Playing Peter Pan at her hometown children’s theater is one of Ann’s fondest, most formative memories. Now, 50 years later, Neverland calls again, casting her and her siblings back to this faraway dreamscape where the refusal to grow up confronts the inevitability of growing old. In her highly anticipated return to Playwrights, Sarah Ruhl conjures a tender, yearning tale that flies in the face of time, in the search for a second youth.

Take a new play by two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and Tony Award nominee Sarah Ruhl, add a cast of seasoned New York actors including the great Kathleen Chalfant, let innovative theater director and Obie Award winner Les Waters mix it all up, and you have a triple whammy of terrific theater at Playwrights Horizons in their 2017-2018 season opener, For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday.  According to Ms. Ruhl, who used her own family experiences in the creation of this play, writing from a place of love was of utmost importance influencing her to choose the three part dramatic structure of Japanese Noh drama (with modifications) rather than a play that pivots around a secret being revealed — what she calls contemporary Midwestern Noh drama. For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday is set in Davenport, Iowa in the 1990s.  Ms. Ruhl’s mother actually played Peter Pan as a teenager in Davenport and Ms. Ruhl bookends the play with sweet recollections of that event with Ms. Chalfant as Ann, a composite stand-in for Ms. Ruhl’s mother.  In the first main scene, five aging siblings camp out in a hospital room as they grapple with their elderly father’s death and ultimately their own mortality.  Ms …Read more