The Wonder Years

Nashville's fall theater season opens auspiciously with the U.S. stage premiere of Susan Coyne's Kingfisher Days, a carefully crafted and warmly expressed memory play of recent Canadian vintage. The Tennessee Women's Theater Project production, under the direction of Maryanna Clarke, is thoroughly engaging—in a mere 90 minutes, it manages to evoke both delightful and poignant elements of childhood, family, friendship, the cycle of life and the world of fantasy.

Based on Coyne's actual experience—and first published as a piece of nonfiction—Kingfisher Days tells the tale of a little girl who spends the summer with her family at a lake house in the early '60s. With her parents and siblings busy with their own activities, the somewhat isolated young Susan strikes up a friendship with 70-something Mr. Moir next door. He teaches her chess, tutors her about local flora and fauna, and exposes her to Alice in Wonderland. More touchingly, he anonymously writes her letters that supposedly come from a fairy princess named Nootsie Tah—of Incan origin, but, it is explained, currently "displaced" for various spritely reasons. The time spent with Mr. Moir and the Nootsie Tah legend fills up Susan's lonely days far more keenly than any typical summery pursuits might have, and this scenario lends itself to both deftly dramatic and cheerfully entertaining theater.

The key to success here is Clarke's seamless staging, which has plenty of well-blocked realistic action—always with an eye toward the gentleness of Coyne's fable. She also encourages some wonderfully freewheeling performances by a terrific cast of three, each of whom offers worthy character work and credible commitment to the script's whimsy and literary sensibilities.

Holly Allen delivers a strong, versatile performance in the lead role. To establish the play's narration, she opens the show as the grown-up Susan, now a harried working mom. There's good humor in the setup, and from there she leads us back to her magical early youth, at which point she moves into the action as Susan the child. Throughout, Allen toggles niftily between these two incarnations, enacting the bygone story with sensitivity and then stepping believably back into the more stressful present. (At one point her cell phone goes off, and she interrupts the proceedings to converse with one of her kids.)

Allen is matched with equal skill by Buddy Raper, who's very funny in several scenes as Susan's scholarly, quirkily distracted father, but really distinguishes himself as Mr. Moir. Raper works that role without even a hint of false sentiment. He's charming, sincere and witty, and together he and Allen create a likable, if disarmingly unlikely, pair of pals.

Jennifer Richmond is the wild card here. Her turn as Susan's ever practical mother, given to well-worn aphorisms, is nothing if not lovable. But Richmond mostly spends her time onstage as the flighty fairy Nootsie Tah, a portrayal that lends itself to broader theatrical movement and an exaggerated sense of wonder, thus forming the connective tissue in the Susan-Moir relationship. She's every bit as good as Allen and Raper in what she's doing, thus completing the hat trick of actorly excellence.

Playwright Coyne's words are exceedingly well-chosen and economically rendered, plus her text includes quaintly nostalgic reference points such as a '60s-era phonograph, funny rural Canadian radio broadcasts, playing patty-cake, doing the hokey-pokey, and even smartly pertinent allusions to Shakespeare.

Amber Wallace's set design is agreeably folksy—portions of the two vacation cottages face each other with a central playing area in-between—and it includes a marvelous upstage lake-and-dock vista that is important to a couple of unexpected comical interludes. On the audiovisual side, there are well-placed voiceovers and sound effects, plus a projection screen that is put to occasional use providing nature lessons, primarily on the birds of Ontario.

A sweetly inspired opus like Kingfisher Days might run the risk of overly saccharine treatment, but that is certainly not the case here. This production's theatrical spirit is as pristine as a blast of cool Canadian air, and, not unlike last season's TWTP mounting of Almost, Maine, there's a celebration of honest human need that might well move even the most jaded of hearts. It comes well-recommended for all ages, and that definitely includes the younger set.