Peter and Alice Read Free

perpetual child.
    PETER : There’s no such thing.
    ALICE : You didn’t know him.
    She moves away from him. He pursues .
    PETER : Did you?
    ALICE : For several years he was at the very center of our lives.
    PETER : “The center of your lives?”
    ALICE : Yes. He’d tell us his stories, on the green or rowing on the river, and then off he’d go to let us dream about them.
    PETER : And where did he go?
    ALICE : I beg your pardon?
    PETER : When he left you, where did he go, what did he do?
    ALICE : I don’t know… I imagine he returned home and went on with his life.
    PETER : No. He didn’t. You were his life.
    She stops .
    PETER : It’s just like Barrie with us… You weren’t a “dream child.” You were a child of flesh and bone. He looked into your eyes and you looked back.
    ALICE : We were a diversion, no more. He was a grown man with an important career and friends of his own… Three adolescent girls, all giggles and elbows? I’m sure he was happy to go home and forget us.
    PETER : Grown men do not “return home and go on with their lives .” That’s what children do. Children pass gaily through life with no sense of the weight of events… Grown ups look in the mirror, and then look at the clock… They walk into an empty house that feels emptier every day that passes, for it brings them ever-closer to the final and inescapable loneliness: that last echoing room where you are truly alone.
    Beat .
    PETER : There are no simple childhood memories, Mrs. Hargreaves. I told you, it’s complicated. Everything’s occluded.
    ALICE : How do you know he was lonely?
    PETER : Ah… If he were not, would he have loved you so much?
    ALICE : How do you know he loved me?
    PETER : Would he have written the book otherwise?
    ALICE : So…it’s to be a love story.
    PETER : Aren’t they all?
    A voice surprises him:
    BARRIE : (Offstage.) No, Peter, you’re wrong… There’s no love in it! No romance, I promise you that…
    JAMES BARRIE enters briskly and goes toward PETER . He’s a stunted, sad, inspiring Scotsman .
    BARRIE : There’s not a jot of love or moonlight to be had, except for that moon which can be glimpsed at dead midnight over the Tyburn gallows after those bloodthirsty brigands have met their end and sway from the gibbet. Gather ’round, lads…
    He continues his story. It is 1901 .
    Music builds .
    BARRIE : Here at Black Lake Cottage there’s a lake which – you will not be surprised to learn – is black. But do you know why it’s black? Not the murky water, though tolerably murky it is. Not the depth of it where no light can pass, though deep it is. It’s black because of the souls of all the dead men trapped at the bottom, it’s been blackened by wickedness, by them that walked the plank, that felt the touch o’ the cat, that had their throats slit by that fearsome captain afore his breakfast. What’s his name again?
    PETER : I can’t remember…
    ALICE : You mean you can’t forget.
    BARRIE : What’s his name again, Peter?
    PETER : Really, I don’t —
    ALICE : You do.
    BARRIE : Come on now! … Feel the spray of the ocean, like you used to when you were a boy; when you wanted to sail the seas on a triple-master, like every boy does, to see the world, to have adventures, to fly and fight and fly again.
    CARROLL : Be young forever.
    BARRIE : What’s his name, that piratical gentleman who had us quaking under the covers at night?!
    PETER : Hook !
    BARRIE : Yes, Hook! Now you’re with me! You’re on the deck of the mighty galleon as it rolls and pitches, and we’re lashed to the wheel together, lad, through the cataracts!
    PETER : ’Round the Horn!
    BARRIE : Until the maelstrom passes!
    ALICE : Do you feel your heart pounding?!
    PETER : Yes! Like racing passion, like love!
    ALICE : So in a flash you’re young again!
    PETER