Giver Delivers
People's Light's Family Discovery Series charts new ground with The Giver.
People's Light & Theatre Company's Family Discovery Series continues to chart new territory, focusing this season and next on smart stage adaptations of novels for children and young adults like Lois Lowry's dystopian drama The Giver.
The 1993 Newbery Award winner, sparingly adapted by Eric Coble as a 75-minute play, posits a gray future that recalls familiar science fiction conventions — George Orwell's 1984, Margaret Atwood's A Handmaiden's Tale — but from a 12-year-old's perspective. Jonas (Cedric Lilly) lives in an ordered society that manages its citizens from birth to death. James F. Pyne Jr. (set), Dennis Parichy (lights) and Rosemarie McKelvey (costumes) make Jonas' world eerily colorless, until an apple flashes red, hinting at his unique perceptive powers.
Director David Bradley's production handles the necessary exposition neatly, lulling us with visions of Jonas' happy life with appointed parents played by Peter DeLaurier and Melanye Finister and similarly assigned little sister Lily (precocious Maggie Fitzgerald). Mark Del Guzzo and Marla Burkholder, as Jonas' friends Asher and Fiona, share his anxiety about their lifetime professional assignments, given to them by the Council of Elders, who "don't make mistakes" — until they pass over Jonas.
Jonas is chosen to become the new "Receiver of Memories," and at last, this society's tidy philosophy of "sameness" and its relationship to our chaotic world are revealed. The Giver (Stephen Novelli, sporting a tremendous gray beard) imparts incredible memories of the past, but they come at a steep price for young Jonas.
Coble faithfully preserves Lowry's ambiguous ending, which should inspire much discussion among audiences of all ages. (The post-show chats after every performance all but guarantee it.) The Giver is definitely not for little kids, raising issues about how much a society can, and should, protect its own that are remarkably prescient about our post-9/11, Patriot Act society.
The Giver | Through May 20 | People's Light & Theatre Company | 39 Conestoga Road, Malvern | 610-644-3500, www.peopleslight.org
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