'Peter and Wendy' undercut by overproduction

Children are fairly easy to please and adults are ridiculously easy to please but children and adults are not simultaneously easy to please. Those rare works that do bridge the gap between the two audiences usually share a certain seductive, halluc-inatory air: The Simpsons (which is rife with dream sequences and occasional drug-aided psychotic interludes), much of the "Looney Toons" catalog (the singing-and-dancing frog and Bugs Bunny whacked out on ether come to mind), Alice in Wonderland (all of it).

Children instinctively respond to any endeavor in which a lucid imagination is used as a means of subversion, even if they're not exactly aware of what is being subverted; adults catch on (sometimes), and that's what keeps them tuned in. It's not quite precise to say that these entertainments work on two levels--the kids and the grown-ups are both on the same page, only the grown-ups are checking the footnotes.

The current Yale Repertory Theater production, Peter and Wendy, which employs dozens of puppets and a single narrator in recasting the J. M. Barrie novel for the stage, doesn't even attempt to keep young and old in the same boat. Instead, it tries a high-and-low, divide-and-conquer approach to grabbing and holding the audience's attention.

The kids, one supposes, are meant to be enthralled by the cartoonish sound effects, the absurdly sorry sight of a marionette Peter Pan sobbing into a hanky, a seven-foot crocodile turning a tango, and the occasional Disneyfied, Peabo Bryson-ready ballad about lost childhood. The adults are expected to simply coo over the play's metatheatrical trappings: the imaginary house within a house within a stage or the hooded, faceless puppeteers bounding around at their puppets' beck and call.

In its ever so postmodern way, Peter and Wendy is as much about the tools one uses to tell a story as it is about the (well-worn, well-loved) story itself. The set looks like a pop-up book, replete with beautiful usage of screen projection and shadow puppetry to evoke the journey to Neverland. Another great resource are the puppeteer's limber bodies, which double as seesaws in the children's nursery or as shipmasts on the high seas. These are smart, elegant touches, but the very subtlety of these moments undermines them, since they are so few and far between in this blaring, frenetic play.

Since Peter and Wendy is such a melancholy and darkly edged fable, and because it is so well-known even by young children, the hysterical pitch of Karen Kandel's narration and the "Riverdance"/Titanic soundtrack bursts of Celtic folk songs that frequently punctuate the action are especially grating. They seem to violate the essential spirit of Barrie's tale.

It's a pity, since Kandel possesses a resonant, almost operatic speaking voice and a sharp ear for accents and intonations. Her ridiculous but also vaguely menacing Mr. Darling sounds like Oliver Reed in Tommy, her effete Captain Hook like Jeremy Irons doing Claus von Bulow. But Kandel forgets that, as the dominant figure and sole voice of the play, she needs to hang back a little at times.

Instead, director Lee Breuer allows her to go full-throttle for all two and a half hours, and while it's a virtuoso performance, not all that virtuosity is for the best. Her lisping, clueless Wendy--the heart and soul of Barrie's story--is unforgivably vacuous and her supposedly Scottish Peter treads water somewhere between a Cockney accent and an Irish brogue. What's worse, though, is that Kandel is miked. This woman's voice all by itself could probably fill the Yale Bowl and she's wearing a headset like she's Garth Brooks.

The audience is simply overwhelmed, mainly because of the juxtaposition of a small-scale, rather antiquated art form--puppetry--with such unrelentingly bombastic sound and staging. When asked what she thought of the play, one of the smaller audience members in attendance replied, "It was loud." Pressed further, she added that she liked the puppets. This reviewer heartily concurs.

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