Forever young?

Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting
has ageless appeal

by Bill Rodriguez

Great storytelling knows no age boundaries. When we're enthralled by a tale, we don't know whether we're six or 60. That's why some of my favorite books, from A Wrinkle in Time to The Dark Is Rising, have been published as children's literature.

Take this book jacket blurb by Jean Stafford, which first appeared in The New Yorker: "A fearsome and beautifully written book that can't be put down or forgotten." That says nothing about young readers, as it describes Natalie Babbitt's classic Tuck Everlasting, which was touted in Harper's as "probably the best work of our best children's novelist."

A play adaptation of the 1975 novel will be performed October 18 and 25 at the Bishop McVinney Auditorium in Providence, sponsored by Alias Stage (proceeds will benefit the Rhode Island Committee to Prevent Child Abuse). It's being billed as "family entertainment," which means that interested grown-ups can bring a kid or two to provide cover.

Its director, Mary G. Farrell, head of the acting program at Providence College, doesn't think that the novel warrants being dismissed as just for kids. "My reaction when I first read it was, `This is such a beautiful book.' If it weren't short, I don't think anyone would ever assume it was written for young people," she says. "The poetic level is so high. The story is so interesting."

Tuck Everlasting is about a fountain of youth (actually, a spring in the woods), and explores the question of whether living forever would actually be such a hot idea. It opens in the 19th century, 87 years after Ma and Pa Tuck and their two boys stopped aging. A little girl named Winnie, who is almost 11, comes across one of the "young" Tuck boys who is drinking at the hidden spring. She then has to be brought into the secret so that she can be convinced to not tell anyone, lest the world eventually be crammed to bursting with people who never die. She is kidnapped, gently, and discusses the immortality issue with each of the Tucks. In the course of the brief tale -- about 27,000 words long -- a sinister stranger lurks after the secret, and there is a killing as well as the equally troubling question Winnie faces: whether to drink from the spring herself.

The director is discussing the book at the auditorium where it will be performed. The stage is dominated by forbidding looking "trees" wrapped in cyclone fencing for bark, and whose pipe branches will soon be wrapped in chicken wire and then fine mesh, creating a woods at once stark and diaphanous. Sitting next to Farrell is the book's author, who lives in Providence. Babbitt speaks about the genesis of the play, which was written by her son-in-law, Mark Frattaroli. He has a graduate degree from Brown, has written other adaptations, and teaches drama at a high school in Connecticut.

"The book was on stage here and there, and I had no control over what was being done to it," Babbitt recalls of the days before the current adaptation. "So I said to Mark, `I don't want this done anymore. Would you do a stage version and that will be the authorized one?' "

She left the writing up to him, since she has no theater experience apart from being a longtime play attendee -- her husband, Sam Babbitt, is an Alias Stage mainstay when white hair and a distinguished bearing is called for. The Frattaroli adaptation has been performed countless times, in nearly every major children's theater in the country, since it was written some seven years ago.

Almost as soon as her book was published, Babbitt had reason to fear its being misunderstood and misinterpreted. She singled out one example in a version available on video, a scene in which the novel has the sweet Ma Tuck react reflexively in maternal protectiveness: she grabs a shotgun by the barrel like a club and whacks the stranger, who was about to go off and sell the spring water to millionaires. The blow kills him.

"In this wretched movie that was made about 20 years ago, the young director had Ma Tuck pick up the gun, take careful aim and shoot him," she recounts. "And, of course, that makes an act of supreme violence out of it."

Some parents have expressed uneasiness over Ma Tuck killing someone, unintentionally or not, but kids have taken the startling plot turn in stride. The event is just more to think and talk about, joining the major discussion question of the book: Would it be such a good idea to live forever? Tuck Everlasting remains neutral on this point, with the younger son a proponent (and trying to recruit Winnie) and the older son gloomy over his fate.

"It's been interesting, the letters that I get from kids and the conversations I have with adults," Babbitt says, "because when I wrote it I just thought that everybody thought the same way I did -- that it would be terrible to live forever. Well, it turns out that a lot of people feel quite the opposite."

The author of more than a dozen children's books, Babbitt started in the genre as an illustrator and has done the art work for a six books by Valerie Worth. Among her own books are two about the Devil and two children's novels besides Tuck Everlasting: The Eyes of Amaryllis and Herbert Rowbarge.

"All my books except one are written around my happiness as a fifth-grader," she explains. "The fifth grade, when you really stop and think about it, is the last greatest year of childhood. Hormones begin after that. It all goes to hell until you're 30. But fifth grade is quite astonishing. They're so open, they look at you directly, they'll entertain any idea, they'll speak freely if they don't agree with it, it's just a wonderful time."

Many passages of Tuck Everlasting are rich, lyrical, as with: "For the wood was full of light, entirely different from the light she was used to. It was green and amber and alive, quivering in splotches on the padded ground, fanning into sturdy stripes between the tree trunks."

I mention that my copy of the novel contains a child's underlinings. One such word is "apologetic" in a sentence that begins, "His long chin faded off into a thin, apologetic beard." I note that such figurative language certainly doesn't talk down to a young reader. "I hated books that were patronizing when I was a child," she responds. "They're just like us. They don't have the same level of experience or cynicism. But they are what we were then, with a few refinements or degradations of one kind or another."

As a director, Farrell has focused on what she prefers to call "family theater" as one of her specialties, studying methods on two sabbaticals in London. She is a terrific match for this play, since her Providence College productions are known for brightness and creativity. Her 1990 production of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods was stunning, with the stage and aisles swarming with forest denizens that skulked around carrying trees to hide behind. It was far more dynamic than the national touring version that later came to town.

She's keeping this play simple, though. "There's an honest reality to it that I think would just get cluttered with my usual [methods]," Farrell says lightly. "I have the chorus and I have the music. And I take some stage liberties with just where we're placing the people so that the audience is not allowed to just sit back and be passive."

So the narrating chorus of "Voices" specified in the script will pop up here and there, running up the aisles, declaiming at the top of the hall, and sometimes speaking through the main actors as they step out of character for a moment. Sophisticated stuff for school kids. Music by Chris Turner and Rachel Mahoney, familiar from Trinity Rep's A Christmas Carol, will include both traditional and inventive sounds.

That should bring the story alive. If not forever, then at least for the scheduled run.