Timothy Johnson
Lantern Staff
“This is like the sixth time that the Alvin the Alligator has appeared in one of my plays,” Bob Peterson said, explaining his inspiration for Alvin the Alligator, the main character in his newest play, “Being Frank.” Bob Peterson is the director of theater at Butler Community College and has won multiple awards for his playwriting. His latest chapter of Alvin the Alligator, “Being Frank,” is set to be performed Saturday, Feb. 23.
“Being Frank” follows the reoccurring character Alvin the Alligator who has appeared in many of his plays.
“His being Alvin the Alligator, he came off of a shirt and came to life and then he has been in several plays since then, and each one of these plays has a life lesson and this one is about believing in yourself, and so they are just things that I have been concerned with as a teacher and as a human being and seeing people,” Peterson said. “Like last year’s theme was about accepting other people no matter what they look like and so this came from observing students who didn’t always have the confidence to be themselves and so that’s where this came from, and this alligator and Frank, his best buddy, they tell the story.”
All of his plays featuring Alvin the Alligator are designed to teach the audience a moral lesson.
“I think this is a children’s theater play, and I think children’s theater should do two things: I think it should entertain and then I think it should teach, and I think you should walk away from each children’s theater play wonderfully entertained and walk away with a thought, and so last year our theme was acceptance; this year our theme is confidence,” Peterson said.
Peterson appears to have a gift for creating characters, based off of his many awards. Characters like Alvin the Alligator require a great deal of imagination that makes one wonder where he came up with the idea.
“It’s interesting because I didn’t realize who Alvin the Alligator and Frank were until very recently,” Peterson said, responding to how he created Alvin. “I knew they were very real to me…and I finally identified where they came from in my life, and sometimes that happens when you write; you know you’ve got a vivid character, you knew it was inside you, and you wrote it down, but you didn’t know where it came from and it was only recently that I figured out who Alvin the Alligator and Franklin they were, and so that’s interesting and all of the characters in the play are based on people that I’ve known or people that I’ve observed.”
Peterson has not just written children’s plays, he also writes more serious plays, like his award winning play “Heaven Ajar” about the Coolidge presidency.
“What they have in common is that they have to be truthful,” Peterson said, as he explained the difference between a children’s play and other plays. “What the difference is that children’s plays maybe, even though they must be honest, are a little bit more exaggerated. They are a little bit more, perhaps, theatrical…in other words when I write a children’s play I can always see the theater. When I’m writing a play like “Heaven Ajar,” I don’t want to see the theater; I want to see the story.”
