A year after J.M. Barrie wrote the immortal “Peter Pan,” the play about a boy who wouldn’t grow up, he wrote “Alice Sit-By-The-Fire,” a sort of Peter Pan for grownups, about a mother who didn’t want to grow up. Considered Barrie’s “lost comedy,” it is not often performed — and sometimes not even included amongst lists of Barrie’s works.
Now, a pluperfect ensemble, under the brilliant direction of Joe Olivieri, has brought this somewhat silly old chestnut to sparkling life at Venice’s Pacific Resident Theatre. This wonderful production is just about as good as theater gets.
Veteran actor Orson Bean, as The Playwright, introduces each act (and there are three of them, just like plays used to have) and sets the scene. Debonair in his silk smoking jacket, Bean talks to the audience while physically opening the curtains to a jarringly ugly, but stereotypical Victorian living room (courtesy of Scenic Designer Stephanie Kerley-Schwartz).
It’s London, 1912. Here we meet the twittering teenager Amy Grey (delightfully played by Betty Wigell) and her friend Ginevra (Tania Getty), anxiously awaiting the arrival of Amy’s parents, who are returning to England after a five-year military stint in India. Amy, her younger brother Cosmo (Miles Marsico), and a baby girl born in India and sent home after just a few months (and represented by offstage cries and gurgles), have been left in the care of the household staff. The children are understandably apprehensive about meeting their parents after living without them for such a long time.
Enter the parents: The kind but starchy Colonel Robert Grey (Bruce French) and a frivolous, flirtatious, uninhibited Alice Grey, played with whimsical charm by Alley Mills.
The children immediately warm to the conventional colonel, but are put off by the overwhelmingly effusive Alice. Shortly thereafter, the parents are visited by an old friend from India, a man named Stephen Rollo (Neil McGowan). The girls, eavesdropping on the visitor, misinterpret his conversation with Alice and jump to the conclusion that she has set up a romantic rendezvous for later that evening. Amy and Ginevra, stoked from having seen five theatrical melodramas that very week, concoct a farcical plot to “save” Alice from an assignation that can only result in scandal and shame.
As the plot thickens, Alice, who is amused by her daughter’s efforts, goes along with the farce in order to win their affection. She solicits Amy’s advice — and follows it, allowing the girl to believe that she is protecting her mother.
In the end, of course, everything comes aright, but getting there is all the fun, thanks to this superb group of players — and a truly dazzling series of period costumes designed by Rudy Dillon. Thus what might otherwise be considered an inconsequential and totally fluffy production becomes a tour-de-force for Alley Mills and Betty Wigell. And for Kristina Harrison, as Stephen Rollo’s “man” Richardson, who quietly steals the show in her one hilarious scene with Rollo and a lamb chop.
Despite its unfortunate name — “Alice Sit-By-The- Fire” refers to Alice’s pledge to give up her frivolous ways and become a traditional mother, which you won’t believe for one minute — this funny, campy play was meant to be a send-up of the kinds of melodramas that graced the English stage in the 19th century. I don’t know how it was received in the 20th century, but this production, at least, is a sure-fire hit in the 21st.
“Alice Sit-By-The-Fire” will continue at the Pacific Resident Theatre, 705 Venice Blvd. (four blocks west of Lincoln Boulevard) in Venice, Thursdays through Sundays through Feb. 10. Call (310) 822-8392 for reservations.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 4, 2008. Read the original PDF.