Zane Williams
The most fascinating thing about Forward Theater’s current production, For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, is the detailed and fanciful set, created by Joseph Varga. Running in the Playhouse at Overture Center through Nov. 24, the show’s backdrop is a stunning work of art. Like a magical department store window at Christmastime, the cityscape of Davenport, Iowa, is meticulously intricate. A perfect doll house floating in space, the lights in the miniature buildings blink on and off, and white puffy clouds hang pleasantly in the sky above. To signify time passing, we see sunset fall on the idealized, Midwestern city center and then watch the community wake again on a new day. (Equally beautiful lighting design by Greg Hoffman.) It is the cleverest device I’ve ever seen to indicate time passing, and the effect is truly enchanting. The backdrop receives a great deal of attention in the first half of For Peter Pan, because it is intriguing. Mysterious. Beautiful. Its changes are delightful, unexpected and entertaining. The three-dimensional artificial world is ultimately much more interesting than what’s happening onstage.
Award-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl wrote the play For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday as a gift for her mother, the character of Ann here, played with detached seriousness by Susan Sweeney. Based on interviews with her aunts and uncles and structured like a Japanese Noh play, it is a biographical essay in three parts to help Ruhl’s mom reflect on the emotional and philosophical toll of losing her parents and the fear of her own life ending.
In the first two parts, Ruhl leans on family history and actual events much more than she does in other works. She creates hyper-realistic scenes that document her own grandfather’s last moments and the five siblings’ actual conversations, over a late-night bottle of Jameson, as they process their loss and ponder their own childhoods and eventual adulthood.
The show’s program notes state that For Peter Pan opens on a deathbed in a hospital room; the place where Forward’s previous show, Mary Jane, left off. But instead of following compelling characters through the story to this literal, wrenching end, in this play audiences sit vigil for an old man dying of leukemia who is a stranger to us. The interactions between five siblings as they wait for their father to draw his last breath are tedious. Relationships between sisters and brothers are established, generic memories are shared, but nothing draws us in.
Similarly, the following scene where the adult children all sit around a kitchen table and share dull jokes, reminiscences about people we never meet, and conflicting political views is static and dull. Arguing about whether Bill Clinton is a good president seems quaint and out of touch with the fever-pitched political rants that are much more common today at family get-togethers. Sure, it’s nice to think about a time when our politics weren’t so acrimonious and entrenched, but it also feels much less important and urgent than the situation we face as a country now.
Though they don’t have a lot to do in the static second movement, the actors make their character distinctions clear. Celia A. Klehr is endearing as the baby of the family and the most emotionally fragile. Michael Herold keeps the mood light with a quick one-liner when needed. Susan Sweeney’s Ann brings a professorial distance and literary analysis to the proceedings, perhaps to protect her own feelings. And Jim Buske is convincing as the golden child and former athlete who was the star of the family.
As the ghost of their dearly departed father, Sam D. White easily pulls focus, going about his normal day in his own home. He eats a grapefruit, takes his Metamucil, and gets his dog (a live performance by a poodle named Butter Cream Frosting) to clean up some spilled pretzels off the floor, unseen and unbothered by his children. The juxtaposition of living and dead is matter-of-fact and amusing.
One of the formative memories for Ruhl’s mother was playing the lead in Peter Pan as a young person at a local children’s theater. So the third section of the play is a surreal mash-up of the J.M. Barrie story and the essential elements of the five brothers and sisters — representing the urge to temporarily escape reality by retreating to the theater. Thematically, it is not a long “flight” from the story of an orphan boy who refuses to grow up, to a newly “orphaned” woman who, at age 70, refuses to consider her own death. The roadmap for this dream-like detour to Neverland is signposted liberally, sometimes awkwardly, in the script.
When the 60- and 70-something siblings join Ann for a trip to Neverland, Ruhl’s poetic and playful language finally emerges, but the magical parallels to the Peter Pan story fade quickly. And when Sweeney actually flies into the air, the apparent strain of the cables on her Peter Pan costume replaces any awe we might feel with concern for her safety.
In an interview, Ruhl describes the exercise she gave to her playwriting students at Yale about writing a play as a gift to a person in their lives, and how meaningful the experience was. I hope that Ruhl’s mother treasures this play, but I also wish it ultimately meant more to the rest of us.
