How Peter Pan Changed My Life
One show-stopping moment set me in motion
When I was 16, I decided I wanted to be an actor and work in theatre because it’s what I enjoyed. It was sort of that simple.
Of course, I had considered several fields, but only because I was an honors student with good grades, and I was expected to consider things like engineering or law. But no, I had settled on being on stage. I had found my college major.
I remember clearly the day I revealed this decision to my mother across the kitchen table, telling her how I had watched her, and others, go to jobs that they didn’t enjoy. I said, “If I’m going to put that much time and energy into a job, I want it to be something I like doing.”
Seriously. I said that. As if being a theatre actor could be my only job. Or even that I’d get to do it full-time, year-round. How simple of me. Thankfully, she never discouraged the choice.
Unlike many college students, I never changed my major, or my mind about the choice. I have continued to do theatre, as an actor, director, and even a writer, so these days I know the realities of working as a theatre artist. But that naive and wide-eyed wonder was what started it all.
Looking back, I can pinpoint my discovery and love for live performance in what I now see as an unlikely adventure, and were it not for a technical error I might be a financial broker instead.
Several years before that fateful life choice, when I was in middle school, I went on a school trip to see the Broadway touring production of Peter Pan starring Sandy Duncan, which had come to Chicago. It was there in the balcony of the Arie Crown Theater that my life changed.
This was a colorful, happy musical and we were enjoying it as much as a bunch of kids would. For the most part, I knew the story and I even knew that Sandy Duncan was a big famous person. She had played Peter Pan on Broadway and had been nominated for a Tony Award for it, and she had been on television for years. So I understood this was something special. But when the moment came for Peter to fly for the first time things went wrong.
The music intro began just fine, the kids asked all the right questions — “Can you really fly?” — and Peter Pan raised his arms and said, “You just think lovely, wonderful thoughts, and up you’ll go!”
And he didn’t move.
Then the wire jerked, and he sort of lifted and stopped and landed again, and he began singing, and the wire jerked again, and lifted and dropped, and finally, up he went a small way, but I’ll never forget what happened next.
Sandy Duncan stopped the show.
She stopped singing, dropped character, started waving her arms about, shouting “Stop! Stop! Let’s go back! Stop!”, directing the crew to put her back down and the orchestra to stop playing. As they lowered her down and the instruments dropped out, one by one, I became enthralled, because it was all so real.
“The fourth wall” — that imaginary barrier at the edge of the stage, that separates the actors and their world from the people in the audience — had been broken and I didn’t even know what a fourth wall was!
To be clear, it’s not like I thought Sandy Duncan could actually fly. I knew there was a kind of wire and harness involved, but I hadn’t thought about how any of it worked. I had been too wrapped up in the story to watch for any of that.
Once back on the stage floor, she looked out to the audience and said to us, “You paid good money to see this, you might as well see it the right way!”
I was stunned. This wasn’t Peter Pan on script, this wasn’t planned. It was Sandy Duncan talking to us. This was all happening unrehearsed and real.
Everyone got back to their starting spots. She looked around, addressing the cast, crew, and musicians down in the pit, asking “Everybody ready?” Then pointing at the youngest boy, shouted “Hit it, John!”
He piped up with his line, “Can you really fly?!”
And this time with “…up you go!” Peter Pan flew high in the air, and despite our having seen behind the scenes of it all, the magic of theatre filled that huge auditorium and we erupted into applause!
It was the only thing that went wrong in that performance. All other flying was smooth and magical — even if I understood a little bit more about how it all works. At the curtain call when Sandy Duncan came out for her bow, instead of coming downstage center, she flew way out over the audience, circling the whole space! It was exhilarating to my newly inspired soul.
I had already dabbled a bit in performing myself, but that experience made me fall in love with the craft of storytelling, the beauty in pretending, and particularly in the immediacy of a live performance. You’d think it would make me want to be a stage technician or something, but no — it was that connection, person-to-person that felt so powerful. I wanted to be an actor.
As I did with most movies I saw as a kid, when I got home, I described every moment of the play in great detail to my mother, following her around the house, talking and talking and it probably took as long as the actual experience. (Also, it was likely very annoying, but what did I know?)
This time, though, I focused mostly on that most remarkable moment of the show — the part that wasn’t supposed to be, the part that was a one-time-only, unique, experience that happened just to those of us in that space on that particular day.
The immediacy and intimacy of the experience was dazzling. I was hooked. In the coming years, I’d be on stage often and feel that same energy and connections with an audience, and I’ve never stopped feeling the same kind of thrill.
That moment is still vivid in my mind, and forty-some years later I still tell the story, still attribute it to why I love and work in theatre (although, perhaps ironically, never musicals), and yes…I still have my “signed” program.
