Already, they had weathered so much, the players of the Garage-in-the-Alley Theatre, who in less than an hour would be taking to the garage and letting loose the lines of “Peter Pan” that they had learned while licking popsicles, practiced in the bathtub and rehearsed for days and days on end.
Collectively, over the last many weeks, they had given up 4th of July parades, karate lessons, play dates, Vacation Bible Camp, more play dates, and, darn it, what would have been unbroken hours of PlayStation 2.
But on this late Friday afternoon in Wilmette, as the sun was slanting harshly upon their hot and sweaty little selves, discombobulation seemed seconds away.
Claire Nelson, 14, the captain of this madcap ship, was doing everything she could to keep the crew from going overboard.
It wasn’t easy: Allie Frei, 8, playing Mrs. Darling, had the hiccups. Her sister, Celia, 7, dressed as Nana the nursery dog, was florid, with downspouts of perspiration dribbling from her forehead. Chad Nelson, 7, a.k.a. The Crock, claimed to be dehydrated, which is not a good thing for a papier-mache reptile about to tick-tock around a stage, not even a crock who refused to put down his Star Wars magazine.
Claire Thomason, 7, dressed in a flannel nightgown for her role as one of the Darling children, wandered in tight circles, whispering, “I am so freaked,” to anyone who would listen.
And then there was Tinker Bell No. 1 (seeing as wings, glitter and no spoken lines made for one coveted role, two Tinks took turns), 4-year-old Kate Thomason, whose golden flecks of hair glitter had gone drab.
And Wendy, better known as Avery Smith, 7 1/2, was having asthma issues, short of breath and clutching tight her inhaler.
Months in the making
Ah, but Claire Nelson was not about to be undone by a little backstage drama. Not the Claire Nelson who had dreamed up this whole thing months before. Who had leapt from bed one Saturday back in February and pored over the Internet searching for “Peter Pan” scripts or songbooks. Who had collected empty toilet paper rolls for weeks to build her pirate swords and crocodile head. Who convinced a 4th-grade boy that wearing green tights and a dyed-green undershirt that hung to his knees was totally a cool thing to do. Who had been waking up at 3:30 in the morning all week fretting over anything from how to paint the swords to what to do about the kids who still didn’t know their lines.
No, she had a play to put on and 50 plastic chairs in the alley that were filling swiftly with parents and grandparents and neighbors and friends and even her idol, Angela Tillges from Redmoon Theatre, who had been a teaching artist at Wilmette Junior High School, where Nelson had just finished 8th grade.
“Who has not had a hairspray check?” Nelson bellowed, wiggling her trigger finger to get out the cramps after all that spraying.
“Everybody has to go to the bathroom at least once before show time,” she told her assembled players. When Captain Hook shouted back that he didn’t have to go, she left nothing to chance. “So, if in the middle of the play, you have to go, you can hold it, right?”
Then, as she took last-minute questions from her troupe, one little hand shot up. It was a 3-year-old pirate who wondered: “Do you have to know your lines?”
Ah, such are the trials of the back-yard-summer-theater maven.
And such is the beauty of Nelson’s big, bold idea, an idea that seems stolen from the pages of an earlier time: a gaggle of kids from one block tackling together what had once seemed impossible, proving to themselves that they needed little help from grown-ups to make magic in what had been an overstuffed garage but by show time had been transformed into a theater complete with home-sewn curtains strung on rods, a keyboard borrowed from school, clamp lights from the carpenter who lives down the alley, and a bevy of cardboard boxes that carried the cast from the Darlings’ London nursery to Captain Hook’s Skull Rock.
Mom’s critical role
Alas, there was one grown-up who got roped into the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. That would be Claire Nelson’s mother, Melissa.
“It’s making me crazy. The cleanup is incredible,” she whispered one Sunday afternoon as two pairs of tights, her husband Pete’s undershirt and two pairs of ballet slippers were swimming in the vat of Rit Dark Green No. 35 dye that had been her spaghetti pot. “Is it taking over my life? Oh my goodness.
“Like last night. My parents are coming. I’m trying to get her to clean her room. She’s making scales for the crocodile costume. It had to be done last night.”
To be Claire Nelson’s mother might exact a price. But not to be her neighbor.
While there was a lemonade stand one hot afternoon that raised $9 and change for the production, this rare summertime diversion cost the rest of the parents nothing but the effort of shuffling little ones back and forth down Maple Avenue for rehearsals every Saturday and Sunday afternoon from mid-May until the last week of June when daily rehearsals commenced.
No one had to sign up or send in registration forms, an ad hoc-ness that is almost unheard-of in the modern world of children’s summer scheduling.
And except for Cole Ricketts, 7, who reluctantly played shadow to his 9-year-old brother Quinn’s Peter Pan, and the recalcitrant Crock who made his big sister promise he would not have to utter a single line, the 17 other players were decidedly gung-ho.
None more so than Claire Nelson, who once dreamed of being the U.S. ambassador to France, but now thinks maybe Broadway is where she’s bound.
A natural-born teacher in the tradition of her kindergarten-marm mother, she taught her troupe how to bow: way low, nearly touching nose to toes, asking aloud, “Did I tie my shoes today?” She explained the word “collaborate”: “When you take all your ideas to make a big thing.” She defined “dialogue”: “That’s what people say.”
But she taught them far, far more than all that.
And anyone who watched even a scene of the action got it loud and clear, and with a lump in the throat.
A tearful face in the crowd
When the curtain finally fell, 39 minutes after the 6 o’clock start (any later would be past Tinker Bell 1’s bedtime), there sat, amid all the parents with their zoom lenses on super-zoom, 75-year-old Bob Lundin, who didn’t have a child or grandchild in the show but who wiped at the tears running down his cheeks.
“I can’t stop crying,” he finally said. “You know, I think everybody here sort of relived a little bit of their childhood, which, of course, is the point of Peter Pan. The adjectives are easy: sweet, adorable. But most of all it was genuine kid stuff, the way kids are supposed to be.
“In 35 years,” he said of his tenure in the big gray house at the east end of the alley, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Claire Nelson didn’t hear that. She was on the other side of the garage, wiping glitter from Tinker Bell 1’s cheeks. And trying to figure out how next summer, when she dives in all over again, she’ll get Pippi Longstocking’s braids to boing out from her ears. Already, she tells you sotto voce, she has plowed through the cornflake-spattered copy of “Pippi” she keeps on the shelf right next to her bed.
Please, don’t whisper a word to her mother. She might put in for a transfer, to a house where a garage is simply a garage.
