The Musical Where It All Began

One of the Lost Boys is restored to his mother in a cross-cultural retelling of Peter Pan

This week, I’m sharing with you the intro to a presentation I’m making this Saturday on building the Beloved Community through staged stories. The occasion is a conference of creatives in Utah, where I’m hoping to gather more people who love musical theatre and want to maximize its power for lifting and uniting us. I spent all day yesterday driving, so I’m hitting two birds with one stone, by devoting this week’s newsletter to the story of the musical that inspired Summit Stages.

What kind of crank would complain about Peter Pan’s troubling messaging, and hesitate about her kids being involved in staging it with their homeschool community? 

That was me. But before you decide I’m crazy, please listen to my reasons.  I was a recovering codependent, trying to teach my children about healthy relationships while we were traversing the desert of my second marriage. It wasn’t easy. And I had good reasons to think the Peter Pan story wasn’t going to be helpful. You see, my first husband liked to say that he was a Peter Pan (a boy who refused to grow up) and it was my fault because I was a Wendy. He was right about the Wendy part. I was a bit of a martyr who’d thought it was my job to help him be the man I saw in him. But when I started attending a 12-step program to address my codependency, he morphed from a Peter Pan into a Captain Hook, and I had to flee with our little ones. 

Now, I was married to a Mr. Darling, and things were tough. On top of that, my youngest child kept telling me that he never wanted to grow up. Which is a fine attitude for a 6-year-old, but I didn’t want him to internalize Peter’s deep reluctance about growing up. And the thing about putting on a musical is that you do wind up internalizing the messages of the lines and songs that you spend months learning and then performing.

Fortunately, the homeschool moms decided to licence a script that came with permission to adapt it however we wanted to for our needs, including that we were allowed to add music. So I went to work writing a bunch of songs that portrayed Wendy coming to recognize that she needed to stop mothering Peter and the Lost Boys and start taking accountability for her own stuff. And, in the end, it portrayed Peter realizing that growing up was an adventure and he was ready for it. 

Our production went over really well. It created belonging among the homeschooling families. And the message was welcome. But there were some other, problematic messages we included. My song introducing the Indigenous Americans was right in line with J. M. Barrie’s original material in terms of demeaning stereotypes. And I was so clued out that I actually chuckled about how “politically incorrect” it was. 

That was before I got involved in a bridge building effort to heal the deep and longstanding divide in Southern Alberta between the Blackfoot people of the Blood Tribe and the descendants of Mormon pioneers. That effort, led by a local lady named Sharon Unger, opened my eyes to the reality that demeaning stereotypes really do cause harm. 

Fortunately, I’d learned that lesson by the time that the homeschool district approached me about restaging that Peter Pan adaptation with almost 50 kids from three communities. This time, my daughter and I decided to make the whole thing ours. She wrote the script and I added some additional songs, including an introduction to the Indigenous people that I honestly thought was culturally sensitive. The lyrics were:

“We’re the people of the forest and we sing the river’s song

And if you really saw us, there’s a chance we’d get along

But all you see are savages who hunt you dusk til dawn.

So we’ll continue fighting ‘til the last of us is gone.”

I ran the script by an associate from the Blood Tribe, and he gave me a few suggestions, some of which I took right away and others of which I resisted. I kind of thought he was being too picky when he balked at the line “we’re the people of the forest” seeing that Blackfoot Territory is pretty devoid of forests. Was I saying that Indigenous people only belonged in the forest? Would I consider calling them “people of the land” instead? I thought it was obvious that the phrase applied to Neverland, not Blackfoot territory in Canada. But when I told a white friend that I was considering changing the wording to “people of the land,” she said “but if they’re people of the land, what about us?” Her reaction caused me to realize that there were undertones to those words that I hadn’t recognized. 

This production was an incredible community-building experience for the homeschoolers of three different towns. Kids who hadn’t been willing to eat lunch with each other were now close friends. Parents said it was the most valuable thing they did all year. The owner of the theatre we rented called me to say this production and its message should go to every school. And then there was what happened with my son, the one who’d said he didn’t want to grow up. He was now 11 years old, and cursed with such an overactive imagination that he was incapable of falling asleep in the dark. But now, when I was telling him goodnight, he asked me to turn off his light. I was so surprised I asked him why, and he broke into Peter’s final chorus: “I want to learn. I want to grow. I want to be the best I can. I want to be a man, someday.” 

As I watched the impact of our production on the individuals and the homeschool community, the thirst to apply this magic to the ethnic divide grew. Meanwhile, tensions deepened. In February 2017, one of Cardston’s theatres put on a new, commercially available,production of  Peter Pan that was so offensive to our neighbors that it spawned protests and threats and got our tiny town on national news. Other incidents followed and tensions reached the point that there was a summer-long protest peace camp on the edge of the reserve. My daughter and I dropped by and talked with an activist there who told us they didn’t want patronizing treatment from the townspeople, or token representation on committees. They wanted meaningful engagement. I said the best way I knew how to do meaningful engagement was musical theatre, and she gave me the name and number of Ramona Big Head, a Blackfoot educator and playwright who’d taken a cast to the Lincoln Center to perform an original play. She was also the principal of the high school on the reserve. 

It turned out she was interested in collaborating, until I told her our play was an adaptation of Peter Pan, renamed Neverland: Wendy's Story. In light of the fiasco the previous year, she didn’t want to touch that one… until we talked about the parallels between colonialism and Wendy’s efforts to turn the Lost Boys into fine English gentlemen. Then she was intrigued, agreed to collaborate, and brought dozens of Indigenous artists, actors, dancers and musicians on board. 

This was not the first time that theatre people from Cardston had tried to involve people from the Blood Tribe Reserve in a theatrical production. But, past efforts had been mostly about asking them to help us tell our stories from our perspective, and the interest hadn’t been there. As a result of those past failures, a number of people warned me that this partnership was going to fail. Our Indigenous collaborators were not going to show up to rehearsal.

What the skeptics didn’t understand was that this time, it was a true collaboration with a deeply committed leader on the Indigenous side who had a driving passion for theatre because she’d seen its power in the lives of her students. This time, we were creating a shared story, that changed the original in meaningful ways. And oh, the things I learned in the process. 

There was, for instance, the time when Big Head gave me feedback on my lyrics, introducing the Indigenous people. “Savages?” she asked, eyebrows raised. I stammered that this was a statement on how the others in Neverland misperceived them. “I’m really tired of that word,” she said. Then there was that final line about “fighting ‘til the last of us is gone.” She talked to me about the “disappearing Indian trope” that comes across as a wish for Indigenous people to disappear, whether by assimilation or death. Yikes! The song needed a massive rewrite. The final version we developed together was:

We are of the sacred circle and we’re rising with the dawn. 

We dance across the seasons and we sing the river’s song. 

Our men are fearsome warriors. Do not treat our people wrong. 

But harmony is medicine and that’s what makes us strong. 

There were more obstacles to the production happening than I can name here. The fact that it actually happened will always be miraculous to me. And it was fully supported, not only by the town but also the reserve. Two peoples who didn’t generally mix filled our theatre night after night. Among the cast and crew, we made genuine friendships that endure to this day. The project has made a lasting change on our community and paved the way for further collaboration and friendship. 

That was the beginning of the Summit Stages dream. It was proof to my heart and others that musical theatre can bridge deep and contentious divides, if we approach it intentionally. That collaboration works magic in bringing people together. And that staging stories with powerful messages can literally change people’s lives for good. Those principles are what drive our mission today. Thank you for being part of this movement. 

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