A 'Peter Pan' For All Ages

By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 14, 2008

Olney Theatre Center will open its curtains next week on a production that explores the meaning of time and of family, of life and death, love and loss.

It's called "Peter Pan -- The Musical."

The play had been on the company's calendar for several years, long preceding the arrival of Eve Muson. But when the longtime Boston University theater professor joined the company and was tasked with directing the children's classic, she decided one thing: This "Peter Pan" would fix its gaze on those too old to exist in Neverland.

The play "is utterly delightful, of course," Muson says. "But it's also about our very complicated relationship with growing up and the passage of time. It speaks to children and to adults as well."

When Muson began thinking about the play last winter, she found herself envisioning an adult cast. "And I wondered why I was jumping to that conclusion," she recalls.

She threw herself into researching the story of "Peter Pan," which was written by J.M. Barrie, a childless man whose first draft was completed in the early 1900s. It was based on stories he frequently told to a family of five rambunctious boys. (Barrie would eventually become guardian of the brothers after their parents died.)

Muson says that what struck her most profoundly about "Peter Pan," the story of a timeless boy's adventures with the Darling children, Wendy, John and Michael, was that "it's an adult's yearning and observation and idealization of childhood. It's not a child's point of view." And in casting adults, the production would be mirroring that vantage point, a grown-up's reimagining of youth.

The casting also allows the production to plumb more depth out of the story, exploring themes that are often glossed over in kid-centric versions. Without changing the fabric of the story, for instance, Muson has ratcheted up the complexity of the relationship between Peter and Captain Hook. In that complexity, she says, lies the tension that always results as one generation usurps another.

Muson wanted a cast of adults, and she wanted one thing more: that Peter be played by a man. The role has been performed by women since its first production, even though Barrie objected to that tradition.

The author "always imagined Peter as an utterly boyish little boy," Muson says. "He's a rough-and-tumble, dirty, impish, volatile, lovable, maddening little boy."

The director wanted her Peter to be that way, too. To Muson the meat of the tale is the affection between Peter and Wendy, two children playing at being grown up and truly falling in love even though only one of them will ever really grow up.

"I was interested in the romance between them and the heartbreak between them," she says. "He can't love her the way she wants."

Some of Muson's colleagues initially balked at the idea of a male Peter, and she agreed to audition men and women for the part. But the more actors she saw, the more she became convinced that it had to be a man. And even then she struggled to find one who embodied the "wicked glee" she wanted in a Peter.

Though actors from all over the East Coast auditioned, the role went to Daniel Townsend, a 20-year-old Howard County native. Townsend "just gets how to combine openheartedness with playfulness," Muson says. "And he's extremely cute."

While casting was underway, musical director Christopher Youstra worked to revise the music to fit the voices of adult singers, including the deep range of a grown-up Peter Pan.

Muson's production is still very much appropriate for children, but in giving it layers of maturity, she stripped away some of the leafy-green ambiance.

"I was interested in a very spare, modern design," she says. It's a big, open stage where mood shifts are denoted by light and projection. The costumes, too, are meant to capture the essence of each character without deference to Disney or the audience's preconceived notions of Hook, Tinker Bell or the Lost Boys.

"They're wonderful and beautiful and different and funny," Muson says of the interpretations by costume designer Pei Lee.

Muson hopes that the combination of all these elements will result in a nuanced production that appeals equally to kids and adults. "If we get it right, there's the possibility for this wonderful doubleness: that we see [the characters] as kids and we see what their adult urges are."

Even more, Muson hopes that adults in the audience can chase down some shadow of themselves through the story of Peter Pan.

"I want them to laugh and have their spirits be lifted by Peter's joy," she says. "And I also want them to be moved by our own mourning for childhood."