THE NEVERLAND AFTER DARK
This ain’t Mary Martin’s Peter Pan. Or Walt Disney’s. Or Stephen Spielberg’s. With Peter Pan: The Boy Who Hated Mothers, playwright Michael Lluberes has his own take on the familiar story, at once faithful in spirit to Barrie’s original tale yet also interested in exploring Victorian attitudes about both children and sex. In Lluberes’ Neverland, Peter Pan is hot and little brother Michael Darling is dead.
This asks a lot from the adult actors, who must keep their childlike hijinks rooted in a deeper, more disturbing experience of passion and loss. Most of the seven actors play multiple roles. They are all gifted with physical agility, grace, and easily switch between different realities and characters. As important is their ability to communicate wonder and joy believably — particularly as adults playing children — and the cast at the Blank Theatre is more than up to the task and gets it just right. Their English accents are a little non-specific, and occasionally go wonky, but their commitment to the material sees them through, under the inventive direction of Michael Matthews.
Trisha LaFache does a dazzling double act as Mrs. Darling and Captain Hook. The death of baby Michael has driven Mrs. Darling to madness, and LaFache ably embodies her confusion and sorrow. Once in the Neverland, as Hook, she gets a chance to display physical agility and humor. The agreeably scruffy Daniel Shawn Miller is charming as Peter Pan. He is sexy without ever letting it cross over into being icky — which seems very much in keeping with the playwright’s intentions. Miller’s interplay with Liza Burns’ Wendy is always interesting to watch. As Tootles and Smee (as well as a few other characters) Jackson Evans makes a particularly strong impression, and David Hemphill, Benjamin Campbell, and Amy Lawhorn each have a chance to shine.
Together, Director Matthews, set designer Mary Hamrick, and prop designer Michael O’Hara do a lot with a very little. Their crocodile is particularly effective — and it’s little more than scraps of fabric, some rope, and a couple of lights. Kellsy MacKilligan’s costumes are brilliant, seemingly Steam Punk-influenced gems. Rags and fabric remnants take wing — sometimes literally. Lighting designers Tim Swiss & Zack Lapinski favor a brown palette of atmospheric murk that sometimes obscures more than it means to; and Rebecca Kessin’s sound design works in many sequences, but sometimes gets monotonous — enough already with the drumbeats.
This is an engrossing production of a somewhat problematical play.
Lluberes tantalizes us with the possibilities but doesn’t allow himself to fully explore the ramifications of introducing sexual desire and mourning to the nursery and to the Neverland. He’s really on to something here. The Victorian obsession with sentimental children was in itself almost fetishistic — and while Barrie has never been the object of as much speculation as Lewis Carroll about sublimated appetites, there is definitely the suggestion of something pervy lurking somewhere.
The bottom line is, when you put a half-naked Pan on top of Wendy; when you show us Mrs, Darling throwing dirt on her baby’s grave; and when the mother doubles as Captain Hook; you create the expectation that the story is going to go somewhere surprising.
But it doesn’t.
Wendy grows up. Her daughter, grand-daughter, and great-grand-daughter will all have a chance to play Mommy to Peter Pan. Who doesn’t grow up.
…And?
photos by Mary Ann Williams
Peter Pan: The Boy Who Hated Mothers
The Blank Theatre at 2nd Stage Theatre in Hollywood
scheduled to end on June 2, 2013 EXTENDED through August 18, 2013
for tickets, call 323-661-9827 or visit http://www.theblank.com