Theater review: Connecticut Rep’s nonverbal take on ‘Peter Pan’ is cool, laid-back and magical

Connecticut Repertory Theatre has a precious gem of a fairy tale flitting about its intimate Studio Theatre space for just a few more performances.

“Darling OR A Guided Adventure in Dismantling the Patriarchy,” a rare student-written production to make it into its regular season, runs through Feb. 15. It is an original multidisciplinary work created by Harley Brooke Walker, a student in UConn’s world-class puppet theater program, and directed by professional puppeteer Kate Brehm, who teaches puppetry at Harvard University.

J.M. Barrie’s immortal story of Peter Pan, a flying symbol of resistance to the seemingly inevitable process of “growing up,” has taken many forms. The Scottish writer J.M. Barrie wrote it as a play in 1904 and a book in 1911. Both were massive hits. In America in the 1950s, “Peter Pan” inspired two popular musicals — one on Broadway and the other animated by Walt Disney. The Broadway one (with music by Jule Styne) got a major multicultural rethinking by playwright Larissa Fasthorse for a tour that played The Bushnell last year. There have been countless other variations, including songs by Leonard Bernstein, an opera by Richard Ayres and the cult vampire movie “The Lost Boys.” Jim Steinman and Meatloaf’s rock epic “Bat Out of Hell” also began as a modern take on Barrie’s Neverland escapades.

The previous “Peter Pan” adaptation that “Darling” most closely resembles at first glance is “Peter & Wendy,” the spellbinding piece by the New York experimental theater company Mabou Mines that debuted in 1996 and had several revivals as well as a multi-week run at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1998.

Both “Peter & Wendy” and “Darling” have puppets interacting with human performers. Both feature live music. In the case of “Darling,” it’s a classical trio of keyboard, flute and alto sax. Both open on musty quiet rooms full of upholstered Edwardian era furniture. That’s a lot to have in common, besides the world famous source material, but the two shows go off in sharply different directions. Where “Peter & Wendy” is grounded in storytelling and  centered around a verbose narrator, “Darling” has no words at all. There are a few inarticulate screams and sobs but no dialogue, no lyrics, no spoken intro, no utterances at all. It is as much a mime show as a puppet performance. It also features a great deal of physical movement, some of which falls just short of tightly choreographed dance.

One of the many impressive aspects of “Darling” is how much it trusts its audiences to follow along. For starters, it expects you to know the “Peter Pan” story and refuses to spoon-feed it to you. The key points are all here: Peter loses shadow, Peter meets Wendy, Peter introduces Wendy to Tinkerbell, Peter and Wendy fly to Neverland and fight Captain Hook. Yet the story is given an amorphous dreamlike quality that allows the audience to recognize, reconsider and reinterpret these episodes.

The piece’s subtitle is for real. It openly questions gender values, gender representation and social stereotypes in full of sexist tropes that are too often presenting without challenge. Peter, you may recall from Barrie’s original, refuses to grow up, but Wendy is expected to immediately become the mother figure to a whole tribe of Lost Boys. “Darling” looks askance at Barrie’s more bewildering social constructs but keeps the sense of wonder and adventure intact.

The cast of “Darling” consists of three puppeteers (Allison “Alfi” Fee, Alice “Rosie” Grunzke and Amy Liou, whose striped outfits match the bedroom set’s wallpaper but decidedly do not stay in the background of the performance), two live actors (Halli Gibson as a formidable, independent, leather-jacketed Wendy and Jiahui Guo as a dapper Peter in a tweed jacket and fedora) and two performers whom we only see as shadows behind a translucent backdrop (Ian Rothauser as Darling, the shadow self of Wendy and Mariangelie Vélez Ramírez). These distinct groups of performers enhance each other’s work. As silhouettes in fancy old fashions, the shadow players mimic the movements of the human Wendy and Peter. The humans in turn acknowledge and highlight the shadow. The puppeteers, who are often front and center, set the pace for the entire show and create some of the most arresting visual effects, centering their work around the voyages and adventures of two main actors. No single actor plays Captain Hook or Tinkerbell. They are relatively minor characters in this Wendy-centric vision of the Pan saga.

The tone is realistic. The tempo is leisurely. The humor is gentle. There’s no grandstanding, no frantic clowning. The acting is controlled, cool. Even the audience participation is laid back. Most theater productions of “Peter Pan” are known for milking applause from the audience. The conceit here is that there are two boxes that help determine where the story leads. The audience, through polite applause, are led to create the adventure.

Cody Tellis Rutledge’s scenic design does some neat things: A chest of drawers becomes a staircase, there’s no lack of places for the performers to perch or hide behind and the whole design suits Walker’s sense of a story being told from different angles and perspectives. Rutledge is also the lighting designer for a show that takes light and shadows very seriously.

“Darling” is a lively, involved piece of theater but can also be appreciated as a fluid, kinetic work of visual art or as a series of images meant to encourage reflection and challenge perceptions. The lack of spoken words gives it a calming, quietly intense quality. You also may get the sense that you’re watching a puzzle solve itself as Walker and her colleagues take apart age-old stereotypes and social patterns shoved into place by Barrie. Ultimately, this repatterned “Peter Pan” isn’t so much about growing up as it is about asserting oneself, questioning entrenched societal values and learning to fly on one’s own terms.

“Darling, OR A Guided Adventure in Dismantling the Patriarchy,” created by Harley Brooke Walker and directed by Kate Brehm runs through Feb. 15 at Connecticut Repertory Theatre’s Studio Theatre, 802 Bolton Rd. Unit 1127 on the University of Connecticut campus in Storrs. Remaining performances are Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. $25-$35, $20-$30 seniors, $12 students and children. connecticutrep.uconn.edu.

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