Festival Preview: Peter and the Starcatcher

TROUPE 8269’S PRODUCTION

Jemicy is the first Maryland school to appear on the International Thespian Festival main stage in 20 years. Sean Elias, the school’s troupe director and chair of the Upper School Performing Arts Department, chose the show because it embraces both community and theatricality. “As a school for students with language-based learning differences, we seek to offer new and exciting ways for students to experience our written cultural legacy,” Elias said. “This season, we’re producing works adapted from some of the most beloved fairy tales in history. This allows our students to experience these literary classics in the way they were intended — experientially and with wild imagination. Peter and the Starcatcher offers the unique opportunity for my students to bring their brilliant imaginations, idiosyncratic personalities, and childlike abandon to the work in a celebration of their artistic creativity and accomplishments.”

With its design, Peter and the Starcatcher harkens back to a time before sets were based in realism and controlled by computer automation. Told in the style of story theatre, the show’s minimal props are created by repurposing everyday objects, and special effects are limited to what the actors can reasonably make themselves. While the novel includes flying, a fantastic shipwreck, and an enchanted island, the play’s staging asks audiences to use their imaginations to create those worlds, employing stagecraft that would have been familiar to theatregoers of Barrie’s day.

“The show embraces the traditions in which theatre was founded, such as traveling troupes, puppetry, magic, and improvisation, as well as the elements of the stage that make theatre exciting to young, modern audiences — music, intelligent lighting, and dynamic sets and props,” Elias said. “While this production is an homage to the past, it is just as much a promise for the future.”

Thespian senior Chloë Wendler, who says her personality is similar to that of spunky, strong-willed Molly Aster, found the show to be an exciting challenge for the cast. “Not only were we characters in the show, but we also were props, and we made the setting for each scene. You had to be very specific about your acting and your movement,” she said. “In other productions, that’s less dependent on the people and more dependent on the scenery, but we were the scenery.”

Ethan Lifson-Book, a Thespian sophomore who portrays Peter, tapped into the show’s sense of wonder and wishing. “The thing that truly resonates with me is that, when we’re younger, we always think we’ll get what we want and that everything will work out in the end,” he said. “Though the show has a happy ending, it wasn’t what I felt like my character truly wanted. That hit hard, because it shows that you don’t always get what you want but it’s not always as bad as it seems. When you wish for something, it may be what you want, but in the end, Peter receives what he needs.”

At just four years old, Jemicy School’s theatre program has grown quickly. Like Wendler, Andrew Spriggs, the junior Thespian playing Black Stache, was part of the first show produced at Jemicy, and he takes pride in the troupe’s accomplishments since then. “Everyone here has some sort of tick in which they learn differently from others,” Spriggs said. “We have a wide range of learning disabilities here. We prefer to call them differences, because we don’t believe it’s a disability at all. The kids here all have emotional and academic support not a lot of schools provide, and I think what’s special about theatre at Jemicy. It really is a learning and teaching experience.

“We learn how to speak publicly, and some of us can’t even read,” he continued. “To be able to get up onstage in front of 4,000 people, and for me particularly because I have severe dyslexia, to be able to recite lines in a correct order and for people to understand them, that’s a huge feat itself. For all of us to do it as one, to rely on one another not to mess up, and to carry one another despite our differences, it really is incredible.”