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    For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday (TCG Edition)
    For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday (TCG Edition)
    For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday (TCG Edition)
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday (TCG Edition)

    By Sarah Ruhl

    4.5/5

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    • Theater

    • Family

    • Literature

    • Time

    • Love

    • Family Drama

    • Coming of Age

    • Time Travel

    • Ghosts

    • Childhood Memories

    • Flying

    • Neverland

    • Eternal Child

    • Power of Friendship

    • Family Secrets

    • Memory

    • Peter Pan

    • Aging

    • Growing up

    • Death

    About this ebook

    After their father dies, five siblings find themselves around the kitchen table of their childhood, pouring whiskey and sharing memories. The eldest, Ann, reminisces about her days playing Peter Pan at the local children’s theater, and soon the five are transported back to Neverland. For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday is a fantastical exploration of the enduring bonds of family, the resistance to “growing up,” and the inevitability of growing old.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTheatre Communications Group
    Release dateJun 5, 2018
    ISBN9781559368797
    For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday (TCG Edition)
    Author

    Sarah Ruhl

    Sarah Ruhl's plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize); Passion Play, a cycle (PEN American Award); Dead Man's Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award); and Stage Kiss and Dear Elizabeth. She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, the Whiting Writers' Award, the PEN Center Award for a midcareer playwright, the Feminist Press's Forty Under Forty Award, and the 2010 Lilly Award. She is currently on the faculty at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.

    Read more from Sarah Ruhl

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    Book preview

    For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday (TCG Edition) - Sarah Ruhl

    OTHER BOOKS BY SARAH RUHL AVAILABLE FROM TCG

    Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Woolf’s Orlando

    (Two Renderings for the Stage)

    The Clean House and Other Plays

    ALSO INCLUDES:

    Eurydice

    Late: a cowboy song

    Melancholy Play

    Dead Man’s Cell Phone

    In the Next Room or the vibrator play

    Passion Play

    Stage Kiss

    For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday is copyright © 2018 by Sarah Ruhl

    For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday is published by

    Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor,

    New York, NY 10018-4156

    All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

    Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights, including but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this book by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the author’s representative: Mark Subias, United Talent Agency, 888 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10106, (212) 659-2600.

    The publication of For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday by Sarah Ruhl, through TCG’s Book Program, is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

    TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.

    ISBN 978-1-55936-879-7 (ebook)

    A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

    Book design and composition by Lisa Govan

    Cover design by Monet Cogbill

    Cover photo of the author’s mother in Peter Pan, Davenport, Iowa.

    Courtesy of Kathleen Kehoe Ruhl.

    First Edition, May 2018

    For Kathleen Kehoe Ruhl. Happy belated birthday.

    With thanks to J. M. Barrie.

    With love and great gratitude to the Kehoes.

    CONTENTS

    Foreword

    By John Lahr

    Preface

    By the Author

    FOR PETER PAN ON HER 70TH BIRTHDAY

    Production History

    Characters

    Set

    Time

    Notes

    Prologue

    Movement One

    Movement Two

    Movement Three

    Epilogue

    Relics and Acknowledgments

    About the Author

    FOREWORD

    Before Sarah Ruhl could write she told stories to her attentive mother, Kathleen, who typed them up. (In those days, in the late seventies, Kathleen, who now has a PhD in Language, Literacy and Rhetoric, was a high-school English teacher, moonlighting as an actress and theater director.) Vivid is one adjective that Ruhl uses to describe her. Kathleen was known to serve up dinner while delivering the maid’s speech from The Bald Soprano and to organize Pig Night: she inculcated good table manners in her two daughters by allowing them to be horrible at dinner once a week. We were encouraged to play at home, so that art-making didn’t seem like an escape from family or a retreat but very much a part of life, Ruhl recalled. Ruhl’s play For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday is a droll, elegiac homage to her actress-mother’s spirited playfulness and to the loving Midwestern family from which she emerged. (In 2017, Kathleen appeared in the Shattered Globe Theatre production of the work in Chicago.) It is also a testament to the slyness of Ruhl’s civility and her stagecraft.

    Ruhl calls For Peter Pan a Midwestern Noh drama. The play borrows the three-part Noh structure and also contends with ancestors—in the shape of George, the dying father of the five children we meet at his hospital bedside, whose spirit follows the disputatious clan from death watch to wake. Ruhl’s story is also underpinned by Noh drama’s psychological strategy. The protagonist meets the ghost, then recognizes the ghost, then dances with or embraces the ghost, Ruhl writes, a clue to the paradoxical game of loss and reparation she is playing. For Peter Pan elegantly navigates its audience through the multiple space-time realities of consciousness: past, present, and time-out-of-time—the mythic realm of play. At once a mourning and a celebration, a ghost story and a love story, a meditation on death and an assertion of the triumph of imagination over time, the play invokes a kind of double haunting, in which Ruhl haunts her

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