What could be more American than the person who sees something they've never done before?

Dreams they could do it. It goes after that dream.

Well, let's begin today with a woman who dreams of directing a play.

In the small town where she lives, a college town somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line,

in the hills of Appalachia, a town which will remain for our purposes today, unnamed.

I don't think she had ever directed, and she claimed to have acted,

and it was never really quite clear just what her credentials were.

But she had managed to convince the local theater department of this college that she should direct a production of Peter Pan.

When he was in the 10th grade in 1973, Jack Hitt saw her production.

And like everybody else in town, he heard about it for weeks beforehand.

Slowly but surely, you know, you began to hear, you know, sort of rumors about this production.

For example, I know that they had spent a lot of money renting these flying apparatuses out of

New York. And apparently there's like one company and a handful of these apparatuses.

And sort of get them was a major coup.

This is a story not just of a mediocre play or a terrible play.

When it comes down to it, it's not even a story about a play.

This is a story about a fiasco and about what makes a fiasco.

And one ingredient of many fiascos is that great, massive, heart-wrenching chaos and failure are more likely to occur

when great ambition is coming to play, when plans are big, expectations great, hopes at their highest.

And what you have to understand is that everybody in this sort of community understood that there were, there was certainly

a sort of air of everyone sort of reaching beyond their own grasp. Every actor was sort of in a role

that was just a little too big for them. Every aspect of the set and the crew.

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