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Sunday, February 19, 2012

Signature Theatre plans evening in memory of education director Marcia Gardner

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Signature Theatre plans evening in memory of education director Marcia Gardner

Text SizePrintE-mailReprints By Jessica Goldstein,

Signature Theatre will honor its longtime education director, Marcia Gardner, who died Jan. 20 after battling cancer. In a celebration of her life and work, Signature will feature songs, scenes from plays in which she acted and a performance by students in this year’s Signature in the Schools program. The event, Feb. 13 at at 7:30 p.m., is free and open to the public.

Gardner began at Signature as an actor in “Mill Fire” in 1990 and later served as the literary manager, casting director and dramaturge.

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( Joshua Morgan / No Rules Theatre Company ) - John Evans Reese and Megan Graves, as Peter Pan and Wendy Darling, rehearsing for “Peter Pan: The Boy Who Hated Mothers,” presented by the No Rules Theatre Company.

( Brianne Boland / Signature Theatre ) - Marcia Gardner, who died Jan. 20, was education director at Signature Theatre. She started there as an actor in 1990.

“I’ve known her 23 years,” said Eric Schaeffer, the theater’s artistic director, who first worked with Gardner during the run of “Mill Fire.” She volunteered to spearhead a program for new plays, he said, “and the rest is history.”

“She had endless energy,” he added, recalling how the Signature staff gave Gardner an iPad when she was in the hospital — she had been sick since June — so she could stay involved with the theater. As recently as two weeks ago, Schaeffer said, she had a running list of questions for him about Signature’s upcoming productions. “She was on top of it. She never stopped.”

Gardner was a devoted colleague and a passionate supporter of D.C. playwrights. “The hardest thing in theater is people all want to talk,” Schaeffer said. “She was a really great listener.”

She was 66, although perhaps she wouldn’t have been thrilled at the thought of her age being printed in the newspaper. “She never wanted anyone to know her age,” Schaeffer said. “The insurance company called [HR] once to check her birthday, because they had three birth dates for her.”

Her work as Signature’s education director “touched over 10,000 kids and introduced them to the theater,” he said. “It’s really life-changing.”

Gardner will be remembered as an integral part of D.C. theater. “She was a great team spirit,” Schaeffer said.

Straight on till morning

When Michael Lluberes revisited “Peter Pan” as an adult, he saw blood.

“The first thing that jumped out was how bloody it was,” he said. “How sad parts of it were, and how true it was.”

Lluberes adapted J.M. Barrie’s classic as No Rules Theatre Company’s “Peter Pan: The Boy Who Hated Mothers,” a show he is also directing. While working on his script, Lluberes uprooted Barrie’s family tree and uncovered more dirt than the unsuspecting reader might expect. When Barrie was 6, his brother died on the eve of his 14th birthday. His mother, Lluberes said, became “inconsolable, and Barrie would dress up as his dead brother for his mother. The brother who died became this kind of symbol. The only comfort she found was that he would stay a child forever, he would never grow up. .?.?. It’s really the ghost of the play, this brother, and the mother who lost the child and is trying to find him again.”

It’s through this dark lens that “The Boy Who Hated Mothers” sees the story you probably know by heart. Lluberes’s interpretation begins with the death of Michael, the youngest brother (in the animated Disney version, he is the toddler in the pink onesie, clutching the paw of his teddy bear) and the surviving Darling children’s desire to escape their gloomy reality.

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