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Kate Wetherhead (Sara) & John Lloyd Young (Charlie)
in The Summer of the Swans
photo: Carol Rosegg
Excerpted from
July 21, 2003
by Susan Avery
The gritty depiction of teen angst in Julia Jordan's The Summer of the Swans is reason enough to take your kids. Protagonist Sara Godfrey (Kate Wetherhead) is a deliciously unpleasant 13-year-old who defines herself most precisely when she growls: "I glare at everyone. It's part of my personality." But it's a character without a speaking part who inherits the emotional center of the show, which was adapted from Betsy Byars's Newbery Award-winning novel of the same name.
John Lloyd Young's portrayal of Sara's mentally disabled younger brother Charlie is startlingly accurate. He shows joy without a smile, grace in awkward gestures, fear through silent tears. When just standing by in a scene, Young thrashes at the air a bit and crosses the stage in clumsy movement that somehow keeps him prominent without intruding on the story.
To connect with Charlie, the twentysomething actor--who twists his model good looks into lumbering agony onstage, causing some audience discomfort at first--toured an upstate school for autistic children. "I needed a reality check," he said after a recent dress rehearsal. "With a character like this, it was hard to really plan. I wanted to keep Charlie vulnerable yet give him dignity."
His transformation, wrought without makeup, is unlike anything seen in children's theater in recent memory.
Young attributes his success with the part to his artistic director, Barbara Pasternack. "If Broadway producers were as brave as she is with new material, we would all be seeing better shows," he says. "It doesn't have to be clowns and balloons. You can go deeper and still resonate with a young audience."
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