She is the belle of the Piccaninny tribe, whose braves would all have her to wife, but she wards them off with a hatchet.”

And to show that he felt Amazons resonated with the audiences of today.
As for role reversal it happens regularly in theatre, males are changed to female or the other way around. The idea was not to remove all Indians but look at a different tribe of aboriginal people. And I think it should also be said that changing a group like that makes a new play, rather like any show put on stage it creates a new interpretation, a different angle.
As for Tiger Lily not listed in the program, she’s not listed as such. You will though find “Lily” in the program, with or without Tiger it’s still the same character.
I can appreciate the points that have been made and glad it has sparked this conversation…which is the ultimate goal of theatre.
Aaron Kropf
Social and Online Media Coordinator
Stratford Shakespeare Festival

Having started to read the book to my son before we left to see the play, I had to explain to him that there would be no “Indians” in the performance. It confused him! I tried to take the opportunity to tell him that Native Americans no longer wish to be referred to as Indians. He became more confused when we got gas from the Smokin’ Joe’s Indian Gas Station.

Still, overall we really enjoyed the performance, with or without Indians.

In the Stratford show, do the other characters really refer to the Amazon on Marooning Rock as “Tiger Lily”? I just don’t remember hearing that. Of course I might have missed it. But even if the Amazon is called “Tiger Lily,” she can’t possibly be regarded as the same character that J. M. Barrie created in his play. That character was an Indian princess; she is gone, and there’s no reason to pretend she isn’t.

What I do know is that no “Tiger Lily” character is listed in the program. There are only several nameless “Amazons”.

If Mr. Carroll claims that he put “Amazons” in Peter Pan because he thought they were something children tend to dream about – well, that’s hard to buy. You and I and Mr. Carroll know very well that kids don’t dream about Amazons. They don’t even know who they are.

And what business was it of Mr. Carroll’s to decide that Neverland needed more women – or to decide that Peter Pan needs to teach young girls that they too can be strong? It’s not Mr. Carroll’s play, and girl power wasn’t one of Mr. Barrie’s themes.

If Mr. Carroll wanted to write a new stage play of his own, roughly based on the story of Peter Pan (like the movie Hook), that would be a different matter, and he could do as he wanted. He could change the story, add or delete major characters, add new themes, and ignore the old ones. But Mr. Carroll was hired to direct J. M. Barrie’s play, and in Mr. Barrie’s play Neverland has no adult women except Tiger Lily.

Mr. Eriksson has already beaten me to my point, which is that Mr. Barrie intentionally created Neverland without adult women, and that arbitrarily putting in a group of them throws the play out of whack. (At the Shaw Festival this summer they’re doing Clare Booth’s The Women, which has no male characters by the playwright’s deliberate design. When we see it in a few weeks, there’d better not be any!)

Mr. Carroll has too much experience in the theater not to notice the architecture and the rules of the plays he’s directing. Peter Pan is designed with groups of threes. At the Darling home, there are (a) three children and (b) three competing centers of power (Mr. Darling, Mrs. Darling, and the children). And there is no sex in the Darling household. In the first act babies simply arrive; in the final act Mr. Darling sleeps in the doghouse.

In Neverland there are also three powers, led by Pan, Hook, and Tiger Lily. And there are three female characters on Neverland, whose characteristics foreclose anything like erotic attraction: Wendy is prepubescent, Tinkerbelle is not human, and Tiger Lily is sexually impregnable. Mr. Eriksson is entirely right: injecting a group of sexually provocative adult women (Amazons) to complement the group of adult men (pirates) is extremely problematical. It distorts and undermines the real themes of J. M. Barrie’s play.