A 'Peter Pan' For All Ages

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."