Fear of Flying

The perennial Peter Pan is buoyant children’s fare, right? Think again.

By Celia Wren

In recent months, American audiences have tasted the anguish of impossible desire, when Edward Albee herded his Goat onto Broadway. They have raged at human faithlessness with an outbreak of Medeas and stared into the abyss of epistemological uncertainty with dozens of stagings of Proof. But let's put this light stuff to the side for a moment and contemplate the most basic human fears—dread about aging, loneliness, time, the libido, family trauma, the gender wars, death. Let us walk on the dark side. Let's discuss Tinker Bell.

Walt Disney's 1953 animated film may have painted the adventures of Peter Pan and his fairy sidekick in sprightly cartoon colors, endowing the world of Never Land with a reputation for adorable whimsy. And the musical that premiered the following year (lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, Betty Comden and Adolph Green; music by Mark Charlap and Jule Styne) may have shored up the tale's notoriety as twee entertainment, forever associating the eponymous hero with visions of a flying Mary Martin in tights. Steven Spielberg may have toyed with a little adult-scale gravitas in his 1991 Hook, but the subdued reception accorded a more recent movie, Disney's cartoon sequel Return to Never Land (which slipped into public consciousness last year with all the clamor of a falling piece of lint) only seemed to confirm the pervasive assumption that the story is unremarkable G-rated fare.

But the fantasy that the English writer J.M. Barrie unleashed with his 1904 play Peter Pan: The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up, followed by the 1911 novel version, seethes with psychosexual subtext and existential angst. Consider the story's preoccupation with the concept of the Mother; or that phallic arrow the Lost Boys shoot at Wendy; or the missing hand—can you say castration complex?—of the evil Captain Hook; or the fact that Hook's nemesis, the crocodile, has swallowed a clock and so become a slithering personification of Time. Reflect on Peter Pan's dread of maturity (read: sexuality or responsibility); his abusive, co-dependent relationship with Tinker Bell, who might benefit from a stay in a battered-fairies' shelter; or his brutal, albeit unintentional, betrayal of Wendy when his memory fails and he forgets to fetch her each spring, as promised. Recall his bleakly mystical, and terrifying, comment that "To die will be an awfully big adventure." No wonder that Peter Llewelyn Davies—one of five English brothers who, as boys, became the first audience for Barrie's Peter Pan tales—once called the story "that terrible masterpiece."

Some time after making that comment, Davies, who is often said to be the primary model for the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up, committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train in the London underground. As this incident suggests, details from Barrie's life—together with the lives of his acquaintances and family—can also help fuel dark readings of Peter Pan. As a child, for example, Barrie strove to replace, and in some sense even become, his older brother, who had been killed in a tragic accident. Years later, the writer's own childless (and possibly unconsummated) marriage ended in divorce, while he became fascinated with the Davies boys, who were orphaned in the years after he met them. Death, unhappiness and obsession, in other words, haunted the world of Peter Pan's creator, and theatre artists who stage the tale in our gossip-mongering age often bring this historical context to bear on the production, rather in the way that Lewis Carroll's curious enthusiasm for little girls informs dramatizations of Alice in Wonderland.

With such ore to mine, it's not surprising that artists have continued to reimagine and re-stage the terrible masterpiece, often drawing out its melancholy, or even its subversiveness—witness the notorious 1968 incident in which authorities in Madison, Wisc., brought obscenity charges against director Stuart Gordon's partly nude political satire, which depicted pixie dust as LSD. In more recent days, even Hollywood has not been immune to the Never Land virus: scheduled for a 2003 release are both a live action Peter Pan movie and a J.M. Barrie biopic starring Johnny Depp. On the thespian front, by the end of the 2002-03 season, several theatres across the country will have taken on the Comden/Green/Styne musical and others hosted Mabou Mines's acclaimed (and suitably dark) 1997Peter and Wendy. In the latter half of 2002, Baltimore's Center Stage opened its 40th season with an ambitious remounting of the original Barrie script, while the baleful Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan turned out to be a surprise hit for Chicago's one-year-old House Theatre. And Philadelphia's Prince Music Theater presented the American premiere of the 1996 English musical Peter Pan and Wendy, which director Ted Sperling set amid the ruins of post-World War II London.

Several of these productions have featured an adult male actor in the role of Peter, reversing a crossdressing tradition that was set when Nina Boucicault starred in the original London production and Maude Adams, the following year, interpreted the part in America, where the play proved even more of a sensation than it had been in England. Casting a male Peter, artists associated with recent productions have noted, creates greater scope for sexual tension, while capitalizing on Peter Pan's implicit message about miscommunication between the sexes. Center Stage's artistic director Irene Lewis, who directed that theatre's Peter Pan, says she engaged 37-year-old actor Jefferson Mays to play Peter because the sexual undercurrent is a crucial part of Barrie's scenario. From Wendy's point of view, Lewis points out, the whole Never Land escapade is a love story, while Peter brushes this possibility off. "The trade-off for no emotional involvement—I found that very interesting," says Lewis. "That's what drew me to the play. I think that is why it has endured. That idea is troubling and universal."

With punk-style blue hair and a glowering energy that seemed perpetually on the verge of violence, Mays also drew attention to the theme of Peter Pan as threat. Kicking over toys, stabbing a doll with a parasol and brandishing a knife, Mays seemed to menace the domestic harmony of the Darling household and, on a broader scale, the bourgeois status quo that household represented.

Those unsettling overtones were underscored by the subtly off-kilter Edwardian nursery-room set created by Robert Israel, who is primarily known for his work in opera. Cluttered along the thrust stage between tiny white four-poster beds were toy blocks that, disconcertingly, varied hugely in scale, some being just a few inches long, while others were nearly chair-sized—the discrepancy seeming to hint that this Peter Pan was not as safe or familiar as a Disney-bred audience might assume. At the end of the first scene, Captain Hook's cohorts invaded the nursery and wreaked havoc with the beds and blocks, which thereafter served as elements in a make-do fantasy world: Drawn in a circle and draped with sheets, they formed the Lost Boys' "Wendy house," and gathered into a prow, they represented a pirate ship. In a nice touch—given that Peter Pan broods over the enigma of time—the lath-thin grandfather clock that had stood sentinel over the Darling nursery metamorphosed into the pirate-ship mast and flew a skull and crossbones.

Because the original scene elements remained in sight in this way, each Never Land scene seemed to violate the innocence of the nursery. One was even tempted to wonder whether Peter Pan, his enemies and his followers were hallucinations conjured up in the minds of the Darling children. "You just think lovely wonderful thoughts and they lift you up into the air," Peter Pan explains to the flying-challenged Wendy in a particularly saccharine line from the Barrie script. But it is hard to watch some modern Peter Pans without reflecting that few of our waking thoughts are airborne-certified lovely.

This psychological truism, as it happens, grounded the somber Peter Pan that New York's Irondale Ensemble Project mounted a little over a year ago. According to artistic director Jim Niesen, Barrie himself was counting on his audiences to come up with some distinctly dark, un-lovely thoughts in reaction to the play. "Barrie was of the mind that, as an adult watching the play, you should be rooting desperately for Hook to beat Peter," says Niesen, who also worked on a 1989 Irondale piece that used a Peter Pan narrative structure to explore the life of Abbie Hoffman.

Spinning Barrie in a new direction in 2001, Niesen drew inspiration in part from Ann Yeoman's Now or Neverland, a Jungian analysis of Peter Pan-as-psychodrama that places Peter on a spectrum of archetypes alongside Icarus, Dionysus and Lucifer. Working from the text of the novel, rather than the play, the artistic director wrote a script centered on a narrator—Barrie—whose snippets of description linked and supplemented the enacted scenes, performed around a net that evoked both pirate-ship rigging and the web of a monstrous spider. In some sense, the artistic director says, Irondale intended to suggest that the happenings on stage—including a combative, adult-sized Tinker Bell and a crocodile created from the bodies of ensemble members slinking in unison—were taking place in Barrie's mind. "The play became an extended Barrie," Niesen says.

Irondale's was not the first Peter Pan to include a narrator—John Caird and Trevor Nunn, for instance, built such a figure into the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1982 Peter Pan, which was cobbled together from various Barrie texts, including a never-filmed 1920 movie scenario written for Charlie Chaplin. More recently, composer George Stiles and lyricist Anthony Drewe (creators of the Olivier Award-winning Honk!) slotted a storyteller into their musical Peter Pan and Wendy, which made its American debut at the Prince Music Theater in December after stagings in Copenhagen and London. According to Ted Sperling, director of the Prince production, the character of the Storyteller enhances the play with "a lot of the whimsy and wryness of the J.M. Barrie novel," complementing the work's rather sober insights, which include the fact that "only through letting go of your children do they have a chance to grow up."

When you get right down to it, the author/narrator trope is a natural for Barrie's tale, because Peter Pan is, in some sense, a story about storytelling: Peter eavesdrops on the Darlings' story hour, and he coaxes Wendy out of the nursery so that she can tell stories to the Lost Boys back in Never Land. This meta-literary theme becomes the center of gravity for some theatrical incarnations. Liza Lorwin, the creator of Mabou Mines's Peter and Wendy, considers that her piece has always been about "the act of reading"—or, more broadly, the act of making art. "What you're watching is the performers in the act of imagining," she says. "Whether it's the fully realized bunraku puppets, or the by-now-falling-apart wooden Lost Boys, or in some cases just a handkerchief, there is the same intensity—the bringing to life of those props." This meditation on art-making, she thinks, feeds the piece's emotional ebb and flow. "It's not a maudlin work. It's not about endless loss. It's simultaneously about the full imaginative experience and our consciousness of desire thwarted."

But ambivalence mists Barrie's parable about the imaginative experience: A story, he reminds us, retains its power only as long as the hearers will permit. Peter Pan "is largely about faith," according to the literary critic Humphrey Carpenter, who points to the famous scene in the play in which Peter, to save the dying Tinker Bell, cries for the audience to clap if they believe in fairies. It's a moment that seems to capture the theatrical situation: The audience applauds when it assents and believes. But Carpenter also asserts that with the "terrible whimsy" of scenes like this—with their references to fairies and mermaids and their hyperbolic sentimentality—Barrie is ultimately mocking the audience's willingness to believe.

Last fall, Chicago's House Theatre picked up on that ambivalence and mockery in The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan, a grim take on the story that wowed the Windy City, attracting so many ticket buyers that the original six-week run was extended to nearly five months. The House version, written by executive director Phillip C. Klapperich, included some amusing touches, like a 30-foot Chinese parade-style dragon that served as crocodile, or the scene in which Wendy, Tinker Bell and Tiger Lily, dressed in red sequined dresses ("Think the Supremes," Klapperich says), lip-synched to Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools." The show also hit some melancholy notes, however: When Tinker Bell drank poison…well, she died. Klapperich says he and his colleagues decided not to solicit applause for the ailing fairy ("We thought that would be mean"), but audiences accustomed to traditional Peter Pans often applauded anyway. "People clap to save her, but it doesn't work," the executive director commented in an interview toward the end of the run. "It's very sad." But the real tragedy in Terrible Tragedy, in Klapperich's opinion, was not Tinker Bell's kicking the bucket, but Peter's refusal to age, since "the adventures he creates in Never Land don't compare to what you face in the real world."

Peter Pan reminds us, in short, that we just can't win. Like the endearing, untrustworthy Boy Who Won't Grow Up, contentment and meaning are elusive. Both imagination and reality can turn treacherous. Childhood fails to satisfy, and so does adult life. If you love—like Wendy—you're asking for trouble; if you don't—like Peter—there's something wrong with you. And no matter what happens, time stalks us like a crocodile, and death, though an awfully big adventure, is not one we care to undertake.

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