For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday
Opening Night: September 13, 2017
Closing: October 1, 2017
Theater: Playwrights Horizons
Playing Peter Pan at her hometown children’s theater is one of Ann’s fondest, most formative memories. Now, 50 years later, Neverland calls again, casting her and her siblings back to this faraway dreamscape where the refusal to grow up confronts the inevitability of growing old. In her highly anticipated return to Playwrights, Sarah Ruhl conjures a tender, yearning tale that flies in the face of time, in the search for a second youth.
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September 13, 2017
Ghosts, pets and arguments without outcomes: These are reliable telltales of the work of Sarah Ruhl, whose new play, “For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday,” includes a long, digressive scene featuring all of them.
In it, five Irish Catholic siblings, now of Lipitor-popping age, sit bickering aimlessly around the kitchen table of their childhood home in Davenport, Iowa. They have reconvened, for the first time in what seems like forever, on the occasion of the death of their father, George. And George, too, is there, if only they could see him, along with their long-dead dog.
It’s a perfect example of what Ms. Ruhl, in her marvelous book “100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write,” calls the “Ovidian form”: Magic is everywhere, stories don’t have arcs and nobody learns a lesson. The theater, she argues, should be more akin to poetry and pageantry than (as she sometimes despairs) legalistic argumentation.
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