MY FATHER’S DRAGON
Just hearing the title of My Father’s Dragon was enough to send my three-year-old niece whimpering out to the lobby. In her first excursion to the theater, she was imagining “bad” dragons, monsters that she might be able to face in a book or on television but not in person. Unfortunately, she and her mother missed a thoroughly silly and kid-friendly play based on Ruth Stiles Gannett’s Newbery-winning book. Recommended for children age four to ten, this Lifeline Theatre KidSeries production has nothing more scary than bubble gum-chewing tigers, cleaning-obsessed moms, and a tongue-tied mouse. James Sie’s adaptation uses simple but incredibly effective story telling and audience-participation techniques, and the kids in the audience seemed to like getting in on the act almost as much as I enjoyed watching them.
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In Gannett’s popular children’s story, Ernie Elevator is the narrator who describes his father’s boyhood adventures to Wild Island. In the stage version, he’s the energetic storyteller who involves the watching children in the action. Though all the characters and animals are played by adult actors, Ernie (James Grote) comes close to being the children’s peer. As the play opens, he walks up the aisles and shares his drawing pad with the kids. Then he pulls their attention down to his stage bedroom and into his imagination, where they meet Ernie’s father, Elmer, when he was still a boy.
In keeping with the tone of the production, Rebecca Shouse’s costumes, Rebecca Hamlin’s props, and Alan Donahue’s set are more inventive than elaborate. Wearing neat monochromatic pants and shirts, the actors simply don different animal heads (and tails), cat’s-eye glasses, sailor hats, and baseball caps to change their personas. Shouse goes a little wilder with the crocodiles–one actor wearing a snout and tail who paddles a skateboard and rolls along two prop crocodiles on skateboards. She saves her wildest creation for last. A Muppet-like hand puppet initially, the dragon in the end becomes a full-size figure equipped with long gossamer wings to fly Elmer home. Most of the furniture and props do triple duty as parts of Ernie/Elmer’s room, a ship, and a jungle. Watching the actors turn a swivel chair into a rocking ship and window shades into tree foliage is like watching kids at play.
Three of Muller’s four tales lack originality and spark. The first, involving a forbidden romance between a wealthy girl and a peasant, is so hackneyed and mushy it will bore young and old viewers alike. The second, about a dead man who comes back to dance on his grave, and the third, about an arrogant young beauty who leaves her family because they are sickly, should have been humorously gruesome and thick with doom. The kids in the audience will probably be reading Poe in school soon, but here they get only a watered-down version of the real thing.
