By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Peter Pan may not want to, but our hero really doesn’t have a choice about growing up, and experiencing all the pains of aging.
In “For Peter Pan On Her 70th Birthday,” Ann (Fran Martone), who played the character in a community youth theater production, back in childhood, offers a prologue.
She tells about her experience in the role including the vagaries of the home engineered flying mechanism and meeting Mary Martin, who played the role on Broadway. And she also talks about the loses in the intervening years, including her husband and her mother.
“For Peter Pan On Her 70th Birthday” by Sarah Ruhl with Heath Diehl directing is being staged by the Black Swamp Players at the theater on Oak Street. Showtimes are: Friday, Feb. 21, and Saturday, Feb. 22, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, Feb 23 at 2:30, continuing Friday, Feb. 28, and Saturday, March 1 at 7:30 p.m. and March 2 at 1:30 p.m. Click for tickets.
After ending her prologue on that blue note, Ann joins her four siblings who are gathered around the hospital bed where their father (Hans Giller) lays dying.
They mostly still live in Davenport, Iowa. They are an educated lot. Two Miriam (Karen Noble) and Jim (Gary Insch)are medical doctors as was their father. There’s also Joan (Renee Harrington) who teaches in college and the youngest Wendy (Naykishia D.D. Darby), also with a doctorate. From the beginning, the actors capture the dynamic of the siblings, the banter, the jibes, the resentments, and the love.
Their father is lingering, and the waiting for his last breath takes its toll.
They try to distract themselves. Ann works on a crossword puzzle, asking for help as needed. Jim, a college athlete, watches a football game. Wendy at one point begins to sing the Scottish ballad “The Water Is Wide.”
Politics intrudes, and Wendy quickly tries to wave it away. Most of the family is conservative, except for Ann, who is proudly liberal, and Wendy who seems disinterested and annoyed by the conflict it sparks.
More seriously they debate the ethics of using morphine to hasten their father’s passing.
It is not about killing him, Jim said, it’s about staying ahead of the pain.
That they are Catholics makes this particularly trying. Yet it is Ann and Wendy, the least observant, who are the most reluctant.
The dynamics established in this movement as the scenes are called are further explored, when after their father dies, they gather around the table in the family home, drinking Jamesons.
Here the political leanings come out. “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart,” Jim recounts his father saying. “And if you’re not a conservative at 40, you have no brain.”
Jim frets about political correctness killing jokes. So they go around the table, with a couple siblings telling jokes.
They fret at times about laughing with heir father just having died. But their father is still with them. He appears in another room, reading a newspaper in his easy chair. He exits and then the siblings hear a toilet flush. Bad plumbing. But he reappears. He has a snack and drops it. So he brings in the dog, masterfully played by “Ozzy” Giller, who is clearly at home on stage.
This surreal element sets up Ann’s return to Neverland.
Ann, now as Peter Pan, frets to Wendy, the character in the story portrayed by her youngest sister, that she cannot fly.
Then they will walk to Neverland, a painful process. They are close, these, two, one who played Peter Pan and the other who grew up looking at the photos of her sister as Peter Pan.
The others sisters play Wendy’s younger brothers, and Jim plays Hook. The show ends with a final confrontation between Pan and Hook, but no final revelation. The play ends much like that late night conversation, which is like so many late night conversations, with more resonance than clarity
