Theatre Bay Area Magazine, August 2008
Of Wishes and Wizards
by Sam Hurwitt, Associate Editor

When the people from the Make-A-Wish Foundation came to talk to Rio Popper, her parents were pretty sure they knew what her wish was going to be. She is a huge fan of the Harry Potter books, and when the family had talked about it before she’d said she might want to meet the series’ author. In the meantime, it turned out that Rio had come up with another idea. She wanted to act in a Harry Potter play.

“I came up with this idea, and I thought, you know, that might be a good idea!” the energetic 7-year-old says, bouncing in a chair in the living room of her Redwood City home. “It’s mostly just based on that I love Harry Potter so much.”

“When we knew they were going to come over, we talked about what kind of things you really want,” her dad, Doug Popper, says to Rio. “Things that we could never arrange for you as parents but Make-A-Wish could. Meeting J.K. Rowling was a big one, but maybe we suggested that. And then when the Make-A-Wish people came here, three of them and you went off into your room, behind closed doors, and you guys came out and suddenly there was a completely different wish. We thought, ‘A Harry Potter play? How difficult!’”

In order to qualify for Make-A-Wish, a child has to be between 2.5 and 18 years old and diagnosed with a life-threatening medical condition. Rio’s illness is retinoblastoma, eye cancer of the retina due to a genetic mutation.

“It’s a kind of eye cancer that affects your retina, and it sometimes makes you blind,” Rio explains. “You could die from it, but it’s a 1-in-20 chance.”

She was diagnosed with the cancer at 6 months old. Two years of chemotherapy stopped the tumors from growing, but finally surgery was required to remove them, which also resulted in blindness.

“Enucleation removes the retina, and that’s where the cancers always form,” Doug says of the surgical procedure. “So now, except for the loss of vision, we don’t have to worry. We just have to worry about a stubborn girl,” he adds teasingly.

Rio was almost 3 years old when she lost her sight, so she has a good understanding of colors, although she says she only remembers a few of them.

“There are so many,” she says. “I can remember like four of them. Well, five if you count red. Green I only remember because of the grass, and I only remember one shade of it.”

In addition to her pet snakes, her room is full of arts and crafts projects that she’s been working on, including colorful page borders for books and glued-rock replicas of objects from the Harry Potter books that she made in her lapidary class: the Hogwarts castle, Mr. Weasley’s car, and a quaffle, snitch and a bludger for the game of Quidditch.

“You know what I’m going to make with some of my not-so-good necklaces?” Rio says. “A pretend Firebolt,” she answers, referring to Harry Potter’s flying broom.

Rio reads Braille, but she knows the Harry Potter series from audiobooks—the American versions read by Jim Dale, which she’s listened to at least 10 times.

In the play, Rio wanted to play Ginny Weasley, a character in the books who, in addition to her various strengths, happens to be Harry’s girlfriend. Rio insists, however, that loving Harry is not the only reason she identifies with Ginny.

Of course, in order for Rio to play Ginny, the play would have to be created in the first place—and before that, they’d have to have Rowling’s permission. Make-A-Wish managed to clear it with both Rowling and Warner Bros., under certain conditions—that it not be represented as an official Harry Potter event, not have merchandise or contests associated with it, be in good taste and noncommercial—restrictions that wouldn’t interfere at all with fulfilling Rio’s wish.

Now all they needed was someone to actually create and put on the play for Rio to be in. Make-A-Wish’s Sarah Grojean contacted Shawn Ferreyra and Amy Cole of San Francisco’s El Gato Theatre Company, with whom she’d worked when all three were at TheatreWorks.

“Sarah called me up and said, ‘We’ve got this incredible project. We hope you’re interested,’” Ferreyra says. “She knew that we ran this theatre company where part of it is creating adult work, but part of it is also doing original family work. So she said, ‘We have this little girl. Her wish is to star in her own play. It’s a Harry Potter play. Do you think you can pull this off?’ Neither one of us had read any Harry Potter books or seen any of the movies, but we said, ‘Absolutely, we can do it!’”

Rio wanted the play to be based on a scene from the seventh and final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in which Ginny Weasley and two of her friends sneak into the headmaster’s office to steal what they believe to be the Sword of Gryffindor. Interestingly, it’s not a scene that’s really shown in the book. Harry, who’s on the run, is told about it after the fact.

“The section that she talks about, it’s really just a messenger scene,” says Ferreyra, who was given the task of writing the script. “Someone walks in and says, ‘Hey Harry, guess what happened back at Hogwarts.’ It’s like three pages long in the book. So what she described was that she wanted either a split stage where action is happening here and here, or she wanted what she described as a scrim so you could jump back and forth and have flashbacks and flash-forwards. I thought, ‘This is incredible. This 7-year-old kid has such an understanding of narrative.’”

Rio had been to the theatre only a few times, attending The Lion King and a couple of productions of Annie, but what she heard captured her imagination.

“It’s mostly because I saw acting, and I just thought that might be a fun thing to try out,” Rio says. “Nobody knows this part of me, because everyone thinks it’s just because I love Harry Potter.”

Ferreyra, Cole and director Rebecca Longworth went to meet Rio and her parents, Doug and Helen, and they all immediately felt it was a good fit.
“In the beginning as parents we were a little worried,” Doug says. “We wanted to be sure that Rio would have enough time to learn the part and practice. Then we met the people from the El Gato company and thought they were great. They really focused in on Rio.”

Right off the bat, that meant going over the story in some detail.
“Initially she said she wanted like five actors, and she wanted the antagonist to be Snape,” Ferreyra recalls. “But then when we met with her she said, ‘Well, I really think there would be more tension if there were these two other antagonists.’ She kept saying, ‘I know you’re the writer, so I don’t want to infringe on your creativity’—in those words, too—‘but I really think it would be much more suspenseful if it was these other two characters.’ I thought, okay, I can’t disappoint the wish girl.”

Ferreyra had done a ton of research—watching the movies, reading the books, and consulting fan-made encyclopedias of Potter arcana—but when he sent Rio the first draft of the script she had a number of notes, mostly about details that didn’t gibe with the established continuity of the books.

When I talk to Ferreyra he’s just finished casting the play, titled Harry Potter and the Sword of Gryffindor.

“We deliberately sought out kids who looked a little younger but had the acting chops to carry this story. We wanted to make sure they could stand next to Rio and look the right age. We got the dream cast of grownups. We wrote Actors’ Equity, the regional office, and said, ‘Do you think you can find it in your heart to let us use Equity actors?’ They wrote us a nice letter back saying, ‘We are 100 percent behind this, and of course you can use Equity actors.’ We had to make sure we had a really good sound designer for her to feel like she’s at Hogwarts, so we got Cliff Caruthers to donate his time.”

Sequoia High School in Redwood City also let them use their newly renovated theatre for the performance, which is set for a day in August. Both 42nd Street Moon and Z Space donated rehearsal space, and Lighthouse for the Blind and Theater Breaking Through Barriers (formerly Theater by the Blind) gave company members tips on working with blind actors.

“It’s amazing when you do a project like this, how many people are willing to help you,” Ferreyra says. “We were overwhelmed by the generosity of people. Make-A-Wish told me that they even want to try to have a marquee with her name on it outside and a red carpet so that she can have that experience. We’re trying to make it like the Rolls Royce of theatrical experiences for Rio.”

Despite having conceived the play in remarkable detail, Rio says she doesn’t take credit for the idea.

“Well, it was kind of J.K. Rowling’s idea to make Harry Potter,” she says, “which made me feel I’d like to be in a Harry Potter play.”