“Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.” -Jean-Paul Sartre

So, doing a character analysis thingy on here helped a lot last time with "Cabin Fever", so I figure I'll do one for "Phallus Pan" since Wendy is as complicated, if not more than Pidge. I apologize in advance if this isn't as "insightful" about acting in general as the other posts. This one is pretty much just for me, so deal with it. Here goes nothing.

Wendy goes through a lot of shit through the course of the show. She starts off right after her father's funeral. So, pre-show, I see Wendy as having a pretty average life. I kind of see Wendy growing up in a family like mine, but maybe a little more eccentric. Wendy and Michael probably grew up in middle-class, white, suburban America. We know that both of the parents are dead, so I imagine that the mother died a good while before the father. I see Wendy as around my age, possibly a little bit younger, so I would say the mother died probably when Wendy was 12 or 13. The mother was the organized runner of the house while the father was off being his eccentric self. With her death, I see Wendy starting to take some control of the responsibilities to help her dad out and keep Michael in line since he was younger. I don't imagine that she was bossy when she first started, but as the years went on I see it taking a toll on Wendy to where she transformed into this stuffy, anal retentive, mother wannabe. I'm sure Michael was fed up having his sister trying to act like his mother. With the death of her father, I think Wendy kind of goes into hyper-drive, trying to take the place of the mother and father. While Michael might be annoyed by her type-A personality, I believe that he and Wendy have a very close relationship. You can see throughout the play that Michael constantly worries about Wendy and her safety while Wendy goes on her journey through Neverland and trying to find herself. Wendy cares about Michael as well, and since she's been the stand in mother for so long, she probably sees him in more of the son manner than anything.

So, this is how Wendy starts off the play. And while she is playing the mother-y role, in the real world she's very uptight about it. She's not the lovey dovey mom type, she's the hardcore organized "We have to be perfect" type. And so through the process of meeting Pan and Tink and arriving in Neverland, she is very hesitant about it the whole time. She's not one for trying new experiences, so she's very stand-offish towards the whole idea. Once waking up in Neverland, she encounters something she's not used to. There are people who want her help and are asking to be their mother. That's something she never got in the real world. She has all this pain and regret dealing with her parents' deaths and trying to raise Michael at the same time; yet in this fantasy world she doesn't have to deal with any of it, and she can create this family that was all but obliterated by the real world. I also think it's at this moment where she falls in love with Phallus Pan, because he is so enchanting and mysterious, and he kind of encourages their relationship by putting himself as the father and Wendy as the mother. So, Wendy decides to leave her past behind in the real world, and accept her new life in Neverland with her new family.

Then we have this weird transformation that Wendy goes through during the middle of the play. She fully embraces the mother role, and she enjoys it a great deal. Then, something within her just snaps and she sort of abuses her role as the mother and turns it dirty. I think since she took care of her family in the real world for so long, she didn't have time to go out and have fun and possibly fool around. Seeing the anatomy of the boys just turned something on with her hormones and she goes crazy. Again, at first she tries to deny this new experience, but then it just gets too much and she gives in. This is the point in the play where things change completely, and through the introduction of sex to the Lost Boys, this domino affect occurs eventually bringing on the destruction of Neverland.

And then again she puts herself in the same situation, just with another Lost Boy. She abuses her mother standing and gives into her sexual frustration. I think Wendy has this ignorance towards her actions in Neverland. In the real world she was calm and collected, but in Neverland she's letting her emotions get the best of her. And she doesn't realize how her actions are affecting this fantasy world. When she gets captured by Tiger Lilly, this becomes the moment of realization for Wendy. She' so stuck on her love for Pan and taking care of the Lost Boys that when Tiger Lilly snaps her out of it, Wendy finally realizes what she's been doing. She remembers the death of her father, and the fact that she's basically abandoned Michael. She doesn't go completely back to the way she was, because her life has changed forever through this experience, but she becomes determined to save her new family and take them out of this place.

She finally destroys the thing that keeps Phallus Pan and the Lost Boys on Neverland, and wants to take them all back home. Through the final scene she reveals her love for Pan, and attempts to get Pan to go home with them and start a family in the real world. When Pan refuses, they battle it out. Wendy has this great monologue towards the end when she tells Pan what she really learned in Neverland, basically about avoiding your pain and dealing with it in all the wrong ways. Finally she becomes victorious, and through a series of events leaves Neverland with Pan.

Wendy goes through this crazy ass journey. And I thought about reading the original Peter Pan play or watching the movie to get inspiration, but I thought no this time. In this instance, this part was written with me in mind, so really this is a perfect example of finding a bit of you in the character. I've felt these feelings that Wendy has felt, and the best way of portraying them is to just know what they are and experience them as if I were for the first time.