A reason to ignore matters of consequence

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH Prince, little, and flower, red, enjoy first date. Volcanoes provide romantic ambiance.

We ought to issue warnings to children, preferably while they're still in the womb, that most of the entertainment supposedly designed for them is a big wad of crap. If it's not the Berenstein Bears, who proffer pat, literalized solutions to every imagined childhood difficulty, it's something like the Pokemon animated series, which rams home bland platitudes while simul-taneously hawking video games. Then, after warning the fetuses, we should read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince to them. Over and over. Loudly, so it gets through the uterine walls.

Fortunately for those who didn't receive this kind of advice early on, or whose hapless prenatal ears were muffled by placenta, the Yale Children's Theater provides an effective catch-up. Under the direction of Sonia Lin, SY '01, the cast navigates the book's mix of allegory, satire, and trancendence-through-snakebite, creating sustenance for whatever remains of the inner child after weeks of midterms.

This adaptation excises some of the original work's asides on the particulars of baobab weeding and asteroid location, choosing to emphasize the interplay of the various characters that the little prince (Rich Hinman, TC '01) encounters during his journey away from his small asteroid home and the high-maintenance flower (Lisa Weiser, CC '02) who lives with him. He meets representatives of the adult worlds of government (Alexis Surovov, ES '02, as the King), business (Weiser again), celebrity (Rosanne Pereira, SM '02, and Gabe Freiman, SM '02) and science (Kim Cauley's, PC '01, geographer), and finds them all lacking a certain depth of character.

The production contrasts these parodic figures of adult life with the wisdom of the fox (Freiman) and the snake (Pereira), whom the prince meets later. The implication here, that innocent and pure things like animals and kids possess some secret perception that adults don't, risks being condescending and nearly as dim-witted as the Berensteins. However, The Little Prince succeeds by applying these lessons toward the possibility of emotional survival in the face of loss, first through the prince's regret at leaving his beautiful flower behind, and then through his own apparent death at the hands of the snake.

One of the nice things about this production of The Little Prince is the way in which it finds performance analogies for Saint-Exupéry's literary devices. The minimal sets and the actors' enjoyably caffeinated performances work well as translations of Saint-Exupéry's narration and drawings, the tone and economy of which convey a determined and touching attempt to communicate deep ideas with simple tools. For example, the pilot (Larry Schooler, BK '00), who acts as the play's narrator, could easily lose depth as a character in the absence of some of his biographical passages. However, Schooler compensates with a thoroughly engaging performance that displays both the character's initial rationalism and the sense of doofy wonder that still remains within him.

The other actors fulfill their roles with equal alacrity. If the prince's girlfriend has to be an allegorical talking plant, he'd be hard-pressed to find one better than Weiser. Surovov and Cauley create high-energy cartoons of a self-absorbed king and a shut-in scientist respectively, while Pereira makes the snake into a philosophical badass. Freiman is especially enjoyable in his scenes as the fox, in which he "establishes ties" with the prince and begins a neurotically regulated friendship. As the prince, Hinman serves as an excellent lens for the audience to view each of these disparate characters, and although he gives the prince determinism and agency a little too slowly for my taste, he does a nice job of guiding Schooler's character toward his final epiphany.

One caveat: in a nod toward timeliness or something, the flower makes a reference to the Spice Girls, and the actors introduce the planetoid dwellers in a format that parodies of the Jerry Springer Show. While it does imply that we're about to see a bunch of human wastes, it also makes the story a bit too topical, following the same faulty reasoning as WB's Hysteria or some of the digressive humor in Disney animation. It implies a knowing superiority to the material, an attempt to make the material more digestible to the punters. Given the strength of Saint-Exupéry's original material, it's not necessary and distracts from the story rather than accentuating it.

The Little Prince recovers from these minor burps, however, and is a welcome hour-and-fifteen-minute break from "matters of consequence." Bring your kids. If you don't have kids, conceive some with a person you love and gestate quickly.

Back to A&E...