You may think you know Peter Pan. I thought I did! He’s a flying boy, usually played onstage by a grown woman, who takes a girl named Wendy to an enchanted land where there are pirates and crocodiles and no mothers. But it’s no pie-in-the-sky song. This is a harrowing tale of abandoned kids and the hazards they endure on a daily basis. It’s a story of survival and eternal hope in the face of overwhelming odds.
At its heart, this show has a large, thriving community. Wendy has two siblings. Peter has a whole gang of friends. There’s a Native American tribe, though we never see them (or know if they are real) and a full envoy of pirates. The magic we wanted to strive for in our production of Peter & The Wolf Children, is the community we built so this oft-told tale of second-stars-to-the-right shine in a new and vital way. They become everything in this world. Flying characters around the stage, creating sound effects, puppetting many puppets, etc… They become the world, in a show that is too often much more about the grandeur of spectacle than the characters themselves.
One of the many clever things adaptor Katherine Busatto’s uncompromising new take on J.M. Barrie’s classic (first staged in 1904) is how she allows such a relatively small cast, with such a grand vision, spring up naturally, while also underscoring some of the main themes of the play. The themes are motherlessness and the nature of death. Katherine Busatto has researched the original manuscripts of Peter Pan from the J.M. Barrie script and found variations that confirm her own vision of the play as a deep, sensitive story of vulnerable children in an uncertain, changing world. She doesn’t sentimentalize the legacy as a fly-happy, ‘Disneyfied,’ frolic. She has stuck to a single voice aimed to the original intent of J.M. Barrie, but uses a historical allegory present just after the time of his writing to shed light on his meaning. Many of the same conventions of the original script are present including: Peter can't be touched by anyone (we aren't told why in the original,) Tink had no voice, and Hook keeps his rambling soliloquies (compete with a passage about "a holocaust of children.")
In our version, all the actors are walking a very fine line between naturalistic acting and all-out escapism. They are, after all, playing children who want to escape from their current situations. Inside, they’re lonely and starving. Outside, it’s World War Two. There are many areas where the Peter Pan story completely takes over, with wild chases and kidnappings and speeches about the importance of strong, responsible authority figures. Then there are times when a different sort of pandemonium breaks in, where the actors forget themselves, play games, and even fight. You’re seeing where the story comes from as it’s being told. I wanted a youthful exuberance and bare-bones set, so as to evoke their inventiveness and intensity.
J.M. Barrie saw Neverland as a Heaven, or maybe a Purgatory, for the fantasy of youth. I wanted to stay true to this in my interpretation of this amazing piece. Hopefully, the audience will leave with a sense of questioning. What is death? Why do we fear it? Was Peter a tragic figure? Or are those who follow him tragically doomed? No matter your answer to these questions, we must all remember to live life with a child-like sense of wonder. If we accomplish this task, we can live each day in a playful way and with our last breaths reach out for that “second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning,” knowing we have lived a life to be coveted and cherished! In time, find comfort in knowing that we all soar. "Death is a very big adventure," Peter tells us. Enjoy the show!
M.B. Griffin , Artistic Director
