An Endpapers Conversation: Rick Elice: Written in the Starstuff

By profession, I search and share with you the different ways in which stories are told. When I took the past few weeks off from writing my Everyday Tips blog, I began thinking about different interpretations of the stories we seek. I was pondering the ones that may feel fresh, yet are somehow rooted in oral history, publishing, theatre, television, cinema and trends.  

One of the stories that immediately came to my mind was the Broadway play Peter and the Starcatcher. I set out to see how a popular children's novel series (and Peter Pan prequel), Peter and the Starcatchers, was adapted into a play that is primarily geared for an adult audience.  

I had no idea that this journey would find me talking with playwright Rick Elice, himself. It was the chance of a lifetime and a rare privilege. How the celebrated, creative powerhouse behind Jersey Boys and The Addams Family could spend the time speaking with a local blogger shows you the amazingly generous person Mr. Elice is.

This story of Peter is also the story of how Elice takes us on a tour of the imagination, touching on the traditions of J.M. Barrie and Charles Dickens with bits of Shakespeare and Louisa May Alcott.  

I am happy to share our recent phone conversation with you.  

Fran Cassano: In the play, you bridged Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson's novel to who Peter Pan was going to become and who Hook was going to become. What inspired you to adapt this children's novel into a play that speaks largely to adults?  

Rick Elice: Well, it was really the opportunity that Roger (Rees) and Alex Timbers, the two directors gave me, because the project really began with them. Disney took the novel to them five years ago and said, "what do you think?", specifically to Roger because of his background with the Royal Shakespeare Company and (their production of Charles Dickens') The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby. They needed to develop a play that didn't cost them anything except the time of the Company. They needed to be really creative with very, very little. They took a very rangy, picaresque, unwieldy novel and they adapted it to the stage, very famously, but very lengthily. Here was a 500 page novel, Peter and the Starcatchers, that Disney said, "why don't you try something like that?" (but at two hours long).  

As they needed things for actors to say, they decided early on they wanted to have adult actors playing all these roles, even the roles of children. They needed someone to give them text for the actors to speak, and so, they came to me because I was friends with both of them (Rees and Timbers). What I did was ask two questions of Roger and Alex and of Dave and Ridley. The novel is written for a young reader, but I don't know how to write children's theater, so could I, while not disenfranchising young people, write the play with an adult sensibility for an adult audience? And they said yes. That worked handily with the idea of having adult actors playing all the parts anyway. My second question was could I be free to change events and characters, even some of the story, in order to manage the wide ranging plot of the novel and to provide practical staging opportunities for the directors? And they agreed to that too. Dave and Ridley just happened to be very generous and wildly enthusiastic supporters of this theatrical enterprise, which made me and makes me very, very lucky.  

Rick Elice continues with how he began to adapt the story...  

With Roger and Alex, we established our organizing principles of inclusion and exclusion~what we would not use from the novel and what we would. Act I would take place on two ships, cramped quarters, tiny cabins, claustrophobic, dark, wet, sinister. Act II would take place on an island with bright sky and big, open spaces. And in the style of Nicholas Nickleby, the actors would play everyone and everything~be the sailors, the pirates, the orphans, the natives, the fish, the mermaids, the birds. They would even play doors and passageways, masks, storms, jungles. They would narrate the action of the story and they would have memory of the story as a narrator, giving them each a privileged relationship with the audience. And I think that that is a great device, a long-standing centuries-old, or maybe millennia-old, theatrical device in order to telescope events and in order to consolidate narrative. Characters can speak a direct address to the audience. They narrate what their characters are doing or feeling with the audience or narrate what other characters are thinking and feeling. We use all of those tricks.  

I saw my assignment as being to take what Dave and Ridley did, which was essentially a "bedtime story run amok" and find some way to use the contemporary, irreverent tone of their novel with the style employed by J. M. Barrie 100 year earlier in the original Peter Pan. Barrie used high comedy and low, alliteration, puns, physical gags, songs, anachronisms, contemporary references. Then he'd deliver sentiment. My challenge was to write the play so it would merge and connect the dots between the, now mythic, characters that J.M. Barrie created with Dave and Ridley's reboot. And that was great fun for me. I also wanted to use all these stylistic techniques to create a play that would also connect the plot of original...to where over the course of many (Dave and Ridley) novels got to, and to where we get to by the end of our play.  

I reveled in the freedom that Dave and Ridley gave me, to rethink some of the mythology, and that was the joy for me (how Captain Hook lost is hand; the alligator's ticking; where Wendy's brother's top hat comes from; the different use of buzzwords from the original~thimble, shadow; the relationship between Wendy and Peter in the original is foreshadowed here with Peter and Molly; and the origin of Tinker Bell). The fun of fracturing this fairy tale. It was fun to deconstruct and reassemble it in a way that seems very appropriate for 2012. And the fact that J.M. Barrie also did that in 1904, which, I felt gave me the license to employ all of those things again.

Fran Cassano: It's fantastic. And I love the fact that it's such a fresh adaptation but it's a throwback to Barrie and also Nicholas Nickelby. So, things that have always been there, things that were popular in the mainstream, that have not been visited lately, are being revisited in the production today.   

Rick Elice: Well, that's exactly right. You know there is nothing that's seen by the audience, nothing that appears to be done on stage in Peter and the Starcatcher that hadn't been seen 500 years ago when Shakespeare was writing. And that to me, is where my passion is. It is in theatrical traditions and theatrical literature. What the theater can do that no one else can do is that they can't give you an entirely live event, performed entirely by living people in front of you, where you still don't want to believe your eyes at what you are seeing and can actually be happening.  

You know, we have a moment in Peter and the Starcatcher where a boy actually flies as Peter Pan. And that's never happened before. There is no wire, no harness. Yes, it only lasts for a moment. But we see a human body in flight. You don't do that loosely or frivolously. The only way is that you know other people are going to catch you. In that beautiful moment, we see a boy who flies because he's a boy who trusts. That moment overlaps exactly what I wanted to write as a playwright and what Roger and Alex wanted to present as a production: a sense of company, a corporate sense of protection, literally having someone's back, where everyone is looking out for the least strong member of the group and they save him in order for the story to continue, and to, therefore, make a larger human statement. And that, in a nutshell, is what our play is about.  

Fran Cassano: It really is an awesome experience. The whole creative team has given the audience the ability to delve into their own imagination. To see the different items on stage and how the people have actually become the set itself. You are actually there. You are seeing it unfold before you and you are involved.   

Rick Elice: It's great. Instead of just being passive spectators, the audience get to actively be involved. Everybody knows now what "interactive" is, but theater has always been interactive. And theater is thousands and thousands of years old. It's not a new idea. It's just a new word. But the ultimate interactivity is what you just described, where we, sitting in the audience, work along with the cast to see what it is that they want us to see and more importantly, to see our version of it. My image in my head, using my imagination, which is different from what's in your head, which is different from the person sitting next to you. And that's great! Now, I can see my island, my Peter and Molly, my ship, and you can see yours. And I think that makes it a much more vivid experience for the people who are willing to play along. Plays are transporting events for whomever the audience happens to be.  

Mr. Elice shares how he changed the title to Peter and the Starcatcher, singular.  

Rick Elice: I asked Dave and Ridley if I could make a slight change to their title, Peter and the Starcatchers. Because we were making an adult play. We were looking at other types of titles and Disney said no, because we have this novel and we don't want people to not make the association. So, I asked, could I drop the S from "Starcatchers"? Naturally, they asked why. It's about how this boy and this girl find their destiny, but only because of the impossibly difficult thing that they accomplish together. At the start the title could be "A Boy and Molly". By the end, they become "Peter and the Starcatcher".  So, dropping the S is a small change with a very big difference. The Starcatchers in the novel are a group of people. But in our story, the Starcatcher really is the girl who becomes the Starcatcher at the end because of the friendship that evolves between her and the boy who becomes Peter. And I think that is really significant. It tells the audience really before they even see it, exactly what they play is about.  

I very much wanted to write a strong female character in the tradition of Jo March, Scout Finch, Anne of Green Gables. The super curious, hyper-articulate, very bright, often lonely, isolated, young female characters, who inspired women of my age and I've known all my life. And I wanted to be a man who could write like that. Because all of the roles I just mentioned are wonderfully written by women for female readers.  I wanted to take a crack at that as a guy, to see if I could pull it off.  

Fran Cassano: And you achieve it. I love her. And those were heroines of mine growing up as well. I hope that, as time goes on, she will become that for future generations.  

Rick Elice: Aww. That would be a great triumph for our play.
   
Peter and the Starcatcher is playing at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. For tickets and more information, visit peterandthestarcatcher.com.  

A very special thank you to playwright Rick Elice.