Director's Note

“Sarah Ruhl imbues the fantastical with a singular logic that is only hers but becomes yours during the course of the evening. She gives a map to a kind of preternatural joy; only when the curtain comes down do you remember that we cannot fly, time travel, or conjure our departed loves ones.” —Mary-Louise Parker

For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday tackles a lot of topics, both significant and mundane in nature. 

Life. Death. The afterlife. Legacy. Dogs. Slick Willy and the Clinton Administration. Chex Mix. Growing up Catholic in Davenport, Iowa. Growing up liberal in a conservative family. Growing older in Neverland. Gout. Diabetes. Mary Martin. The chiropractic arts. Platonists vs. Aristotelians. Family. Home. Leaving home. Returning home. Selling the family home. And, of course, Peter Pan, Captain Hook, and the Darling siblings.

While the scope of this play is vast, the connecting thread among its catalogue of topics strikes much more closely to home—at least it does for those of us sitting in this theater waiting for the house lights to dim and the performance to begin. At its core, Sarah Ruhl’s play is an homage—even a love letter—to the live theater, and to the many ways that that institution enriches our everyday lives. 

Indeed, the play begins and ends on a bare-ish stage, more specifically the stage of the Davenport Children’s Theater, circa 1955. 

From that stage, 1/Ann/Peter Pan invites us (her audience, both then as a child-actor and now as . . . something else) to embark on an adventure with her, an adventure of a lifetime that takes us from the hospital where Ann’s father is underneath a sheet, dying, to an Irish wake around the small breakfast table at 111 McClellan Boulevard, the family home, and, finally, in its penultimate scene, to Neverland. Through this adventure, we encounter both the familiar and the unexpected—from oft repeated sibling rivalries (e.g., 1/Ann tells us, “We’ve been having the same political argument for the past thirty years”) to casual strolls down memory lane (e.g., 2/Joan asks her siblings, “Remember the year of the lutefisk?”) to ghosts (both human and canine in form) and “full-on children’s theatre, arms akimbo, with real people hovering underneath their roles in Peter Pan.”

As we move deeper into the play, our expectations for what is possible and impossible, what is real and what is fantastical, shift, sometimes quite dramatically, and we are compelled to enter a not-entirely-unfamiliar world of make believe and imagination—one that calls back to childhood when an eight-pack of Crayola crayons and a tablet of paper were the only gateway we needed to conjure whole new worlds and experiences. 

The stage world that Ruhl creates is a world in which a life-sized stuffed crocodile can come alive and momentarily transform our stage into Crocodile Creek. A world in which simple cosplay costumes can magically transform stagehands into J. M. Barrie’s Lost Boys. A world in which a set of fairy lights and a handbell can make us believe in fairies. And a world in which neither age nor infirmity prohibits us from flying and fighting pirates and playing a game of shadow tag with our loved ones.

For Peter Pan On Her 70th Birthday is, in a word, joyous in the way that it celebrates the child-like magic of the live theater and the ways in which that institution offers us the tools to pose and begin to untangle some of the big questions about life, death, and everything in between—questions that all of us, at one time or another, have asked or will ask. And, in the end, the play invites us to consider the possibility that, as we age and mature, perhaps the best really is yet to come.

Thanks to my talented cast and the enormously supportive community of theater artists that helped bring this beautiful script to life. And thanks to our audiences who continue to recognize the value of the theater arts in our everyday lives by supporting live theater with your presence. Enjoy the show, folks.