PETER PAN
Center Theater
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Barrie’s obsession was more than a little unhealthy–but its intensity is what gives Peter Pan a power lacking in most other children’s entertainment, of Barrie’s era and our own. It’s the reason the play became an annual holiday attraction in England after its Christmastime premiere 89 years ago. Of course, the less tidy aspects of the story are often swept under the rug–certainly in America, where audiences like their children’s stories light and simple. Reviewing Maude Adams’s Peter back in 1905, one critic waxed eloquent about the fairy tale’s “lovely, sweet, and wholesome” qualities. Nothing could be further from the truth. Peter and his fairy, Tinker Bell, are mean, possessive, arrogant, and very vulnerable.
Center Theater’s revival of Peter Pan hearkens back to the true spirit of Barrie’s sprite, named after the pipe-playing pagan god of pastoral pleasure. Director Dale Calandra not only dispenses with the songs (added to the play in the mid-1950s for Mary Martin), he interpolates subtextual material from Barrie’s wry, witty stage directions, giving it to the newly created character of a narrator. As played with creamy poise by Monica Mary McCarthy, she’s an understanding, reasonable figure, forgiving of the idiotic excesses of grown-ups (though she’s quite stern with Mr. Darling, whose fumbling attempts at authority drive his babies into the waiting arms of mischievous Peter) and wisely cognizant of the primal intensity of children’s imaginations.
Mounted by Touchstone Theatre for the last eight years as an alternative to the myriad Scrooges and Santas that grow like baobabs this time of year, this Little Prince is true to its source, for better and for worse. It’s witty, sweet without being cloying, sad without being depressing, and full of worthy lessons. But it’s also rather dull; very little actually happens in the book or the stage version, whose narrative thrust is carried almost entirely by the aviator narrator. Director Ivana Bevacqua tries to brighten things up with choreographic interludes (two women play astral birds and dancing roses) and colorful costumes by Patricia Hart (the Little Prince’s dashing outfit is modeled after Saint-Exupery’s own illustrations). Blessedly, the actors all carefully avoid the whininess and exaggeration too often associated with children’s theater; Christopher Vasquez is a gentle, uncondescending narrator, Raymond Mark is a sly Fox, and diminutive Brendon DeMay (a Dennis the Menace look-alike) is a self-possessed if rather bland Little Prince.
