MR. POPPER’S PENGUINS
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Based on a 1938 book by Richard Atwater, a University of Chicago professor and columnist for the Chicago Evening Post, and his wife Florence, Mr. Popper’s Penguins concerns a mild-mannered housepainter who dreams of adventures in far-off lands; he’s especially enamored of the antarctic travels of “Admiral Drake,” as the Atwaters named their stand-in for polar explorer Richard Byrd. The housepainter is thrilled to discover that the surprise package he gets in response to a fan letter to Drake contains a penguin. Popper and his family teach the bird to live in their icebox, and they find it a proud and playful pet; but it begins to pine for its own kind, so they obtain a female penguin from a nearby zoo. One and one soon equal 12, and the Poppers are saddled with a bird brood they hardly know what to do with. Then Mr. Popper hits on the idea of training the animals for the stage: Popper’s Performing Penguins (who are named after explorers such as Scott, Columbus, and Magellan) become the rage of the vaudeville circuit–until a series of misadventures lands them in jail. But all problems are solved when Admiral Drake himself comes to town and schlepps the birds–and Mr. Popper–off to the arctic.
This simple story has been nicely compressed into a 40-minute show by playwright Meryl Friedman, composer Douglas Wood, and director Ruth Landis. They’ve eliminated some of the story’s more elaborate digressions, but they preserve its knack for communicating interesting information about polar life through seemingly natural conversation: Mr. Popper, a distracted dreamer who’s close kin to Thurber’s Walter Mitty, regales his family with amusing anecdotes about how penguins live and play.
“Hermaphrodite” is also the insult applied by the bullying father in A Summer Remembered to the young son through whose memory the play’s action seems to be filtered. While I want to correct my earlier misassessment of Nolte’s track record, I’m even more convinced now of my statement that the play “feels like a singular work by a writer with a special story to tell”–and that for all its flaws, A Summer Remembered is one of the more touching, and most effectively performed, scripts Steppenwolf has produced.
