‘A corset for your crotch’: What it’s like to fly like Peter Pan
If you want to know how it feels to fly like Peter Pan, imagine a corset for your crotch. Preparing myself to soar above San Francisco Playhouse’s stage, I was quite sure my harness was already snug. The straps and buckles cinching my quads and abdomen had no more give. But sure enough, just as “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” flight director Lewie Long predicted, once I was 12 inches in the air on a quick trial lift before my voyage through Wendy, John and Michael’s window, all my weight tried to pool down in my feet. “Our bodies are 70% water,” Long pointed out. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Higher up on my frame, inches of slack materialized. I tightened the fasteners once more. More Information “Peter Pan Goes Wrong”: Written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields. Directed by Susi Damilano. Performances begin Saturday, Sept. 26. Through Nov. 28. $52-$145. San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., S.F. 415-677-9596. www.sfplayhouse.org Landing again, my body trying to return to equilibrium, I had a feeling akin to muffin-topping — only instead of a waistband, picture a lattice of harness straps like a colander with very large holes, and your flesh trying to squeeze through every which way, like Play-Doh. I wound up being in the air — greeting the ghosts I imagined wafting on the backside of the theater’s proscenium, tap dancing on the window frame of Cody Tellis Rutledge’s set design — for just a few moments. Even so, afterward, a marble of stiffness bubbled up inside my leg, right on the inseam where a strap was. I tried to shake or knead it out. Advertisement Article continues below this ad That day, actor Ezra Reaves, whose character Jonathan plays Peter Pan in the show’s pratfall-ridden play-within-a-play, was in the harness for much longer. After rehearsal, they told me, “My life is going to the show … then coming back and recuperating.” Their task is infinitely more complex than mine was. In the farce, which begins performances Saturday, Sept. 26, they have to be completely safe while looking plausibly unsafe. They must make only the mistakes that are written into Henry Lewis, Henry Shields and Jonathan Sayer’s script, and not others. They also must be graceful in their lack of grace, appealing in their blundering, so as to never puncture the cartoon reality of the play and alarm audiences. “No one is enjoying a show when they think someone is unsafe,” said Bridgette Loriaux, the show’s flight consultant, who has 15 years of experience flying onstage. In this play, the comedy doesn’t come from actual lack of safety. Rather, it’s funny because “the person up there is just not supposed to be in this role,” she explained. Lots of characters are very, very bad at their jobs. But it takes a lot of skill to look that entertainingly bad. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Long, who works for theatrical flying company Vertigo, gets the vast majority of his business from straight productions of “Peter Pan,” “Mary Poppins” “The Wizard of Oz” and pageants at houses of worship. (“We get very busy during Christmas,” he noted.) But with “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” he said, “I do have to rewire my brain completely.” Most of the time, he’s trying to hide cables and harnesses and make flying look beautiful and magical. On this show, by contrast, he finds himself saying things like, “It’s funnier if you grab that cable and look scared,” or, “It’s funnier if you smack that wall and make a big noise.” Flying is only one layer of the shenanigans that fight director Dani O’Dea has to choreograph. For instance, she said, “I’ve never choreographed a person who’s in a wheelchair on a seesaw pirate ship — who gets rocketed off of the seesaw pirate ship. They don’t teach you that at fight school.” When I was in the air on a much less ambitious jaunt, Loriaux was hyperfocused on every wall, rail or other potential obstacle, guiding me to angle my body to avoid collisions. Fly crew members Anthony Aranda and Quinn Barringer were bearing my weight, which made me appreciate how, as Long explained, stage flight technology hasn’t changed much since the days of Mary Martin, save for new pulleys that can make the lifting feel 20 pounds lighter. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Before the big liftoff, Long used a favorite technique to tell whether it was OK to hoist me. “Watch their face,” he said. “Their voice will lie to you. Their face will not. If you lift them and they make that strange face, you can go, ‘OK, I’m going to set you down. Fix what you need fix.’” I passed the face test, evidently, but moved with all the grace of a sack of onions once airborne. When Reaves was playing Peter Pan, they angled their body to look sprung with magic. Stage magic can make a theater critic fly. But it might take actual magic before she looks good, or even entertainingly bad, doing it.