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

Description

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.

Sarah Ruhl has written numerous award-winning plays, including The Clean House (Susan Smith Blackburn Award, 2004, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Pen Award), Melancholy Play, Eurydice, Late: a cowboy song, Orlando, Demeter in the City (NAACP Image Award nomination) and Passion Play: a cycle in three parts (Fourth Forum Freedom Award, Kennedy Center). Her plays have been performed at Lincoln Center Theater, Second Stage Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Wilma Theater, Cornerstone Theater, Madison Repertory Theatre, Clubbed Thumb and the Piven Theatre Workshop, among other theatres across the country. Her plays have been translated into German, Polish, Korean, Russian and Spanish, and have been produced internationally in London, Canada, Germany, Latvia and Poland. Sarah received her MFA from Brown University and is originally from Chicago. She is the recipient of a Helen Merrill award, Whiting Writers' Award and a Macarthur Fellowship. She is a proud member of New Dramatists and 13P.

I don't know any playwright who trusts her audience as much as Sarah Ruhl does, and for me, the rewards of that trust are enormous. The off-kilter structure and the drifting and the deliberately meandering feel of the writing led to a kind of transcendent emotional power--you're thrown off balance by the style of storytelling, and then hit with a solid punch. Absolutely virtuoso playwriting.-- "Jason Robert Brown" It's hard to imagine another play that deals so beautifully and delicately with growing up, growing old, dying, being dead, God, where does your consciousness go when you die, should we be terrified, are politics the heart of the matter or merely a sport, gender inequity, childhood, parental approval or the lack thereof, jockeying for position among siblings, religious belief, loss of religious belief, yearning for ritual even after the loss of belief, how fiction can seem more resonant and meaningful to us than fact. I was transported...but strangely felt as if I was transported deeply into my own consciousness. I only wish my mother was still alive and could have seen it!-- "Cynthia Nixon" Ruhl's imagination is among the most adventurous at play today in the theater.-- "Charles Isherwood" Sarah Ruhl imbues the fantastical with such a singular logic that is only hers but becomes yours during the course of the evening. She gives a map to a kind of preternatural joy; only when the curtain comes down do you remember that we cannot fly, time travel, or conjure our departed loved ones. I wept at the end of this play, not only from its glorious and impossibly inventive resolution, but from having to depart another hilarious and divinely perverse world that Sarah created with her elegance and bottomless humanity.-- "Mary Louise Parker" Having For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday to transport me back to my childhood now that 'no one is standing sentry between (me) and death' is a gift for which I lack adequate words to thank the playwright who wrote it for me.-- "Kathleen Kehoe Ruhl [the playwright's mother]"