Adapted by Liza Lorwin from the play and novel Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

Produced by Ms. Lorwin and Mabou Mines for Arena Stage

Reviewed by Tim Treanor

Something very unusual is happening on the Kreeger stage.  I don’t mean the story, which is one of the world’s most familiar.  Rather, that the avant-grade theatre troupe Mabou Mines and the incandescent Karen Kandel are reinventing the very grammar of storytelling in order to open up Peter Pan’s melancholy heart.

To say that they tell it with Bunraku-style puppetry is to immediately relegate it to the world of the fey or the exotic, so let’s not call them puppets.  Instead, let’s say that Peter, Hook, Smee and the lost boys are what we always knew they were – figments of Mrs. Darling’s desperate imagination.  One “terrible Friday” she came home with her husband from a dinner party to see her three children silhouetted against the sky with another boy, whom she called “Peter Pan”.  By the time she was into the house, they had winked out of existence. [Read more...]