Poised to Fly

Peaches and Wendy are the names of two characters actress Karen Kandel is playing these days in two productions heading for Los Angeles.

While the names of these characters share a sunny whimsy not unlike the woman who is creating them, they are not alike. Wendy is an imaginative wizard who waltzes about a nursery in a long, white Victorian dress and magically conjures up a host of characters. She is Wendy in “Peter and Wendy,” the critically acclaimed retelling of J. M. Barrie’s immortal tale of Peter Pan adapted by New York’s Mabou Mines theater troupe that opens at the Geffen Playhouse on Tuesday.

Peaches, on the other hand, wears the orange regulation jumpsuit of a drug-dealing ex-convict who in the course of Anna Deavere Smith’s new drama, “House Arrest: First Edition,” is both a narrator and an agent of unimaginable horrors perpetrated on children. Featuring an ensemble cast of 14, “House Arrest” uses quasi-journalistic narrative to describe the mythic role of the presidency in American history. It premiered Nov. 19 at the Arena Stage Theatre in Washington, D.C., and is co-produced by four regional theaters, including the Mark Taper Forum, where it will play April 16-May 31.

While both plays deal with loss of innocence, the stunning contrast between the light and dark tone of each is all in a day’s work for the versatile Kandel, who sees a surprising affinity between the two.

“I don’t find that much difference between the kind of horror and tragedy in ‘First Edition’ and the kind of emotions you find in ‘Peter and Wendy,’ ” she says. “We are all capable of all of these things--good and evil. The key to both characters is finding their humanity, their desires, their hopes, and their deepest fantasies. Peaches wants to fly as much as Wendy does.”

Kandel herself is also poised to fly. For more than two decades, the self-described “theater baby”--who lives in Manhattan with her husband, actor Paul Kandel (Uncle Ernie in the original production of “The Who’s Tommy”)--has labored long and hard in relative obscurity in what she calls “poor theater”: the nonprofit, experimental arena where she has worked with such uncompromising directors as Elizabeth Swados, David Gordon, Anne Bogart, Andre Serban, Douglas Hughes, and Lee Breuer, the last of whom co-founded Mabou Mines 27 years ago. Kandel joined Mabou Mines (“Gospel at Colonus,” “An Epidog”) a decade ago, playing among many other roles a voodoo-inspired Creole Edgar/Edna in dreadlocks in the group’s gender-bending “King Lear,” for which she won her first Obie.

“Peter and Wendy” writer Liza Lorwin approached Kandel six years ago for “Peter and Wendy,” although the show wouldn’t have its premiere until 1996, at the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina (the production moved later that year to New York’s Public Theatre and the New Victory in 1997). For the role, she won her second Obie, and finally got singled out for the critical acclaim that many in the business had been foreseeing for years. In the show, Kandel not only plays Wendy, but also provides the voices of everyone else, from the plucky Peter to a Scottish-burred Mr. Darling, an ominous Capt. Hook and all of the Lost Boys. These characters are represented by puppets manipulated, bunraku-style, by seven silent actors veiled in beekeeper-style outfits.

Some are shadow puppets on a stick, others mere toys, and some appear to be just a heap of rags (Nana). But they are all enlivened by Kandel, who in what the New York Times described as a “coup-de-thea^tre,” turns her nursery into a wonderland. Bed sheets unfurl to become the masts of Hook’s ship, an ironing board becomes its plank, flapping bedclothes represent the Darling children’s flights around the room while the Scottish-tinged music performed live by fiddler Johnny Cunningham and vocalist Susan McKeown underlines the wistful melancholy and repressed infantile eroticism of this much darker, adult version of the tale--playing out what Breuer calls “the impossible romance” between Peter and Wendy.

“Karen is an exotic,” says Breuer, “and, as a black woman in Barrie’s white world, she is this incredible combination of Victorian delicacy--Wendy--and magical orientation--Peter. In her heart of hearts, she is a romantic, almost like a Henry James heroine. As a person, she is very intelligent but emotionally built like a child. Her whole unconsciousness is her conscious, her emotions are very accessible.”

On a chilly autumn night in Washington, D.C., during a dinner break between a rehearsal and the press opening of “House Arrest,” the 40-ish Kandel is pacing outside the Arena Theatre, a strikingly lovely presence with her elfin face, short-cropped hair and rail-thin, boyish frame. She is dressed in a long cable-knit sweater over black tights and looks far younger than her years--which she won’t be specific about. Combining hip androgynous sexiness and childlike naivete, Kandel certainly doesn’t betray any nervousness about facing the critics in less than two hours as she walks to a Chinese restaurant, reflecting on the capital’s bureaucratic stone palaces and the myth of power that is at the heart of Smith’s ambitious play.

The ensemble of actors plays a theater troupe and three prisoners in a work-release program who together are presenting a Postmodern work about the presidency, combining historical reconstruction with the theater-verite interview techniques of Smith’s previous solo works (“Fires in the Mirror” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992”). Kandel, as Peaches, waltzes about in a white petticoat as Sally Hemmings, the alleged slave-mistress of Thomas Jefferson, but she also is the voice and person of Alexis Herman, President Clinton’s Secretary of Labor who recounts a harrowing story of herself as a 5-year-old child watching her father being beaten by Klansmen; Paulette Jenkins, an inmate at a Baltimore prison who is held responsible for her crack addict lover’s beating of her 7-year-old daughter; and Patricia Williams, a Columbia law professor who digresses on the Jefferson-Hemmings liaison. All the material is interwoven into a layered discourse on political power, and it is billed as a work-in-progress. But last-minute frantic editing and changes don’t faze Kandel.

“I told Anna that I was exhausted and scared but really excited and happy at the same time,” she says, settling into a restaurant booth for a quick bite before returning to her apartment for an hour of meditation. “I’m so used to working in experimental theater, which is so spontaneous and collaborative, that when I’m presented with a formal, finished script, it’s almost weird.”

Indeed, her ability to roll with the punches is what made Smith lobby so intensely for Kandel to participate in “House Arrest,” even though her prior commitment to “Peter and Wendy” meant that the actress would only play previews and two opening performances of the Washington, D.C., run before returning to New York for rehearsals of the Mabou Mines production. (Kandel still hasn’t decided whether she will return to Smith’s play at other venues, including L.A.) Smith had known Kandel’s work since 1975, when she saw her in Swados’ “Nightclub Cantata,” and says she had always wanted to write a role for Kandel.

“Karen has worked with all these great directors and pays such a meticulous attention to detail that I knew she would inspire and lift up the company,” the playwright-actress says, adding that she also knew Kandel’s calm, inventive presence would strike just the right note for such a complex project.

Kandel admits that, despite some “really tough times” during the rehearsal period, her cheerfulness puzzled the cast, some of whom wondered aloud how she could manage to keep smiling while working on some truly devastating testimony, particularly from prison inmate Jenkins.

“I’d tell them, ‘Maybe I’m just stupid or naive, on some level I am 5 years old,’ ” she recalls with a laugh. “I really haven’t experienced a lot that other people have. When new material is being thrown at me, or stuff which is really difficult, I turn off my brain so I don’t get completely overwhelmed by it. I would rather just do, rather than think.”

Kandel says that when Lorwin first approached her to play in “Peter and Wendy,” she realized that she was only familiar with the Disney cartoon of the tale and had to immerse herself in the original Barrie works. There she found a version of childhood that wasn’t all “sweetness and light” but filled with a “cruelty, insensitivity and sexual tension” that she immediately could understand. “I thought, ‘Ohmigod, this is my life, this is the way I remember childhood.’ Right after doing ‘Peter and Wendy’ at the Public, I went into therapy for the first time because it uncovered all these feelings, these feelings that drive me still because I’m so connected to them.”

Growing up in Queens as the third child born to a New York City subway conductor and his wife, Kandel says she spent much of her childhood alone, playing with her black Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, bedecking herself with scarves, letting her imagination run riot as she danced about. At 9, she was presented with a baby brother whom she would later entertain by inventing stories, foreshadowing an interest in “toy theater” that would become one of her adult passions. Her flights of fancy were a refuge from a strict, puritanical--albeit loving--upbringing and the cruelty inflicted on her by other children. In a family of beauties with long, thick, dark plaits of hair, Kandel, who stuttered throughout her childhood, said that she felt “shy and gawky.”

“I was very quiet, skinny and athletic, with muscles, and that was definitely not cool,” Kandel says. “To this day, I’ll still look in the mirror and wonder if I look too much like a boy, if maybe I should put on earrings or more makeup.”

Kandel’s mother is from the Bahamas and her father from Massachussets, a great-great-great grandson of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Kandel said that she never felt the sting of racism until her family moved from Jamaica, Queens, to the then mainly white neighborhood of Queens Village, near the Nassau county line. Then 14, she was walking down the street one day when a neighbor child her same age began to scream, “Why don’t you [expletive] go back to where you came from? We don’t want you!”

“I remember thinking, ‘Whoa, what’s that all about?’ It just struck me as very weird and strange, and then everybody moved away and the neighborhood became all black,” she said. Kandel was likewise undeterred when a college professor suggested that instead of pursuing an acting career she should go to a technical college and learn a craft. “He suggested that it would be difficult for a ‘Negro person’ like me to find work,” she says. “I just dismissed it. There are times when it pays to be naive.”

After graduating from Queens College, she answered an open-call audition at LaMama, ETC., an experimental downtown venue where she met Swados, who cast her first in “Nightclub Cantata” and then in “Runaways,” an exuberant late-’70s musical about scrappy urban youth that began at the Public Theatre and later moved to Broadway, and then in “Alice in Concert,” which also featured Meryl Streep. After an apprenticeship of more than nine years with the mercurial and demanding director, Kandel and Swados parted ways.

The pressure “to be good” had become too much, says the actress, something of a perfectionist who would push herself relentlessly to polish her craft. “I wasn’t happy acting, I was so knotted up. I thought I’d never act again.”

Indeed, Kandel spent the next four years building miniature doll houses, with furniture and accessories to match. “I loved the solitude of it, it was very therapeutic” she says. “I also loved the idea of drama happening in small, contained spaces.”

She was drawn back to the theater by a call from Anne Bogart, who was then casting the opera “The Making of Americans.” This role led to regular, if largely unrecompensed, work in regional and nonprofit theater. Though she has performed all over the country, “Peter and Wendy” marks her West Coast acting debut.

The joy of acting, she adds, blossomed when she hooked up with Breuer and Mabou Mines, which she calls her “second family.” She loves the open-endedness of their style. “Lee would come up to me even at the last performance and say, ‘Hey, Karen, I’ve got this hit [idea], why don’t you try it and see what happens?’ And I would, and it was just so liberating.”

That attitude has extended to her personal life, especially since she has been in therapy, finally facing what she calls “the real me, not the sweet, kind, nice person so everybody likes me, but the arrogant person, the one I’ve been so frightened of showing the rest of the world.”

While Kandel has made brief television appearances, she has yet to make feature films. Asked if she would like to do so, she laughs shyly and touches her short-cropped hair: “Oh, yes, sure, but wouldn’t I have to grow some hair? Film is all about hair and big breasts and beautiful bodies, isn’t it? So I don’t know. I’m not sure that people see me for all that I am.”

Kandel adds that she doesn’t really plan or count on much beyond her stints in “Peter and Wendy” and perhaps the subsequent editions of “House Arrest”. In discussing a loss of innocence, the theme that permeates both projects, she says that therapy in a way represented that for her. But she hopes to maintain innocence in at least one crucial way: “ ‘Peter and Wendy’ sort of says that we can never regain that lost innocence, but I feel that we can and that we do. I hope that seeing the show helps people to get in touch with that again, actually. Acting for me is stripping away the walls, tearing down the barriers of learned behavior and going back to the real thing, the emotional honesty and trust that ‘Peter and Wendy’ is all about.”

*

“Peter and Wendy” opens Thursday at the Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Performances are Tuesdays to Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Also Dec. 24, 2 p.m.; dark Dec. 25. Ends Dec. 28. $17.50-$37.50. (310) 208-5454.