Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    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

    ()

    Read preview

    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 is a playwright, essayist, and poet. Her fifteen plays include In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play), The Clean House, and Eurydice. She has been a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Tony Award nominee, and the recipient of the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. Her plays have been produced on- and off-Broadway, around the country, internationally, and have been translated into many languages. Her book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write was a New York Times Notable Book. Her other books include Letters from Max, with Max Ritvo, and 44 Poems for You. She has received the Steinberg Playwright Award, the Samuel French Award, the Feminist Press Under 40 Award, the National Theater Conference Person of the Year Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a Whiting Award, a Lily Award, and a PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for mid-career playwrights. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tony Charuvastra, who is a child psychiatrist, and their three children. You can read more about her work at SarahRuhlPlaywright.com.

    Read more from Sarah Ruhl

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

    Related ebooks

    Performing Arts For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Cathedrals Made of Bricks

      Nov 25, 2019

      Cathedrals Made of Bricks
      6 min read

    • Article

      My 21st-century Touchstone Play: Theatre Stars Share The Shows That Shook Them To The Core

      Feb 19, 2021

      Here at the Evening Standard, we recently tried to pull together the 21st-century’s greatest plays (read our list and see if you agree). But what about those plays that impact us more personally, that seem to speak to us directly and leave us getting

      7 min read

    • Article

      Qui Nguyen Finds a Home in Orange County

      Apr 2, 2019

      As a playwright, I’m a little bit ADD artistically,” says Qui Nguyen. “I get bored really quickly. I put things in there that are kind of wild, just to keep myself entertained.” Nguyen’s breakthrough play, Vietgone, illustrates exactly what he’s talk

      5 min read

    • Article

      Critic's Notebook: Star Turns That Serve The Broadway Play — Elaine May, Daniel Radcliffe And Janet McTeer Show How It's Done

      Nov 26, 2018

      NEW YORK - When it comes to playwriting, Broadway has a supply problem. Although the new generation of American dramatists is blazingly talented, the great majority of these writers prefer the creative flexibility of more intimate stages. New dramas

      6 min read

    • Article

      Pain And Love In The Backyard

      Feb 25, 2020

      In Will Arbery’s new play, five conservative Catholics in Wyoming gather late at night by a fire pit to argue, commiserate, and face the uncertain future of their faith and their country. Danya Taymor, who directed the play’s premiere at New York Cit

      8 min read

    • Article

      Mfa Or The Highway?

      Dec 25, 2019

      FOR YEARS, I IDENTIFIED AS A PLAY ‑ wright who wanted an MFA. I had seen those coveted three letters in almost every playwright’s bio, often attached to an illustrious university—an Ivy, or maybe a West Coast equivalent. I spent three autumns writing

      12 min read

    • Article

      “Where Did You Laugh?”

      Dec 14, 2019

      “Where Did You Laugh?”
      4 min read

    • Article

      Onstage March 19

      Feb 25, 2019

      Onstage March 19
      26 min read

    • Article

      Suzan-Lori Parks

      Apr 15, 2019

      The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright on adapting classics, the black avant-garde and how much of the world is a stage

      2 min read

    • Article

      Sam Shepard’s Dynamic Women

      Aug 11, 2017

      Sam Shepard’s Dynamic Women
      4 min read

    • Article

      An ‘Inheritance’ Deferred

      Oct 25, 2019

      An ‘Inheritance’ Deferred
      8 min read

    Related categories

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

    4.5/5

    6 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Great story! You can broaden your audience by publishing your story on Novel Star Mobile App

    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

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1