Aisle View: Baby Boomer Walks the Plank

Richard Nelson makes it look easy.

Take a family of three or five middle-aged, unfulfilled siblings from the Eisenhower years; bring them together to care for an aging relative; sit them around a kitchen table; and over the course of ninety minutes let them unpeel and unravel like so many Vidalia onions, informing the audience of the characters’ frustrations and their own (i.e. the audience’s) mortality in the process.

Nelson, over the last years, gathered all those Apples and Gabriels together and alchemized them into no less than seven plays, each of them sterling. Sarah Ruhl—of In the Next Room, The Oldest Boy and How to Transcend a Happy Marriage—has tried something of the sort with For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday. But it is not, it turns out, quite so simple (nor a fraction as compelling) as when Nelson does it.

Ruhl’s title, at least, is provocative. J. M. Barrie’s “boy who wouldn’t grow up”—while a product of the Edwardian era—is wholly ingrained in the American Boomer conscience. This, courtesy of the 1954 Broadway musical version starring Mary Martin, a cultural landmark thanks to the 1955 telecast—one of the first spectaculars broadcast nationwide in brand-new color—which reached a record-breaking audience of 65 million.

The playwright’s mother played Peter Pan in a children’s theatre production at the Masonic Temple Auditorium in Davenport, Iowa, in 1955; Mary Martin, on tour, stopped by to take a publicity photo; and the children’s theatre Peter apparently never quite got over it. Thus, this family drama is literally dedicated to Kathleen Kehoe Ruhl (AKA, Peter Pan) on her 70th birthday.

The siblings are mostly doctors, although Ann (Kathleen Chalfant) is an intellectual with a PhD in Rhetoric—which, from the first, makes her stand out from the rest. Attending the comatose father (Ron Crawford) are John (Daniel Jenkins), the eldest son; Jim (David Chandler), a know-it-all; Michael (actor/playwright Keith Reddin), the youngest son; and Wendy (Lisa Emery), the baby of the family approaching sixty.

When you come across a play with siblings named Wendy, Michael and John—well, be prepared for whimsy. And Blimey slimey Captain James Cook, too. Even the dog, plus good ol’ Tinker Bell. There are also, alas, ghosts roaming the premises. Playgoers with a keen eye will note several sets of weights hanging above the stage, suggesting that by the final curtain everybody’ll be flying to Neverland or at least trying to.

The siblings talk in the hospital room, until the father dies. (There is some humor in the fact that while waiting for a doctor or nurse to show up, the doctor sons try to outdo each other.) After the father dies, they move to the family kitchen and talk some more; but while they go through the motions of comparative memory and all those years of sibling slights, Ruhl doesn’t quite develop her characters. Other than Ann; I suppose that when you are writing about your mother and your uncles recounting their youth, you are likely to have keener insight into your mother.

The whole thing is, indeed, very much like one of the Apple Family Plays—only without rich layering and the empathy. Let it be noted that there was at least one line of dialogue so pert that I dutifully wrote it down in the dark. The seventy-year-old Peter, trying to fly, says her foot hurts; when her doctor brother offers to look at it, she responds: “It’s not the diabetes, it’s the gout.”

Chalfant has, over the course of her career (Angels in America, Wit and more), given us some remarkable performances. She is very good here; she seems to storm determinedly through the action despite any weaknesses, like—well, like Peter Pan. Everyone does a good job, under the direction of frequent Ruhl collaborator Les Waters. But the playwright has not written the play she so earnestly seems to have wished to.

Sarah Ruhl’s For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday opened September 13, 2017 and continues until October 1 at Playwrights Horizons