New Neverland

The ART unveils a holiday alternative

by Scott T. Cummings

This may be as close as the American Repertory Theatre ever gets to staging A Christmas Carol. Starting this week, the troupe joins the holiday scramble for the family entertainment dollar with a new adaptation of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. A year ago, ART revived its irrepressibly popular production of The King Stag for the holidays. Now, in a seeming attempt to capture lightning in a bottle yet again, the company turns to a tale so loaded with mythic and psychological truth that it's lent its name to a syndrome -- which is more than even The Wizard of Oz can boast.

J.M. Barrie's play premiered in London on December 27, 1904, but the versions best known to Americans have been filtered through Broadway or Disney. The ART version, titled Peter Pan and Wendy, comes from director Marcus Stern and playwright Elizabeth Egloff, two of the nation's most promising theater artists. Egloff is the author of The Swan, another play steeped in fantasy, as well as adaptations of Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Racine. Stern, an ART resident director, is known to Cambridge audiences for his postmodern productions of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck and Sam Shepard's Buried Child. His style, developed in frequent collaboration with scenic designer Allison Koturbash, is marked by austere and stunning visuals, ghostly characters surrounded by empty space, and a generally foreboding atmosphere. If there is a dark side to Peter Pan, a Grimm side, you would expect Marcus Stern to find it.

Speaking over the telephone, the playwright warns against typecasting the director. "For all of the darkness and sophistication that has been in his other pieces, underneath that there is a Marcus who likes to jump around with a lampshade on his head," Egloff says. And she should know: Stern directed the first production of The Swan when director and playwright were both graduate students at Yale in the late 1980s.

As it turns out, Stern's first choice for his subsequent thesis production at Yale was Peter Pan, an idea that was nixed back then for budgetary reasons but remained in the back of his head. When he proposed it for the ART, he says, Egloff came immediately to mind to do a new adaptation. "I felt she would be able to walk that line between the issues and themes, the psychology and philosophy that run through Peter Pan, and the fact that it has to be this absolutely delightful tale that can be enjoyed by kids and adults. I think she's done a nice job of melding all those elements -- the humor, the romance, the sadness, the adventure, the entertainment -- into a wonderful story."

As happy as she was to take on the assignment, Egloff admits that "when I read the play, I couldn't really connect with it at first. I had seen the Broadway show with Mary Martin on TV when I was a kid and I could never connect with the idea of what was to me a middle-aged woman in tights pretending to be a young boy." As she learned more about J.M. Barrie, Egloff found her own way into the material. "He had an older brother who at the age of 13 was killed in a freak skating accident. After that, he took on his brother's identity, not in an official sense, of course, but at times he wore his brother's clothes or would carry on entire conversations with his mother, at her instigation, in which she would call him by the dead boy's name and he would respond as the dead boy. This Victorian notion that embracing death in the midst of life is not pathological and is in fact healthy was something I could identify with. It seemed to explain Peter Pan as literally the boy who never grew up."

Stern is candid about the challenge he feels to honor the expectations an audience will bring to Peter Pan and Wendy. He speaks of "taking care of the story" in a way that mixes craftsmanship with custodial responsibility. For him, this required working on "two tracks simultaneously," one that ignored outside expectations enough for the company to discover the Peter Pan story they wanted to tell, and another that satisfies enough expectations for the audience, as he says, "to let go of Mary Martin and Cathy Rigby. I want to make sure that we are really clear about the story we are putting across and that it feels fun and loving and sad and scary and lyrical and goofy in the right way for us. And we hope that will be okay for the audience."

What is the Peter Pan story they are putting across? Beneath the adventure, the fantasy, and the romance, Stern suggests, it is about "reaching out to people that you love or need or want, the fear that is involved in that, and the recalcitrance and reticence that comes from that fear." He sees almost all the characters -- Peter and Wendy, Mr. and Mrs. Darling, Peter and the Lost Boys, even Hook and the pirates -- as reaching out tentatively and then pulling back in some fashion. "They're both afraid that they're going to be abandoned and afraid that they're going to be embraced, and since those are basically the only two possibilities, it becomes a frightening proposition. It's just like real life."

Peter Pan and Wendy begins previews this Friday (December 12) and runs in repertory with ART's production of The Bacchae through January 22.