Press

The New York Times

A bizarre-looking vehicle recently drew slack-jawed stares from the normally jaded Manhattanites on West 83rd Street. Occupying a flat-bed delivery truck, it looked like a white and neon-red locomotive, but with so many crumples and curves that it resembled melted marzipan.

This was part of a train, all right, but not one that had ever chugged into New York, except in young imaginations. It was the locomotive from Dr. Seuss’s ”Green Eggs and Ham,” and it has now found a station: the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, where it stars in ”Oh, Seuss! Off to Great Places,” a 4,000-square-foot exhibition that opens today.

Although the train doesn’t actually move, many other creations in the show do. ”The sophistication of interactive exhibitions has accelerated to such a degree that there’s so much more now that you can accomplish,” said Andrew S. Ackerman, the museum’s executive director.

This show relies much more on technology than its ancestor, ”Seuss!,” at the museum from 1997 to 1999. Remaining through August 2005, when it is to begin a three-year national tour, ”Oh, Seuss!” is also more ambitious: costing $600,000 (it’s supported by JetBlue Airlines), the show is a cornerstone of the Seussentennial, the yearlong celebration of the 100th birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991), better known as Dr. Seuss.

Originally, the exhibition was to be based on just one book, ”Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” That 1990 Seuss tribute to newfound independence has become a favorite graduation gift. (In the film ”The Terminal,” it briefly appears in Tom Hanks’s hand in the airport bookstore.) But delightful as the book is, the show’s planners found the concept too restrictive. They soon included not only ”Green Eggs and Ham,” but also ”If I Ran the Circus,” ”Horton Hatches the Egg,” ”The Sneetches and Other Stories” and the intriguing but less–known ”Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?” Diverse books, but they share certain themes.

”When we were approached two years ago by Dr. Seuss Enterprises,” Mr. Ackerman said, referring to the organization that handles the Seuss intellectual properties and proposed the show, ”we were still very much in the shadow of 9/11. And with all the things that kids are going through, getting out of slumps and overcoming obstacles became the central idea.”

But first the museum faced obstacles: not just turning two-dimensional illustrations into three-dimensional objects, but making real Dr. Seuss’s unreal creatures, contraptions and feats. How do you have children fly on a trapeze like circus pros? (The show does it with trick photography.) What sound is made by a creature that’s a cross between a lion and a fish? (Move its tail across a big poster and find out.) And how do you construct and deconstruct two weird Seussian inventions, a Throm-dim-bu-lator and a Borfin?

”We had this early idea of building a Seussian world,” said Karen Snider, the museum’s deputy director for exhibitions. But the staff didn’t want to do it from scratch. ”We had interns combing the Internet for Seuss-like products,” she said.

Oh, the places they went! One source was in San Francisco: Daniel R. Oakley, the architect who designed Öliblocks, amorphous magnetic construction toys. They seemed like possible components for the Throm-dim-bu-lator, the machine that ”poor Herbie Hart” has taken apart in ”Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?” (Lucky not to be Herbie, among other things.) But the show’s planners wanted gears like the book’s ”gicks” and ”goors.” So Mr. Oakley designed some. Their place of manufacture? China.

The show lets children do what Herbie can’t: put the Throm-dim-bu-lator back together. Consisting of a hulking metal frame and the magnetic building elements, the machine can be assembled and disassembled. (There is no one correct method, although the museum offers whimsical directions by authors with a Seussian sensibility: children.)

The Borfin, from the same book, was a bigger problem: ”Every morning at six,/poor Mr. Bix has his Borfin to fix!” Resembling a Russian nesting doll of tubes and cylinders, the Borfin rises each day but ”shlumps in a heap” every night. The museum wanted one for children to shlump and unshlump.

”There are a lot of things we could have done to make the Borfin move, but it’s got to have the Seuss quality and be interactive,” said Rich Miller, the museum’s technical designer. ”It’s sort of a machine but it’s also sort of a character, so we had to make it seem alive.”

The team settled on a 10-foot-tall fabric Borfin, which includes linear actuators, motors that ”create push-pull kinds of forces,” Mr. Miller explained. Although the Borfin has been a bit slow in going off to great places, the museum plans to install it today. When it’s fully operational, children can pump pedals and push buttons at five stations to activate it, complete with sound effects.

The rest of the 25 activity areas range from playground simple — for preschoolers, a model of the nest that the loyal elephant Horton perches on — to examples of the most advanced digital technology. These include stations designed by Linda Gottfried of Color, Light & Shadow, where children can manipulate the images and text from the Sneetches’ story on a huge ”graffiti wall” or race the hot-air balloons from ”Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” on video monitors.

Perhaps the most complex is the interactive installation by Camille Utterback of Creative Nerve Inc.: as visitors watch themselves on a wall-size monitor, Seuss text rains down on them, and they can push, move or ”catch” the words. This is fun, but like everything else, it’s play with a purpose. ”You’re learning how to read without knowing you’re learning,” Ms. Snider said.

The museum struggled to make every element match the books. ”We’re Horton,” Mr. Ackerman said. ”We’re 100 percent faithful.”

But the real critics will be children. ”There’s a certain kind of laugh that’s almost a chuckle,” Mr. Ackerman said. ”It’s this little laugh of satisfaction that means the child understood something and accomplished it. When you hear that, you know you’ve been successful.”

”Oh, Seuss! Off to Great Places” is at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, 212 West 83rd Street, (212) 721-1223, through August 2005.

Photos: Illusions: visitors play in the circus exhibit at the Children’s Museum.; Children discover the ”Throm-dim-bu-lator” in the ”Oh, Seuss!” show. (Photographs by Ruby Washington/The New York Times)

By LAUREL GRAEBER