Emma-Jane Huerta is a longtime theater artist and educator in Santa Barbara, known for her ground-up approach to production. She ran Upstarts Youth Theatre for two decades, and, despite the notorious difficulty of finding appropriate material for young actors, always had a play in the wings for a large casts of kids — because she’d write them herself. “I’d write the plays out of necessity because I needed plays with roles for 30 people,” she says. “Wacky stuff like Killer Junk Food from Outer Space.”
This winter, as 2024 winds to a close, Huerta and the newly minted Kerfuffle Theatre Company have re-tooled one of her campy shows for adult actors. Huerta dusted off a 2006 script for Peter Spam, a Peter Pan parody with “most” of the magic of Neverland, including puppets and an ode to Bollywood. Tastefully absent are the native Americans and the mermaids (whose costumes are rather cumbersome). “We’ve written the mermaids out with one line,” says Huerta. “Stinkerbell was jealous.”
Huerta, who is English, is creating this production based on the nostalgia of the British pantomimes of her youth. “This is the traditional time of year in England to do big camp family shows. Very tongue and cheek.” Peter Spam is family friendly, as Huerta has eased up the (rather dark) source material, which pulsated with childhood trauma and distrust of mothers.
“J. M. Barrie had a genuine belief that as we grow up, we lose the ability to have imagination because other things move in,” she says. But Huerta’s piece is firmly set in the comedic spoof realm, ready to keep the holiday spirits high in the doldrums between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. See Peter Spam at Center Stage Theater December 28–31 (with an early show on New Year’s Eve) for a classic tale with a ridiculous twist.
For tickets and information, see centerstagetheater.org/show-details/peter-spam.
