Darker Side of Peter Pan

Playwrights take inspiration where they can find it, and Katherine Burger found it in the mug shots of six South Coast Repertory actors she pinned to a wall in her writing studio in Woodstock, N.Y.

SCR had commissioned Burger to write a new script on the strength of “Morphic Resonance,” a play produced in Los Angeles in 1997.

In an unusual exercise, SCR’s dramaturge, Jerry Patch, sent Burger photos and resumes of the theater’s most experienced company members, most of them regulars since SCR’s first season 35 years ago.

The theater is committed to providing roles each season for this corps of “founding artists” and Patch proposed that Burger write a vehicle for them.

She accepted, pinned up their pictures, and began mulling how to concoct a play around a middle-aged woman and five middle-aged men.

It eventually occurred to her that she was looking at Peter Pan, Wendy and the Lost Boys--grown to middle age without having grown up emotionally, with a now-aging Captain Hook and Crocodile to be their nemeses.

The resulting play, “Ever Ever,” gets its first audience tonight in a staged reading at SCR. Richard Doyle is Peter, Martha McFarland plays Wendy, and John-David Keller and John-Frederick Jones are a pair of bookish Lost Boys. Hal Landon Jr. is Hook, who renews acquaintance with his old but no longer reptilian enemy, Mr. Crocker Dial, played by Don Took.

Peter, Wendy and the Lost Boys share a communal apartment in New York City, Hook is their landlord, and Dial turns up to upset the equilibrium. The play is marked by witty, urbane conversation that gives rein to Burger’s fondness for ornate, well-turned phrases in the Edwardian English style of J.M. Barrie, author of the original play, “Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” (1904) and the subsequent novel, “Peter and Wendy” (1911).

Burger’s aim is not to burnish fond memories of a kiddie story but to explore the darker currents in this modern fairy tale. She broaches issues such as aging, death and the “Peter Pan Syndrome,” pop psychology’s term for grown men whose desire to stay young prevents them from forming mature, committed attachments.

Burger said her own brushes with serious illness attuned her to questions of mortality, and she knew firsthand what it’s like to fall for a noncommittal Peter Pan type.

“It was something I could write about with some authority,” she said in a recent phone interview.

Burger wrote her first draft without consulting Barrie’s books, which she had not read since childhood. Then she went back and read the originals.

“It’s not a wimpy little children’s book. It’s got a lot of acute psychological detail and it’s sort of disturbing,” she said. “Peter is a complicated and not particularly likable character. He’s selfish and solipsistic and cruel, but you love him anyway. He’s the id personified, a pure child.”

The central conflict lies with Wendy: Will she continue to be a mother figure to Peter, knowing he will never give her the romantic love she craves, or will she say goodbye to her household of overgrown boys and try to get on with her life?

Last summer, Burger came to SCR for her first meeting with the strangers who had inspired her play--none of whom she knew beyond their pictures and resumes.

“The whole thing was a little daunting. If they hate it, it’s going to be an awful, terrible experience. I walked into the room and the actors were all over me. ‘We love it, it’s so us.”

Burger, who is in Costa Mesa for rehearsals and the reading, is pleased as well.

Emotions poured out in the rehearsal room during the climactic confrontation between Peter and Wendy, she said.

“It was quite moving. We were all in tears, and it made me quite happy.”

The script contains some obvious belly laughs too. Though scenery won’t be an issue for the reading, the play poses some serious scenic challenges. The Manhattan apartment is a two-story, cutaway design portraying a fantasy land in which one room is a forest and another has a river running through it.

“I’m not so sure I’ll ever get a production of this play because the set is so daunting,” Burger said.

With touching elements, big laughs, witty banter and the Peter Pan franchise going for it, “Ever Ever” could be the kind of play to catch the eye of Broadway producers, for whom an exotic stage design might be a bonus, not a drawback.

“It seems like a lot of hubris to think that far ahead,” said Burger, who has made her living as a manager at the Metropolitan Opera and running a summer art colony in Woodstock. “It’s just so expensive to put on theater, and to say ‘We’re going to do a production of this’ would be a huge step.”

* “Ever Ever,” by Katherine Burger, will be read tonight at 7:30 as part of the NewSCRipts series at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $8. (714) 708-5555.