What’s the cost of childhood fame? Is it always exploitative? How do children navigate being adults in a world that refuses to see them as anything but the child they were? These are the themes of John Logan’s Peter & Alice. Alex Gomez directs the production now playing in Napa at the Lucky Penny Community Arts Center through Feb. 15.
The stellar script begins at the opening of the 1932 Lewis Carroll exhibition in London. It is a fictionalized version of a real meeting between Alice Liddell Hargreaves (Bright Eastman) and Peter Llewelyn Davies (Max Geide). If those names don’t ring a bell, the books written about them will.
Alice Hargreaves was Carroll’s (Dennis O’Brien) inspiration for Alice in Wonderland (Pilar Gonzales). Peter Davies was J.M. Barrie’s (Kade Morrill) inspiration for Peter Pan (an excellent Arthur Mautner). Slipping between memory, fantasy and their current reality, this is a heartbreaking but fascinating look at what it means to grow up…