Awfully Big Adventures: The Lure of Neverland

by Gregory Kable
     Dramaturg

Richard Linklater’s sky gazing opening from Boyhood (2014), and Peter Pan creator James M. Barrie.

We live in an age of revisionist art. A dizzying array of sequels, prequels, remakes, origin stories, samplings, spin-offs and franchises meet the constantly expanding alternate characters and virtual plotlines of fan fiction; books become plays which beget musicals which become films, then are restaged in their movie guise and repackaged in book form all over again. A dissenting view on such trends is voiced in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, where a troubled, fearful Mormon wife, Harper Pitt, laments “imagination can’t create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions with the appearance of novelty and truth.” But Harper’s perspective isn’t the last word, as Kushner places her delimiting comments within a scene of flamboyant magic realism, itself a bold affirmation of human imagination, and her rendezvous ends with Harper trading genuine insights about innermost truths with an AIDS-stricken gay man facing the specter of mortality, who identifies their present surreal environment, “the very threshold of revelation sometimes.”

While author James M. Barrie predates this cultural landscape by more than a century, both his method of reinventing materials in subtle to surprising ways and his love of the worlds of imaginative literature and the practical magic of the theatre make him a natural inhabitant of our times, and one whose best works likewise deliver us from the ordinary to a place of revelatory power. Barrie introduced Peter Pan as a cameo character in his novel The Little White Bird in 1902. Two years later, Barrie premiered his beloved stage version focusing on Peter as the now archetypal Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up as he subtitles the play. The original Pan episodes from Little White Bird soon morphed into another book, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), and the play was finally novelized as Peter and Wendy in 1911. Barrie’s playful, fluid, at times obsessive approach serves as one point of confluence with contemporary practice, and Peter Pan, of course, has since taken on a life of its own, finding expression in every form of art and genre of media. But what accounts for its continued relevance and timeless appeal?

An answer might lie in a notable contrast. Richard Linklater’s recent groundbreaking film Boyhood, shot over the span of a dozen years, is the story of a boy we both narratively and literally watch age and mature, witnessing its central figure Mason Evans’ passages through childhood and a host of encounters, both pleasurable and painful, before reaching the cusp of adulthood and embarking on college. Though like Barrie’s hero a dreamer who never allows reality to extinguish his love of life’s adventures, Mason is the anti-Peter Pan. The film’s poignancy lies in the inevitability of the small disillusionments and negotiations with circumstances we see etched in actor Ellar Coltrane’s face as he grows from innocence to experience.

     Advertising posters heralding the range of fancy in Peter Pan’s initial London stage run (1904-13).

“It is simply a matter of light attracting light. The pleasure taken by audiences at Peter Pan has come from the fact that whatever is human and healthful in thought or feeling in them has been touched by Barrie’s humanity.” - producer Charles Frohman (1906).

Peter Pan is the spirited negation of that stubborn world of fact. Barrie releases us from the bonds of convention in an environment where dominant values, gender roles (and given the tradition of cross-casting Peter, gender identity), even gravity no longer apply. Just as daring is the equanimity the titular hero shows in the face of death, which Peter characterizes as he previously had life as “an awfully big adventure.” As Edwardian journalist Oscar Parker observed in reflections on the play in 1906, Barrie’s triumph lay not in recalling “the actual visions of childhood, but the whole mental life of the child, when reality and dreams merge into one another.” Barrie struck a chord with an embodiment of unfettered potential in a period of historical and social upheaval. In The Century Magazine (also 1906), critic Louise Boynton notes how Peter Pan is the glorious rebuttal to the tone of cynicism defining much of the literature of the day. And both social instability and the prevalence of a studied irony in popular culture further closes that apparent distance between Barrie’s time and our own.

Barrie found kindred souls in novelists Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, whose 2005 source novel Peter and the Starcatchers reimagined Barrie’s fantasy for the burgeoning landscape of Young Adult fiction, one of the rare sites of explosive growth amid the changing fortunes of the publishing industry. In the tradition of the narrative-bending Barrie, Starcatchers was followed by several more books, Peter and the Shadow Thieves (2006), Peter and the Secret of Rundoon (2007), Peter and the Sword of Mercy (2009), and The Bridge to Never Land (2011), leading to a trilogy of new works set on Never Land; Escape from the Carnivale (2006), Cave of the Dark Wind (2007), and Blood Tide (2008). Our production’s director Brendon Fox memorably described the progress of Rick Elice’s skillful stage adaptation as “shaking the Etch A Sketch”, and that metaphor is as applicable to Barrie’s career long fascination with Peter, as it is to the wealth of retellings leading to this latest variant. And as to the medium, the wonder, danger, surprise and delight of the subject matter finds a perfect marriage in Elice and Barker’s celebration of theatrical artifice.

Barrie’s 1904 play taking shape, flanked by its subsequent appearance in novel form and current incarnation.

Final thoughts on the reign of Barrie’s creation and the widespread allure of Peter and the Starcatcher can be found by applying these companion pieces to a seminal statement from British stage director Peter Brook, whose 1968 book on theatre, The Empty Space, became a standard text.

“In everyday life, ‘if’ is a fiction, in the theatre ‘if’ is an experiment.

In everyday life, ‘if’ is an evasion, in the theatre ‘if’ is the truth.

When we are persuaded to believe in this truth, then the theatre and life are one.”

In whatever version, Peter Pan has acquired the status of myth, awakening the sleeping child within, allowing us to defy and finally make our peace with loss and aging, and to keep equal faith with the faculty of imagination and the stage as a site of its precious gift of possibility. As Peter and the Starcatcher so lovingly demonstrates, the human instinct for recreation may be more formalized in the theatre, but the ways by which the stage liberates our energies and frees us to partake of its revelations are those selfsame means shared by Barrie and his protagonist, Barry and Pearson, Rick Elice and Wayne Barker, and now PlayMakers and its audiences through this production: as Brook sagely concludes, “a play is play.”

 The infant Peter on his flight path home in Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) and the last illustration from the Barry and Pearson novel.

Peter and the Starcatcher takes flight in the Paul Green Theatre beginning November 18th.

Click here or call our Box Office at 919-962-7529 for tickets.

Seminar: Special Post-Show Conversation Sunday, Oct 25

Join PlayMakers for a post-show discussion with UNC Creative Writing faculty Daniel Wallace and Randall Kenan this Sunday, Oct 25 following the 2pm matinee performance of Seminar.

Sponsored by PlayMakers and UNC’s Creative Writing Program in the Department of English & Comparative Literature, the conversation will feature Daniel Wallace, J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English, and Randall Kenan, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and will be moderated by Gregory Kable, PlayMakers’ dramaturg and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Dramatic Art. Cast members from the play will also join in the discussion.

Daniel Wallace is author of four novels, including Big Fish (1998), Ray in Reverse (2000), The Watermelon King (2003) and Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician (2007). Big Fish was made into a motion picture of the same name by Tim Burton in 2003. Wallace has written one book for children, entitled Elynora. His illustrations have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Italian Vanity Fair, and many other magazines and books, including Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensible Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers by George Singleton and Adventures in Pen Land: One Writer's Journey from Inklings to Ink by Marianne Gingher.

Randall Kenan is the author of a novel, A Visitation of Spirits; two works of non-fiction, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century and The Fire This Time; and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. He edited and wrote the introduction for The Cross of Redemption: The Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the North Carolina Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rome Prize.




All are welcome for this special discussion - join us!

This post-show conversation is free and open to the public and will be held in the Paul Green Theatre beginning at approximately 3:50pm, 5 minutes after the end of the matinee performance of Seminar.

For information and to purchase tickets to the play, call 919-962-7529 or visit www.playmakersrep.org.

Beating the Odds: How Guys and Dolls Conquered Broadway, America, and the World

by Gregory Kable

Part Two: America and the World, or My Time of Day

Frank Loesser rehearsing Marlon Brando and Edward Hopper's poignant Nighthawks (1942).
(www.mtishowspace.comwww.mtishowspace.com) (www.edwardhopper.net)

My time of day is the dark time
A couple of deals before dawn
When the street belongs to the cop

And the janitor with the mop
And the grocery clerks are all gone
When the smell of the rain-washed pavement
Comes up clean and fresh and cold
And the street lamp light fills the gutter with gold
That's my time of day.

How might we account for the incredible staying power of Guys and Dolls? Without question, its combined strengths of original plotlines, deft characters and arresting score are prime factors. But a wealth of other musicals without this show’s devoted audiences or longevity can boast of the same. Instead we can place Guys and Dolls among a handful of musicals which are quintessentially American in spirit and tone and which have become internationally beloved as unique affirmations of foundational principles. Even the briefest roster would include as diverse a collection as Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, Jerry Herman’s Hello, Dolly!, and Ragni, Rado and MacDermot’s Hair. Beyond their spectacular achievements as musical theatre, perhaps an answer lies in the social context for each of these essential classics, and Guys and Dolls can be productively approached from this direction as well.

Standing at the midpoint of the American Century, 1950 afforded a timely opportunity for assessing the nation’s trajectory. America had endured two World Wars and economic calamity, and the tide of modernism had been rising at a steady pace since the 20s with urban displacement of an agrarian society one decisive result of this transition. The life of Damon Runyon himself is one expression of the shifting dynamic.

Alfred Damon Runyan (the surname Runyon the legacy of a newspaper typo) was born, prophetically, in Manhattan, Kansas in 1880. Raised in Pueblo, Colorado, he became a newspaperman by the age of fifteen, covering sports, crime and courtroom beats as a star reporter for William Randolph Hearst’s publishing empire. Once settling in New York, Runyon brought both an outsider’s fascination with and Midwesterner’s critical eye to the epicenter of modern America. Following the Wall Street crash and the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, Runyon found a new income stream in the fiction that would secure his legacy.

The Beggar's Opera (www.music.org)

The Granddaddy of Guys and Dolls and arguably the American Musical, is the 18th century English Ballad Opera, The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay (1728), a rollicking satire on human and social corruption with a gleefully depicted underworld serving as a funhouse mirror of respectable British society.

Gay’s innovation was to reset existing English melodies to new lyrics suitable to his needs. The method surprised and delighted audiences who could come in humming the tunes, undercut the heightened romance, heroic stature, and foreign languages of the dominant grand opera, and overnight established a vogue for vernacular musical entertainments, and the kind of “light” or comic opera that the Victorian team of Gilbert and Sullivan would further immortalize.

Never one to pass on dramatically sound existing material, German playwright Bertolt Brecht returned to Gay’s masterwork in collaboration with composer Kurt Weill for their adaptation entitled The Threepenny Opera. Premiering in 1928, this updated reboot would become one of the most important and influential musicals of the century. Although Brecht and Weill’s piece would fizzle on Broadway in 1933, finding delayed success two decades later in a landmark Off-Broadway production, its appearance in the 20s suggests that the vein of exploiting urbanism, and especially its criminal class for fun and profit was there to be mined.

(www.threepennyopera.org) The Threepenny Opera (www.last.fm)

The pointedness of Gay’s outrageousness and Brecht’s politics may be absent in Frank Loesser, but those predecessors would certainly recognize a kinship with their own experiments and the shrewdness of making such subject matter deeply pleasurable. “The proof of the pudding,” Brecht was fond of repeating, “is in the eating,” and Loesser’s audiences, like those of Gay and Brecht/Weill before him, clearly couldn’t get enough. As much as George M. Cohan, George and Ira Gershwin, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart had earlier in the century, Loesser’s Guys and Dolls would put its indelible stamp on our collective consciousness of what New York City is all about.

Guys and Dolls (www.playbill.com)

Thus, if Loesser and Abe Burrows engaged in the ongoing project of reshaping American mythology (the credited Jo Swerling withdrew from the project at an early stage but was contractually protected to be listed co-author), they built not only on the trifecta of Gay, Brecht, and Runyon, but upon another prominent figure of the interwar and postwar years.

Walter Winchell was ubiquitous in newspapers, radio and television from the 30s to the 50s helping popularize the same kind of punchy style and striking use of American idioms which characterized Runyon’s pieces, as well as (for better or worse) fueling the fixation on American celebrity, a focus which has ballooned to today’s gargantuan proportions. Like Runyon, Winchell retailored New York as the glorious, glamorous, gaudy heart of national culture, providing colorful ballast to the dreariness, predictability, and sacrificial ethos endemic to the Depression and the nation’s slow recovery.

Newsman and personality Walter Winchell offered relief from America's starker realties.
(www.britannica.com) (www.vintage-ads.livejournal.com)

Given both men’s high-profiles and their special delights, the Runyon-Winchell Manhattan became enshrined as the truth of the times. Their New York City was the bold, brash image the metropolis craved for itself, and consequently internalized as authentic memory. And from the opening sequence entitled “Runyonland”, Loesser and his collaborators recognize how full and loving a portrait of modern America was contained within this potent mix of outsized ambitions, sympathy and cynicism, and a promise of wish-fulfillment.

(www.spoonercentral.com) High times and bad times in period New York (www.britannica.com)

It is this heady air that is so blissfully captured in Guys and Dolls, preserving in equal measure the sentiment and snap of the American life. If transplanting pastoral romance to big city environs wasn’t exactly new, it still felt sincere enough to ring true given the historical moment of Guys and Dolls, coming just before the explosion of the suburbs transformed the national psyche once more.

(www.blog.insidetheapple.net)                                                              (www.mysticstamp.com)

Guys and Dolls embodies both the hustle and wistful tenderness of the city, a union speaking to the intersection of an abiding faith in American innocence with our parallel drive for greater experience. Sky Masterson’s hymn to the city dweller’s senses of place and self introducing this essay is a disarmingly intimate turn so characteristic of Loesser’s whole. From start to finish his New York City is personified with as much devotion as any character—two of its defining features, the skyline and subway, literal signifiers of those brass rings of aspiration and mobility, the reach and the freedom that built and continue to inspire America. The zip and rush of the contemporary world offset the habit of trading in nostalgia, but Guys and Dolls still finds ample time for quietly reflective moments as in a painting by Edward Hopper. In this fusion, the piece’s emotional power is unforced, organic and satisfyingly earned.

(www.mercantilemill.com)                                                                             (www.redditgifts.com)

Glitz, gangsters and gamblers rubbing shoulders in Hollywood takes on New York.
(www.moviepostershop.com) (www.gettyimages.com) (www.antiquegamblingchips.com)

What, then, are some of Loesser’s life lessons musicalized in Guys and Dolls? Submitted for your approval is a Lucky 7 of extrapolations:

• If the national character is equal parts passion, optimism and irony, Musical Comedy is one of its most perfect and telling expressions.
• Virtue and vice are inextricably bound in a host of our enduring works, likewise sentiment and satire.
• Similarly, all extremes of morality or sin threaten us with a diminished life. This is nowhere more pronounced than in the turnabouts following the show’s Havana interlude.
• Our history is not one of constant upheaval. A peaceful progress can even be traced between our pastoral past and urban present.
• American success and happiness are just as predicated on luck as on pluck. The Puritan work ethic isn’t everything. Timing and “chemistry” as Sky maintains, are also verities. In that respect, both Plymouth Rock and Las Vegas are key memorials.
• Always take your best shot and err on the side of trust. If not, you might let a sizable windfall or precious chance at love pass you by.
• On the flip side of that last injunction, if a wager seems too good to be true, decline it and happily avoid “an earful of cider”.

Vitality and Variety: Salvationists and Showgirls sharing Guys and Dolls' spotlight.
(www.pinterest.com/thesalarmyctri) (www.takemeback.to)

In these and other respects, Guys and Dolls endures as a musical monument to Whitman-esque ideals, showcasing our nation’s time of day in a one-in-a-million town in which one can’t help but hear and respond to America singing. In any sweepstakes of urban Americana it’s truly better than even money that Guys and Dolls finds a place in the winner’s circle.

(www.newyork-wallpapers.com)                                                  (www.allposters.com)

Guys & Dolls - onstage through July 25th.

Click here or call 919-962-7529 for tickets or more information.