My cousin is starring as Nana in a production of Peter Pan. So I gather up my mom, younger sister, nephew, and niece to go see it.
It’s my nephew and niece’s first play. I’m not sure if at ages five and four they will be able to sit through the whole thing, but it’s an experiment I’m willing to try for Peter Pan with its representation of the irrepressible spirit of youth contrasted against the grown-up Captain Hook and the ticking crocodile with its crushing jaws and sharp teeth as the symbol of the inevitability of time, age, and death.
Ever since I first read Peter Pan, probably sometime in my twenties, I was enchanted by it.
The story’s voice itself, J.M. Barrie’s delightful style, is charming while being both subtle and outright with humor.
For example, this when speaking of Wendy’s birth: “For a week or two after Wendy came it was doubtful whether they would be able to keep her, as she was another mouth to feed. Mr. Darling was frightfully proud of her, but he was very honourable, and he sat on the edge of Mrs. Darling’s bed, holding her hand and calculating expenses while she looked at him imploringly.” (page 5).
Or this of Captain Hook: “The pirates disappeared among the trees, and in a moment their Captain and Smee were alone. Hook heaved a heavy sigh, and I know not why it was, perhaps it was because of the soft beauty of the evening, but there came over him a desire to confide….” (page 45).
It’s true that the book has some cringy and dated points, being as it was written by a British citizen in the early 1900s, but it is still a story whose existential elements remain relevant. After all, growing up is a big deal. As is death.
We arrive after the lights have already dimmed and sneak in to find our seats. We’re pretty far in the back and the play is held in a church’s auditorium so there isn’t stadium seating. My sister puts my nephew on her lap and I take my niece upon mine and hope they can see over the heads in front of us. Apparently more civilized than we are, both children seem a little shocked and slightly horrified when we suggest they stand on the chairs. They express their preference for keeping their seats with us.
For a good part of the first act (an hour and a half long) my niece stays on my lap, singing along to the songs (which she does not know), and glancing around. For other parts of the act, she gets up to dance in the meager aisle. For all of it, she eats the snacks I’d brought along.
She pretends to be frightened by the pirates. She notices the stage lights behind and above us and draws my attention to them time and again. And every time a song ends and the audience begins to clap, her body tightens with panic—for her hands are holding a bag of fruit or the box of popcorn my mom bought for her (and a separate one for her brother) and she needs both her hands to clap. I take the bag or box from her and then she is free to clap along with delight and joy. And free again to take the bag or box from me again when the play resumes.
Separated by several seats, and entertained as he is by my sister, I cannot tell what my nephew thinks. Except that he laughs when the crocodile—a bipedal creature dressed in a fuzzy outfit of varied green with a nice long tail—comes on stage.
My cousin does a wonderful job of being Wendy, John, and Michael’s dog nanny.
The pirates lurk.
The lost boys shoot Wendy out of the sky.
Tinkerbell, a flickering green light, drinks the poison left by Hook for Peter and begins to fade.
Peter Pan turns to the audience and implores us to clap. For clapping, for belief will bring her back to life.
My niece claps with enthusiasm. My nephew, now on my mom’s lap, is shy about clapping. He doesn’t want to go along with it. So he doesn’t, keeping his hands still and staying firm in his decision to not act. For his attention has wandered from the play and its story. Ever a planner, he’s whispering his ideas to my mom about the schedule for the rest of our day and the elements of the upcoming sleepover at her house (which he’s been planning for months).
And I think of the movie Bogus where the little boy, when confronted with his new guardian who has forgotten her childself and is telling him of the disappointments of her youth which had led her not to clap during a Peter Pan play when Tinkerbell’s light was about to dim, tells her, “My mom and I always clapped.”
I don’t worry about my nephew’s capacity of enjoying his childhood. He does. His imagination is fine. More than that, his attention span and ability to sit still have lasted longer than I’d expected.
We get up at intermission.
We don’t make it back for the second act.
For there is a playground outside. My mom buys both kids an air-inflated sword and a plastic hook. They take their new toys and climb to the top of the structure with its steering wheel and lookout points. From there, they put on their own play of pirate and pirate ship.
At one point, my niece orders me up to steer. I ask her where we are going. When she tells me, I nod. Though I have no idea what she’s said for I still don’t understand the entirety of her language which is part English and a larger part toddler. But we are probably headed to Neverland via the second star to the right and straight on until morning.
In the days that come after my nephew and niece have gone home again, I think about six years ago when my parents and my eldest sister met up with me in Kirriemuir, Scotland. The birth and burial place of J.M. Barrie.
Now these years later, I can’t remember if it I’d known before we scheduled our stay there—being midway between where I’d been on the east coast of Scotland and where they flew in to Aberdeen—that it was Barrie’s birthplace or if I’d only found out after I’d arrived.
Maybe I’d known, for earlier in my year-long adventure, I’d gone to Kensington Gardens in London to see the Peter Pan statue that Barrie himself had commissioned in 1912 and which had been made by Sir George Frampton. In the Gardens not so far from Barrie’s former house. Not far from where Barrie had made friends with the five boys who he’d said when pressed together made up the character of Peter Pan.
In Kirriemuir, we visit Barrie’s grave. We walk past houses with placards claiming Barrie as their son, their author. Past a shop called Wendy’s House.
I think of six years ago, in light of the themes of Peter Pan, and how since those days have passed, my nephew and niece were both born. And both kept—as Wendy was kept by the Darlings despite the costs that Mr. Darling calculated, and as her brothers, too, and though, “there was the same excitement over John, and Michael had even a narrower squeak… both were kept” (page 6).
I think of how my nephew and niece live in that beautiful too short moment of irrepressible youth. That bossy tyrant, “innocent and heartless,” charming child time of the young (page 135). That crowing delight of childhood.
And I think of how much fun it is to be able to fly next to them to Neverland, however the place looks to their imaginations and however it looks to mine.
I think of how also since that time, those few six years ago, the clock stopped ticking its warning and the crocodile was there waiting for my dad. As it waits for all of us.
I think of Captain James Hook and how “above all he retained his passion for good form. Good form! However much he may have degenerated, he still knew that this is all that really matters” (page 103-104). And how he “had one last triumph” at the end in seeing Peter act with bad form. How Hook cried out at his ever-young and long-time foe, “Bad form” and “went content to the crocodile” (page 117).
I think of how, since my dad died, I often ponder the question of what it is to live and to die with good form. Of what it is to die well. To die with grace. How I feel my dad fought his way to the end. How his method better matched Dylan Thomas’s poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night which, as the title suggests, says, “Do not go gentle into that good night/old age should burn and rave at close of day;/rage, rage against the dying light.”
I think of how there is more than one way to live. There is more than one way to die.
In the days after the play, I think of Peter Pan, of youth, of growing up, and of getting eaten by the crocodile.
As I move through my days, nursing grouches, trying to be good, trying to manage whatever it is that being grown up means, confronting decisions, being responsible, feeling overwhelmed, being unresponsible, mismanaging stress, I write stories of my own. Ones that are much less bloodthirsty than Peter Pan. Ones that do not kill off all the pirates. I write stories to stay in touch with my child nature. I write stories because they hold the magic of fairy and Neverland within them. I write so that I don’t forget what it is to be alive.
As the days go by, ticking ticking ticking by, my mother and I discuss life and death, how one’s ways of interacting with the world changes when there are less years ahead of one than there are behind, and as we discuss and discuss again, I think of the famous line from Peter Pan, quoted here at the end of the moment that he’s faced with his own end which goes: “Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A tremour ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one. Next moment he was standing erect on the rock again, with a smile on his face and a drum beating within him. It was saying, ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’” (page 72).
As the days speed by, I think of death and dying in terms of being a big adventure and hope that I can make the living of my life equally as grand.
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