasn't marching, and the marching band equivalent, the Mellophone. "Not a light instrument," she notes. "We marched in the Rose Parade when I was a sophomore. I thought I was going to die. It was such a long parade. I remember my arms shaking by the end." To make matter worse, Krimm's band shoes were too small. "After the parade both my big toenails fell off."

Interestingly, when the marching band season ended, so did Krimm's interest in playing in the orchestra. "I was much more attracted to the spectacle of the marching band. I really didn't like the concerts. For a time I even gave up my instrument to march in the flag and dance corps. I just loved the spectacle of it all."

When it came time to go to college, Krimm first bridled at the idea of going to school. "At first, I didn't want to go to college. I remember saying, ‘I wanted to be an actress; why would I go to college?'" So Krimm stayed home in Lakeland when a lot of her friends when to college. "I spent the year working in the mall. That's when I decided to go to school."

She enrolled in the Florida School of the Arts, a junior college focusing on the arts. Typically full-time students took two years to get their associate's degree, Krimm stayed for three years. She wasn't a bad student. Quite the opposite. She packed her schedule with classes she was interested in. "I took as many arts and theatre classes as I could," Krimm admits.

Eventually, though, she had to move on. She auditioned for the BFA program in theatre at Florida State University. She got into the university but not the BFA program.

"At the same time I was offered a job touring with Missoula Children's Theatre," Krimm explains, adding, "It is like the peace corps of theatre. You tour with one other person. What you do is go into a community. You hold auditions, cast between 5 to 16 local children; you teach them the show. The show we were doing was a version of The Pied Piper. You do a dress rehearsal and then two performances. Then you move on to the next town. It was pretty great. I have seen the entire northwest because of the Missoula Children's Theatre. I toured for a year with them. Our last show was held in Yellowstone."

After that Krimm returned to Florida State to get her BA. In her second year she was offered a place in the BFA program but turned them down.

Krimm's first job after graduation was performing in The Lost Colony, Paul Green's 1937 historical play about the ill-fated first English colony in America, done every summer on Roanoke Island. The show, which has been continuously running on the island since 1937, has had an illustrious history. Actors as different as Andy Griffith and Chris Elliott cut their teeth in the show, before moving on to greater fame elsewhere.

"I played Eleanor Dare, the mother of Virginia Dare [the first European child born in North America]," Krimm notes. "The job was very cushy. They provide housing that looks like the Ewok Village. The summer was full of late night revels. There are numerous traditional parties and initiation rituals."

Krimm also returned to the Missoula Children's Theatre for one more tour, this one international. "We went on the Japanese tour," Krimm notes. "We were part of their English program. They cast the shows before we arrived at the school, which sometimes caused problems. They learned everything phonetically, which also caused problems.

"We were doing The Wizard of Oz. At one school, I remember, there was a Tin Man who couldn't say ‘ax.' He only said ‘ass.' We kept trying to get him to say ax but he couldn't. Finally we told him what he was really saying in English He turned red and he didn't want to say anything."

All through this, Krimm technically still lived in Florida. She and an actor boyfriend from Florida State decided for the sake of their careers they had to move to a theatre town. They decided on Chicago and Krimm pulled up stakes.

That began one of the worst years of her life.

Soon after arriving in Chicago she broke up with her boyfriend. Worse still, she couldn't get cast in anything.

"I felt like I was going to auditions all the time," she sighs, "and got nothing."

Frustrated with her lack of luck she was looking into the possibility of going back to school and getting a degree in social work when she saw the audition for Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.

"The only reason I auditioned for the Neofuturists," Krimm admits, "was that I had all these stupid student loans I was paying off. I made myself promise that I would audition for anything and everything, to justify all the debt I had gone into."

Krimm was not familiar with the show when she called for the audition. "I never saw Too Much Light until the night before my audition," she admits. She also showed up at the audition virtually unprepared. For the first round of the audition performers do a piece they're written that they think would be appropriate for the show.

Krimm quickly wrote something before the audition. She did well enough during the first round of the audition the Neo-Futurists asked to see her portfolio of writings. (All performers are expected to also help write shows and so are asked to have samples of their other writing.)

"I didn't know I had to have writing samples," Krimm gasps. "'Oh, yeah,' I told them, ‘I forgot them. I am going to have to bring them later.' Then I sat in the hallway by the bathroom and wrote several short pieces. Then I told them my computer had broken and had to give them handwritten copies." Krimm laughs. "All my writing samples were written in about 15 minutes in the theatre."

They accepted Krimm into the company anyway and almost immediately she began performing in the show. Soon after that she began appearing in the Neo-Futurists' prime time shows. She was a cast member in Sean Benjamin's shows Devolution and Missing Parts.

In 2001, around the time Neo-Futurist Greg Kotis' show, Urinetown, was a hit in New York, Krimm proposed writing and starring in her own musical, based more or less on her own life, at the Neo-Futurarium. The show was accepted and given a spot in the spring of 2002.

Suddenly Krimm was faced with a dilemma. Having sold the show now she had to write it. "It was really horrifying," Krimm admits in retrospect. "It was about halfway between the time that I proposed the show and the time it was supposed to open, that I realized I didn't think I could write a musical. I just didn't feel competent to write a musical.

"I sat at the computer and cried. The idea of filling hour and 15 minutes when you are trained to get your point across in two minutes. That extra hour and 13 minutes is a very, very long time."

To make matters worse, not only was Krimm writing the show, she was also supposed to act in it. The show received mixed reviews, but the show did go on, with a lot of help from her collaborator, Jonathan Mastro, who wrote lyrics and co-wrote the tunes for the show. "I wrote the melodies," Krimm notes. "I hummed them into a tape recorder. And then [Mastro] transcribed them. But he was given some license. He jazzed it up – a lot."

"To this day people ask me if I am going to write another musical and I say, ‘Did you see my last musical?'"

Krimm's next two projects were more intensely collaborative. Krimm was a part of the team responsible for the interactive, multi-media parody of the media, SEX! A Special Report from the News Show. She followed that up with, Inside My Mouth, written and performed with two others, Genevra Gallo and Sharon Greene.

But nothing Krimm has done since her days in the marching band in high school has involved coordinating the effort of so many people. In her latest project, the environmental theatre version of Alice in Wonderland. With a couple chapters still unassigned as of the end of August, she has nine different creators working on the project and five different venues for the work. Each artistic team is responsible for their own take on the chapter they've been assigned.

In addition, Krimm has to coordinate five different white rabbits, who will lead the groups of actors. The rabbits will start their tours every 15 minutes.

"I am having trouble finding a fifth white rabbit. I am worried I am going to have to be one of the white rabbits, which would mean I would not be able to stay at the Neo-Futurarium to make sure everything runs smoothly."

The Neofuturist's Alice opens Sept. 18 at 1 p.m. and runs Saturdays and Sundays through Oct. 24.