>>PREVIEW
PETER PAN
Opens November 25
Alberta Theatre Projects
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
"There’s those intrinsic wants you have from when you’re a kid. You have flying dreams. Even as an adult to see someone fly is pretty incredible."
Braden Griffiths is certainly in touch with his inner-child, or at least belatedly realizing superhero fantasies. As the titular character in Alberta Theatre Projects’ production of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, the recent University of Calgary graduate has already found himself strapped into a harness, his entire body weight supported on three points of contact, bruised but flying.
"Once you build up the calluses, holy cow, you get to fly every day for the month. Sometimes twice a day," says Griffiths, adding with a laugh that can only come from the experience of harness bruises, "which is awesome."
"It’s a seminal life event," he declares.
But while Griffiths is flying above the Martha Cohen stage, its in-the-thrust staging literally placing him over the heads of the audience, director Bob White is trying to keep his production on the ground. Though he’s careful not to frame his company’s holiday offering as some sort of Freudian psychodrama – a boy looking for a mother, a girl looking for a boyfriend – ATP’s artistic director points out that there’s more to be found in Canadian playwright Jeffrey Pitcher’s adaptation than green tights and wooden swords.
"When you go back to the original script and Pitcher’s adaptation, you realize there’s a lot more dimension to this play than people running around in Neverland and fighting with pirates," he says. "You don’t want to turn this into a heavy psychological drama, because it isn’t (one). But the basic story is of the boy who wouldn’t grow up and the girl who is growing up, and the relationship between them is quite adult and serious when you focus in on it."
White’s own Neverland memories begin with NBC’s 1955 live broadcast of the Broadway version, featuring a 42-year-old Mary Martin.
"An ancient musical theatre star, flying," he says ruefully.
"There was no character there," he explains. "Not even a sex. Here you’re dealing with a real guy and a real girl. And one of the advantages of having young adult actors is adding that element of the attraction between them that is innocent and real."
But, in a play whose climactic battle scene melds aerial choreographer Sven Johansson’s aerobatics with Adrian Young’s fight choreography, pitting a swooping Peter Pan against Captain Hook (Trevor Leigh), "real" is a relative term. Staged with a minimalism that White hopes will allow ATP’s audiences to impose their own vision of Neverland on the stage – much like last year’s abstracted pirate ship in Treasure Island – there is a striking parallel between the importance of imagination in Barrie’s world and the suspension of disbelief that makes theatre possible.
"We go into the theatre and see wood and paint, and believe it’s a castle in Denmark. The actor who you saw in Safeway yesterday is coming out and doing ‘To be or not to be,’" says White. "Belief is what this play is about. If you believe in fairies, if you believe that boys can fly, if you believe that Neverland exists, then it does."
Just as central to the play’s imagination, however, is the underlying inevitability of growing up.
"(Peter Pan) has to sustain this world or he won’t exist," says White. "And the turning point happens when Wendy decides to return to the world. His whole illusion is like a soufflé – it deflates."
Illusions notwithstanding – a flying actor caught in permanent adolescence flitting around a fictional world – audiences looking for escapism can certainly see the return of pirates to ATP’s stage. Though White admits a certain reticence in bringing another pirate offering a season after Treasure Island, he concedes: "My colleague says you can never have enough pirates. There is this endless fascination. We’ll ride that crest as long as it’s happening." |
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