Arts & Ideas
If the giggles and gasps I heard Thursday night from both adults and young children — often in unison — in Yale’s University Theatre is any indication, A Billion Nights on Earth is that rare thing: an evening of theatre for children that is not children’s theatre. Rather than a brightly colored cartoon story with enough double entendres to keep the parents awake, creator and director Thaddeus Phillips has taken the braver step of reminding us adults that we are at our best when we are like our children. Although the evening he has crafted lasts a scant hour and holds a trifle of a plot, it is designed, like a vivid dream, to linger long after it ends.
The play runs through June 16.
The plot is a combination of The Chronicles of Narnia and Go the F**k to Sleep. When a young girl named Willow (Coralie Holum Lyford) decides she can’t nod off without her missing stuffed whale, which she last saw at the museum earlier that day, she devises a series of games to entertain herself. These include an imagined search-and-rescue mission led by her stuffed penguin and squirrel and an elaborate rehearsal of robot dance with music from her tape player. Her father, an architect (Michael Fegley), repeatedly enters her room to turn out the lights in an amusing impersonation of Sisyphus.
But the story turns when Willow, in search of a glass of milk, finds herself crawling through a mystical portal that has opened in her refrigerator, and her father follows suit. On the other side of the fridge is a dream world where parent’s and daughter’s roles reverse. As they roast marshmallows by the fire, join the stars in a Native American dance, swim through an ocean storm, and walk on the moon, we watch Willow take control of her surroundings while her father appreciates what it’s like to be overwhelmed and in need of someone else’s confidence. In a subtle twist, Phillips leaves it ambiguous whose dream we have just witnessed. But the play ends with the pair finding together a new and welcome harmonization of responsibility, fun, and mutual care.
The simplicity of the play’s design, which Phillips crafted with the help of designer Steven Dufala, generates a smorgasbord of fancy for Willow and her father’s imaginative world. Curtains, blow-up dolls, and space suits combine with light designer David Todaro’s light-and-shadow play and composer Juan Gabriel Turbay’s expansive score to draw out of both characters and audiences that most under-exercised faculty: wonder.
Lyford and Fegley, as Willow and her father respectively, inhabit their roles with jubilance. Fegley is relieved of the burden of creating psychic depth since his character’s emotions are all on the surface, and he obviously enjoys it. Moving from the exasperation of adulthood to the vigor of a recovered youth, it’s his journey we follow, and his commitment to its clarity carries the production forward. Lyford, meanwhile, is a hoot. She plays Willow with a virtuosic balance of sass, heart, and ham, and when it’s her turn to carry the scene, she does so with the casual confidence of a pro wrestler. She’s having a great time, and she dares us not to do the same.
A Billion Nights on Earth was created over a year ago in Philadelphia and was most recently performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But it so happens that its premiere at New Haven’s Arts and Ideas Festival coincides with the national exposure of harrowing treatment of immigrant children and their parents on the southern border. There is little in the play to remind us that there are countless children and parents whose nights are nothing like Phillips’s playful dreamscape, rendering the gesture of universality in its title a different kind of fairy tale. But that doesn’t mean it has nothing to offer the moment. Even if it is more difficult than usual to fully lose oneself in Willow and her father’s journey, the production has the virtue of reminding us that what is at stake in the depressingly adult world of politics is nothing less than the privilege of children to smile at their dreams.
A Billion Nights on Earth runs through June 16 at The University Theatre, 222 York Street. For tickets and more information, visit this website or call (203) 498‑3772.
