(Photo by Bill Brymer) Kathleen Chalfant at ZFX Flying Effects. Tyler Franklin) Lisa Emery and Kathleen Chalfant prepare to fly at ZFX Flying Effects. Tyler Franklin) Kathleen Chalfant flies above the cast and creative team of “For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday.” (Photo by J. “It was really just this artistic process, this collaborative art form that I so dearly love, of saying, ‘Well, what about this idea?’ or ‘What if we change this moment a little bit?’ It doesn’t matter where those ideas come from, whether it was me or Les or Sarah.” Sarah Ruhl and Les Waters at ZFX Flying Effects. “The biggest challenge was coming up with a way to tell the story so that the flying effects supported the rest of the script and didn’t just become this thing we did,” explained Owens. While Owens has worked on massive productions, including the Arabic version of “American Idol,” For Peter Pan allowed him to work on a much smaller scale. “Seeing those moments then allowed us to make the general decision that the crew can be seen manipulating and setting scenery and props whenever necessary during the metatheatre parts of the play,” said scenic designer Annie Smart.īrian Owens, senior flying director and lead trainer at ZFX, worked with the creative team to determine where and how the flying effects would work. So the decision was made to allow the mechanics of flying to be seen, along with other elements of the stagecraft. He told Ruhl, “Oh, we’re flying them.”īecause the script in the fantasy section calls for the characters to fly rather suddenly, the actors couldn’t be taken offstage to clip into their flying lines. But director and longtime collaborator Les Waters-whose first order of business when he took over as ATL’s artistic director in 2012 was to commission a new play from her-had other ideas. “I had always thought the flying would be a metaphor and we wouldn’t actually be able to afford flying one character, much less five, around the stage,” Ruhl admitted. (Cirque du Soleil, for one, gets all their black steel cables from ZFX, whose technicians developed a coloring process that makes wires invisible onstage.) Louisville happens to be the home of ZFX Flying Effects, a company that handles everything from building equipment and harnesses to aerial choreography for productions around the world. To make the final part work, some technology would be necessary-you can’t do Peter Pan with everybody’s feet on the ground. Ruhl tells the story in three “movements” without an intermission: First is the vigil at the hospital then the informal, whiskey-fueled wake around the kitchen table and finally a fantasy sequence in which the siblings jump into the world of Peter Pan-or rather, a children’s play version of Peter Pan, but with their creaky knees and bad eyesight. Ann is the oldest of five, with three brothers and a younger sister, all of whom are dealing in different ways with the impending loss of their father. The play opens with a 70-year-old Ann (Kathleen Chalfant), a sort of stand-in for Ruhl’s real-life mother, directly addressing the audience about the joy of performing the role as a child. “So it was part of my association with my mother, and also part of my association with what theatre was.” “When I was growing up, whenever I visited her family house in Iowa, there were these pictures of her as Peter Pan, in green tights, flying,” Ruhl recalled. These questions are at the heart of Sarah Ruhl’s For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday, which takes the tale of the boy who never grew up for a new spin while telling a story about something we all have in common: death.įor Peter Pan, which ran March 8-April 10 as part of Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, was inspired by Ruhl’s mother, Kathleen, who played the character onstage as a teenager, and who is seen on the poster for the play looking perky in her green costume. When is a person truly a grown-up? Is it when they get a real job, when they have a child of their own, when their parents die? Is “never” really an option? Carolyn Leigh, from the 1954 musical Peter Pan I’ll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up…”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |