Off-Broadway Review—Sarah Ruhl’s “For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday”

For Peter Pan on her 70^th birthday

Written by Sarah Ruhl; directed by Les Waters

Performances through October 1, 2017

Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY

phnyc.org

Kathleen Chalfant (center, arms upraised) in For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday (photo: Joan Marcus)

Sarah Ruhl’s plays are an ungainly hybrid of whimsy, tragedy, absurdism and sheer absurdity—and her latest to arrive in New York, with the equally ungainly title of For Peter Pan on her 70^th birthday, is no exception. (The haphazard capitalization is Ruhl’s own.) Its protagonist is Ann—which rhymes with Pan, of course—a former grade-school player of Peter, who introduces herself, is seen at her father’s agonizing deathbed with her four siblings, then at the booze-fueled wake with their father’s ghost wandering in and out of the proceedings with the family dog, and finally in a fantasy sequence donning the green outfit and flying harness one last time as her brothers and sister enact roles from J.M. Barrie’s beloved saga, like Captain Hook, Wendy and the Lost Boys.

The idea of an elderly woman stepping into Pan’s shoes to replay her childhood certainly has promise, but Ruhl bludgeons it to a premature death with countless side trips into forced whimsy and heavyhanded dialogue, right from Ann’s opening monologue in front of the curtain, and continuing with the deathbed scene, where it’s not the physical and emotional turmoil of waiting for someone to die that’s excruciating but the paucity of the writing and meaningless conversations. The wake, too, suffers similarly: would a group of middle-aged Midwesterners from Iowa boisterously start singing “O Canada” simultaneously? The other song interludes—including one of the brothers picking up a trumpet to play not “Taps” but “The Saints Go Marching In”—are additional desperate padding.

For 90 intermissionless minutes, Ruhl’s play meanders both obviously and pointlessly. Unsurprisingly, she has explained that she wrote it for her mother, which is fine as far as it goes, but For Peter mines territory similar to her other work, as willful weirdness and irrational characters and their relationships pile up onstage in order to stretch out a play whose ideas barely pass muster for a 10-minute curtain-raiser.

What’s disheartening is that Les Waters directs persuasively, David Zinn’s sets are beguiling, Matt Frey’s lighting is often dazzling, and Kristopher Castle’s costumes are amusing. Fully on board is the entire cast, led by Kathleen Chalfant, who plays Ann with her usual resourcefulness and intelligence. But nothing can disguise that For Peter Pan—even more than her previous play seen in New York, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage—is all dressed up with no place to fly.