To Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday (Sarah Ruhl)
After viewing Asteroid City earlier this year I looked to see what other’s thought of it. While I love Wes Anderson and that he seems to have fully come into his own with French Dispatch, the tenor of at least a few reviews is “why is a man who is capable of stirring character pieces like Royal Tenenbaums or Life Aquatic, using his time to make strangely written, strangely acted, and strangely conceived movies like French Dispatch or Asteroid City?”
In the words of a gallerist from Anderson’s French Dispatch “He is capable of drawing this, but he thinks this is better.” Frequently we get upset at artists who once resonated with us deeply but seem unwilling or unable to do it again. But that’s not really the artist’s job (it might be commercially advantageous, but that’s a different concern.)
Anyhow, I feel the same way as those internet reviewers when it comes to the work of Sarah Ruhl. Most of the time I don’t like her plays, in fact most of the time I deeply dislike her plays, but every so often I love a play, and I almost always love her first acts, only to get disappointed when she abandons reality in the second.
Why can’t she write more Clean Houses? More The Oldest Boys? Why does she throw Stage Kiss away in the final ten pages, or do whatever it was she was doing in Dead Man’s Cellphone? I don’t know, but she likes her poetic truths, her breaks with the conventional, and I have to go into every play with the knowledge that she’ll likely break my heart all over again.
How does To Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday fare? Read on and find out.
As an Audience Member
To Peter Pan follows five siblings as their father dies and each faces their own mortality. While there are ghosts (or a ghost) in the play, the majority of it is just a family talking to each other, relating to each other, being comfortable with each other, and grieving with each other.
In the final movement (as this is a play with movements, not acts) the eldest daughter escapes back into her childhood memories of playing Peter Pan as a way to stay young and avoid death, even as her siblings face life head on.
It’s a great play. The break with reality that Ruhl frequently employs in her work is well setup and thoroughly justified, by both the themes and the background of the characters. When we transfer to the world of Peter Pan we are prepared and welcome it (or at least I did,) and it serves to underline the problems the characters are going through instead of being tangential.
This doesn’t reach the heights that Ruhl is capable of with me, but neither does it sink like I find her work so often doing.
As a Producer
Apart from the fact that the cast is older than our usual crop of actors I could easily see this being on the edge of a normal Pronoia production: it’s comedy tinged with sadness, it has strange leaps, and it deals with a small, but vitally important subject for the characters at hand.
As a Writer
I don’t know that there’s anything for me to take from this. The first two movements don’t overstay their welcome, but neither are they pushing plot details: indeed there really isn’t a ploy, the comedy is well grounded, but nothing I haven’t seen before.
If anything this play does show that well written words said by well chosen actors can create interest without the need for tension, mystery, and surprise, even if those are tools we ought to use frequently.
