Photo Credit: Sydonia Lucchesi
This month, Cooperative Performance Milwaukee presents Kelly Coffey’s Nightmares & Lullabies: The Darker Side of Peter Pan. The title makes reference to the fact that J.M. Barrie’s creation is generally seen to be something other than dark. The bright, rubbery Disney notion of fairies playing in an imaginary land with the boy who would never grow-up sounds nice. Think about the basic premise of Peter Pan for too long and it scarcely seems innocent at all. That darkness, though scarcely much of a shock or surprise, is an enjoyably sinister place for a theatrical adaptation to inhabit.
Nightmares & Lullabies tells some of the background on the life of J.M. Barrie in a dark fantasy that delves a bit into the author’s biography. The aesthetic of the sparse 45-minute production is firmly grounded in an art gallery atmosphere at Theatre Gigante Studio just south of downtown. There’s some metal scaffolding. There’s some ragged costuming. An overhead projector. It’s all assembled with a degree of ingenuity that feels somewhat pleasantly patchwork.
Matthew Northey plays J.M. Barrie. Not difficult to spot his entry point on the way into space: theres a manual typewriter garnished with syringes on the floor. Northey cuts a toweringly brooding figure as Barrie who is plagued by death and visions of lost children in a barren box of a fantasy world. They dance in synchronicity and tell tales of Peter Pan by the light of the overhead. They occasionally explode in noise and commotion from behind the shrouded scaffolding.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
It’s a very rough-around-the edges feel of a hazy dream. Some aspects are remarkably vivid. Others feel like rehearsal. I don’t think this is any accident. It’s a really tight 45-minutes and everything seems to come together quite well even when it’s not being particularly compelling. There are a lot of details here and some of them are fabulous. Once again in a crowd of others, my favorite additions come from Sarah Ann Mellstrom. Here she’s playing an otherwowrldly Fairy Creature who can be seen hanging out around the edges of the production. On at least one occasion, she confronts Barry in an aggressive taunting that bleeds out into other languages. Her speech sounds like a mishmash of English, German and Russian. She wears a lizard-like unitard and contact lenses that make the eyes completely black. She moves around with animalistic precision. It adds a great deal to the atmosphere of a patchwork piece that almost seems to be prodding and poking at the substance of reality itself in some places. Nightmares & Lullabies explores some of the nightmares that scratched around inside J.M. Barrie’s head and swims through a few of its own as well.
Cooperative Performance Milwaukee’s Nightmares & Lullabies runs through April 25 at Theatre Gigante Studio space on 706 S. 5th Street. For more information, visit cooperformke.com.
