Singer-Wong, Director-Right: Fall Drama in Review

Editor’s note: Because of the foolishness of the editor, this article was published far later than intended. However, it is an excellent article! Many apologizes to the author. Regardless, please enjoy!

Peter at Wendy’s.

Peter/Wendy opened on the 19th, promising new and deep insights into J.M. Barrie’s timeless story of Peter Pan, but not the movie. Because retro is always in, this adaptation drew its dialogue from the source: Barrie’s 1911 work Peter and Wendy. (Of course, that novel was only an adaptation of the 1904 stage play Peter Pan, which in turn was only an adaptation of five chapters of Barrie’s 1902 adult novel The Little White Bird, which may or may not have been heavily influenced by the stories Barrie’s own mother told him to deal with the guilt she felt after losing yet another infant son to smallpox. Don’t worry Mrs. Barrie, they’re in a better place. Not Neverland, but a better place.)

Regardless of source material, the LHS Drama Department delivered on their promise of three-dimensional characterization of the play’s two leads. Minimalistic lighting against a backdrop of scintillating stars cast shadows in more ways than one across our beloved childhood adventurers. Actors who had only recently emerged from their own adolescence played the roles of children with the traditional bright-eyed energy, leaving, however, enough room in their deliveries to maintain a sense of removal from their childlike actions. Revisiting Neverland serves to revisit our childhoods themselves, where, it seems, we see our past selves as different people entirely. We were clumsy, messy, rash, and immature in every way. Peter shows us who we were; from the first tableau where he stumbles about and slashes at imagined foes, uncoordinated and unaware. Paradoxically living forever while being only a week old, Peter is so thoughtless and forgetful that could very well be either a toddler or a grandmother who mistakes you for your mother. That probably something having to do with generations relating or age gaps. Well, maybe. I don’t what J.M. “Jerry” Barrie was thinking. You could ask Katrina if you want insight into the acting.

Also ask her about how productions usually seek the most convincing flight rig in order to lift the cast off the ground, but here the ground itself (probably) stands as a harsh reminder of Peter’s newly addressed humanity. After stumbling, knees keenly aware to the effects of gravity, Peter crashes to the ground when attempting to reattach his shadow. The scene is reminiscent of the CRASH which ends Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Angels in America: Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Part One: Millennium Approaches, where a different character in white comes hurtling from the sky, a possible homage to a recent production of the aforementioned play by acclaimed, homosexual ,and Belgian director Ivo van Hove also employed minimalist sets and lighting. Well, probably not, but it would be really cool if they did do that and I was able to catch it from my one mostly-awake viewing of this play and a New Yorker article I read.

There were some other characters too. Hook, whose name was Hook apparently before he lost his hand, was also there. How, however, was still left to the imagination. Did he come to Neverland as an adult? Is his crew composed of Lost Boys (are they gender-neutral “Children”? “Folks”?) who decided to be pirates after getting to Neverland? Was one group there first? Actually, Peter and his band are pretty much pirates too. There’s really no establishment at all on Neverland, and everyone just goes around partying and doing whatever they want. So who are they to call the other guys pirates? How would anyone know what a pirate is for that matter? Peter is the one who cuts off Hook’s hand, for reasons still unknown, so it’s understandable that he wants revenge. We know that Hook is bad guy because he tries to kill Tiger Lily, but, I mean, he could have a good reason for that. It’s never explained exactly why he goes after her, or why on only that night. About that, who is Hook? We got more backstory in the Disney movie. I guess there was nowhere to fit in the ethos of a tortured and misunderstood character this ninety-minute play driven solely by characterization. He does have one analysable abstraction: a pirate flag is lowered whenever Hooke enters, symbolizing for the audience that he is, in fact, a pirate. I guess they couldn’t come up with a way to do that with only shadows and chalk. We did get to see more of Tiger Lily, whose changes were evident from her introduction.

“You’re not a pirate, are you?” gasps one Lost Boy who stumbles into her.

“Or, dear lord, you’re not someone privileged appropriating native culture, are you?”

“Oh, no, of course not. I’m an actual flower now, so we don’t have to address the kinda racist parts of the original.”

With the newfound character depth, the relationships between characters gain new dimensions which in turn allows us to peer deeper into said characters. Tinkerbell, for example, clearly has Stockholm syndrome. Peter does nothing but abuse her, with both of them well aware that he could kill her with three words. Actually, could he? Is disbelief targeted? Is affirmation? Tink is brought back to life by belief, although did we have to say “I do believe in Tinkerbell,” targeting it, or would it just work by power of intention? Does a specific child’s disbelief kill a specific fairey? Anyway the whole predicament the fairey race finds themselves in totally their fault. No one believes in fairies, but the fairies have hidden on an island in the sky for at least a few generations. One, two max public fairey appearances per year would probably diminish the death toll. And what are the fairies even doing on Neverland? Trust me, there are plenty of children in London who would love to be able to fly and plenty of others who wouldn’t mind a new house. But enough thought and vision. Let’s move on the auditory.

The music winding throughout the play set the mood well. The trance banger used in the Lost Young People dance seen really brought me into a Victorian era forest atmosphere. The scene change music was a pan flute, and if not, it should have been. Any scenery or color would have really ruined the raw, barren, exposed aesthetic of the play, but God forbid we skimp out on the sound effects. As the pirates hit the ground (which we talked about earlier as mortality) I didn’t quite grasp that there was supposed to water there. That Poseidon’s Kiss sploosh really cleared it up, and even engaged me further as I watched the slow-motion tumbles as bodies clad in white crumpled onto the dark mortality of the ground and marched ghost-like out through the house.

I have another thousand words to go, but I have just been informed that the play only actually ran for three days and ended almost half a year ago.

Overall, 5/7.