One of the best-selling books in history — only the Bible, the Quran and a couple of others can lay claim to a wider readership — Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince means a lot of things to a lot of people.
On its surface, The Little Prince is a whimsical fable about a young boy — a little prince — who’s left his home on a distant asteroid to visit Earth. His story is told through conversations with a wounded aviator whose small plane has crashed in the Sahara Desert.
Underneath, it’s a series of allegorical fables about life, love, loneliness and longing and the essential nature of humanity.
These, of course, are universal themes: Since it was first published in 1943, The Little Prince has been translated into more than 300 languages. Not everyone agrees on Saint-Exupery’s intentions — there are those who insist the story is one big religious allegory — but it’s been turned into movies, radio serials and stage plays, two operas and a ballet.
“Depending on your interpretation of it, it can actually have a lot to do with many of the themes that we try to think about around the holidays,” says freeFall Theatre Artistic Director Eric Davis, who’s directing a production of The Little Prince opening Nov. 25. “And especially that idea of personal connection, and that humanity is important. And that life is beautiful. I think those are really great ideas for us to think about at the holidays.”
The adult longing for the wide-eyed innocence of childhood is one of the most common take-aways from what all agree is an inspirational tale. William Garrabrant, the 10-year-old who has the title role in this freeFall production, subscribes to this theory.
“I think it’s about childhood and how kids sometimes have that creativity and madness, and just a bunch of other things that grownups kind of grew out of,” says the Perkins Elementary School fifth grader. “It’s about how you should always keep that bit of creativity — and everything that makes a child a child.”
Will (as he prefers to be called) has been in a dozen professional productions in the bay area, eight of them at freeFall. Davis and company make changes in freeFall’s exhausting rehearsal schedule to accommodate his school hours (he doesn’t get out until two in the afternoon).
Davis, of course, has directed Master Garrabrant before.
“It has been a pleasure to watch Will progress as an actor,” he enthuses. “He’s learned so much from working with many talented professional actors at freeFall over the last four years.” The Little Prince marks Will’s debut as the lead in a freeFall play — and Davis knows his young charge is ready.
“Watching his process during this challenge of carrying a show has been a joy,” he says. “This will truly be a triumph for him — and a pleasure for the audience to experience.”
Incredibly, Davis says, he still meets people who’ve never even heard of The Little Prince. He hopes they’ll come to see his show, and sit next to those who know it, love it, and have very clear ideas about what the characters look like, and the meaning of their words.
“We want to leave some of that ambiguity in place, because that’s at the heart of what makes the book interesting,” he explains. “And makes it enticing for repeated reads, throughout your life. And I know that reading the book now, or working on this piece now, I have very different ideas about it than I had the first time I read it — which was when I was in high school.”
The author’s simple watercolor illustrations have visually defined The Little Prince since day one. The freeFall production, which also employs masks and puppetry, adheres to that original design (although the all-important Aviator is also played by a real live person, actor Michael David). Davis is also the show's costume, video and sound designer.
Sometimes, as with the original book, it’s a matter of straddling a practically invisible line between the obvious and the subtle.
“The adaptation itself is very true to the novel,” says Davis. “So letting that happen in a very theatrical way, and in a way that embraces the storytelling quality of it, is really important.”
In the end, there’s no definitive interpretation, no single answer, no "what’s it all about," Alfie. “Whatever your interpretation is, there’s this sense of a secret knowledge that’s imparted to the Aviator,” Davis explains. “And a lot of that has to do with these personal relationships that we encounter in the piece. The characters often talk about ‘important things,’ and to different characters, they’re very different.
“Through the Little Prince, the Aviator and the audience are left to discover what is really important in life. And I think a lot of what the book is saying is that what is important in life are these personal connections that we make.”
This article appears in Nov 16-23, 2017.