Peter and Alice

by John Logan

  The word doesn’t come. His mouth gapes horribly.

  This is his stammer.

  He starts to panic.

  CARROLL: P-p-p-p…

  ALICE: Pirate? Poetess?

  PETER: Protagonist?

  CARROLL: P-p-protagonist. Who shall be our heroine? Shall it be one of your sisters? Shall it be Lorina? Or shall it be Edith?

  ALICE: Me!

  CARROLL: Why you then, Alice?

  ALICE: Because I am your dream child. Because they’re awfully silly and I’m not. We understand each other, Mr. Dodgson.

  CARROLL: Like two cryptographers, unlocking the same secret.

  ALICE: I don’t know that word.

  CARROLL: That’s a word you learn when you’re eleven, along with crepuscular and cantilevered… So if we can’t be cryptographers, perhaps we’d best be polar explorers, roped together lest a crevasse or snow-blindness make us lose our way.

  ALICE: I don’t see how one can become blind in snow. I could see losing your way in a cave, or at the bottom of the sea.

  PETER: Or in memory.

  CARROLL: I wonder if we’ll lose our way someday, Alice?

  ALICE: I would think that depends on where we’re going in the first place.

  PETER: You weren’t that clever.

  ALICE: I am now.

  CARROLL: It’s a simple thing to get lost, you know. You glance around and suddenly everything’s changed. Nothing’s like it was, even you in the looking glass. Who you thought you were, you’re not… And you don’t need to be exploring another c-c-c-continent either. You can lose your way right here in Oxford if you’re not careful. Right over that hedge.

  ALICE: Or down that rabbit hole.

  PETER: You didn’t bait him like that.

  CARROLL tells a story. He’s enchanting.

  The buzzing of the insects becomes intoxicating music.

  CARROLL: So imagine a day like this and a girl like you and a sister like Lorina and you find yourself on a riverbank, and there’s a rabbit hole nearby, and perhaps you had one too many jam tarts this morning, so you’re ever so soporific, which is a twelve-year-old word in truth, so on this particular, peculiar day you fall asleep…

  CARROLL continues quietly.

  ALICE: The maladroit stutter, the slanting body, the dreadful shyness all disappeared that afternoon, that golden afternoon when I was ten and we went up the river with my sisters, and we were in the shadow of a haycock because it was blazing hot, and he told the story of Alice underground, my story, which would have died like one of the summer midges, like all the others, only this time I John logan asked him to write it down, because I was the heroine, that day he was beautiful.

  Beat.

  ALICE: That day he had all he needed… He had his story.

  PETER: But what man can live on words?

  ALICE: He was a writer.

  PETER: He was a man.

  ALICE: Not much of one.

  He looks at her, the sharpness surprising.

  She moves away from CARROLL. CARROLL remains. (Once characters are introduced they remain on stage. Lingering like memories or ghosts.)

  ALICE: Not the way I’ve come to know men, adult men. He was a 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 tears himself away. The music fades.

  ALICE: Can’t help yourself.

  PETER: You get caught up.

  ALICE: I know.

  PETER: You can’t breathe.

  ALICE: You don’t want to.

  PETER: That’s their power, these writers, these men of words. Trap baited and sprung, and before you know it you have to chew your leg off to get free.

  ALICE considers BARRIE.

  ALICE: In truth he was a little man.

  PETER: Not when he told his stories.

  ALICE: Who’s the romantic now? … I met him at a reception once and was surprised to find him so terribly diminutive. Famous people should not be so tiny,
it seems dishonest.

  PETER: From the first day, he was all words. My brothers and I were playing in the park and the most enormous dog came bounding over. His dog, Porthos, like a lure it was.

  ALICE: There’s that trap again.

  PETER: How he enmeshed himself in our lives! Before long he was following us home and staying for supper, seemed to think it was his right. He just…acquired us… My father was so uncomfortable with him, fully aware he was being supplanted, but what was he to do? My mother loved him, as did we boys… Snap. The trap was sprung.

  He looks at BARRIE.

  PETER: You plain mesmerized us.

  BARRIE: I made you famous.

  PETER: I didn’t ask for it.

  ALICE: Didn’t you?

  PETER: For god’s sake, I was a child. I didn’t know anything!

  ALICE: You listened. You laughed. You sparkled for him. You wanted him to look at you most, to look at you longest. To love you best.

  CARROLL: You’re my favorite, Alice. You’ll always be my favorite.

  ALICE: Your brothers were rivals.

  PETER: Were your sisters?

  ALICE: Yes.

  PETER: It wasn’t that way with us. We were a band of brothers.

  BARRIE: My Lost Boys.

  ALICE: I can see the five of you, each craning over the other, crawling over his lap like puppies. Whose eye will he catch? Who’ll make him smile today?

  PETER: Michael.

  ALICE: What?

  PETER: He loved Michael most… Uncle Jim always said that he made Peter Pan by rubbing the five of us violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. But that’s not true. It was Michael, bold and fearless Michael… I was never bold. I always had fear.

  ALICE: Of what?

  PETER: What does every child fear? … Captain Hook.

  ALICE: The character?

  PETER: The idea. Means something different for every boy I expect… For me it was no more summers of pirate yarns and playing in the grass. All the boys going to school, moving away and getting separated. My brothers not being my brothers anymore, being someone else’s husband or father, but not my brothers, not really, not like it was. No more father and mother… Just me… That’s a piece of growing up, isn’t it? Learning to name the thing you fear? … Captain Hook.

  CARROLL: Or the Red Queen.

  ALICE: Children’s stories can’t hurt you.

  PETER: You know better.

  ALICE: They don’t exist. There is no Captain Hook.

  PETER: Are you sure? Don’t you sometimes feel him? … When you’re alone, in a dark room, the point of his hook touching the back of your neck?

  ALICE: They can’t hurt you. Not once you grow up.

  CARROLL goes to her:

  CARROLL: But, Alice, you must never grow up! Promise me!

  ALICE: Really, how can I help from growing up?

  CARROLL: Ah, the question of the ages. We’ll have to ask a wise old tortoise. Shall we stroll?

  She’s disturbed by this bit of her past.

  ALICE: That long summer. God, would it never end? … We were walking in town. There were illuminations that evening and the street was radiant. My sisters and our governess had wandered ahead, so it was just Reverend Dodgson and me… It was so rarely that, just the two of us alone. Only twice that I can recall.

  PETER: Truly?

  ALICE: It was a different era, Mr. Davies. Unaccompanied in the presence of a gentleman? It wasn’t done… I can only remember two times. This was the first…

  Gentle and magical illuminations light the stage.

  CARROLL and ALICE stroll. It is 1862.

  ALICE: But why mustn’t I grow up? It seems the most marvelous thing in the world to be old and wear gowns and gloves and hats with feathers.

  CARROLL: Oh, hats with feathers are admirable things, but along with them goes something altogether unlike gowns and gloves. First the squint in the eye and then the hard set of the mouth, followed in quick order by the wagging tongue and the shaking finger. One day you turn around and you’ve become Mrs. Grundy: soberly disapproving of everything that used to give you pleasure.

  ALICE: I can’t imagine that! Shan’t I always be able to laugh at things?

  CARROLL: Does your mother laugh much?

  ALICE thinks about this.

  ALICE: No… Not so much as she used to perhaps.

  CARROLL: And it seems to me even our Lorina is not so amused as she used to be.

  ALICE: She got her first corset, you know.

  CARROLL: Alice, you shouldn’t talk about such things to a gentleman.

  ALICE: It’s made out of whale bone!

  CARROLL: That’s why the leviathans are so terribly fat. They’ve given all their corsets to little girls in Oxford.

  ALICE speaks to PETER:

  ALICE: I watched my sister putting on her corset for the first time. I shall never forget it… My mother sat us down, all three girls, and produced it from a gorgeous purple box, made of Venetian paper I think. I was intoxicated by the box. And then the bone of the corset was iridescent. Here was growing up and becoming a woman: and it was beautiful… My mother helped Lorina put it on and tighten the laces. Well then I could see it hurt. Lorina cried… And my mother, the look on her face. She was not a woman given to displaying vulnerability. She was our soldier. But on her face… What was it? Not quite sadness. Acceptance. Resignation to something vast, and helpless to change it. Powerlessness… Here was growing up too.

  CARROLL: We’ll have to watch Lorina carefully, like a fever-sufferer, and at the first sign of the censorious eye, we’ll strike.

  ALICE: What’ll we do?

  CARROLL: Make her stand on her head.

  ALICE is amused.

  They walk for a moment.

  CARROLL is thinking about something.

  CARROLL: It’s only a matter of the clock now. She’ll be up and married and raising a litter of her own soon.

  ALICE: Lorina?! She’s still a baby.

  CARROLL: She’s 13. That’s a whole year past the age of consent.

  They walk for a beat.

  CARROLL: Why, in two years you could get married.

  There is weight to this.

  ALICE: What was he trying to say?

  PETER: You know exactly.

  ALICE: I was ten years old.

  PETER: You had fascinated him. Beaten out your sisters, like you said; your rivals. You sparkled for him. You got your wish.

  ALICE: Stop it.

  PETER: Don’t you like love stories?

  CARROLL: Alice, will you not look at me?

  PETER: I thought all little girls enjoyed love stories.

  ALICE: You’re a terrible man.

  PETER: And what kind of child were you?

  ALICE: A child is what I was!

  PETER: Not after that night. Might as well start chewing off your leg.

  ALICE: You don’t know anything about it! You didn’t walk with him. You didn’t feel his suffering. Like a vibration next to me, like a tuning fork, his need was overwhelming.

  CARROLL: Alice? Please look at me.

  ALICE pretends to peer ahead for her sisters.

  ALICE: Where have they gone? Can you see my sisters? I should catch up with them.

  CARROLL: Of course.

  ALICE: All right. See you later, sir.

  CARROLL: Alice – I’ve almost finished your story.

  ALICE: You’re writing it down, I’d forgotten. That’s marvelous.

  She moves off quickly.

  CARROLL immediately stops walking. He stands alone.

  ALICE recovers herself.

  ALICE: What would I have done if I looked back and saw him standing there? Would my heart have broken?

  PETER: Does it now?

  ALICE: Children don’t have hearts yet, not really. They haven’t been hurt into the need for one… You know, Mr. Davies, I think they were born out of sadness, Alice and Peter. Out of loneliness, wouldn’t you say?

&nbs
p; PETER: Uncle Jim was the loneliest man I ever knew. For a time he could be a part of us, one of the boys, but that couldn’t last because…

  He stops, realizing where this has gone, inevitably…

  PETER: Because all children, except one, grow up…

  PETER PAN flies in. He’s full of bravado and nerve and looks exactly as you imagine PETER PAN to look.

  PETER PAN: I ran away the day I was born! I heard father and mother talking about what I was to be when I became a man. I don’t ever want to be a man. I always want to be a little boy and to have fun. So I ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long long time among the fairies.

  PETER: He created the one boy who would never grow up and leave him.

  ALICE approaches PETER PAN:

  ALICE: Wendy felt at once that she was in the presence of a tragedy.

  PETER PAN: Would you like an adventure now, or would you like to have your tea first?

  ALICE: What kind of adventure?

  PETER PAN: I’ll teach you how to jump on the wind’s back, and away we go!

  PETER: Away we go…

  BARRIE: To fly and fight and fly again. Shall we do that, Peter?

  PETER PAN: How clever I am! Oh, the cleverness of me!

  CARROLL, who has not moved, looks up.

  CARROLL: Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it…

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND pops up from a trap door, like one of the Tenniel illustrations come to life. She’s a bold and curious girl.

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: And what’s the use of a book without pictures or conversations?!

  CARROLL: So she was considering, in her own mind…

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: As well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid…

  CARROLL: Whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies –

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: When suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her!

  PETER PAN and ALICE IN WONDERLAND linger nearby.

  They are curious about their real-life counterparts. They interact, examine, imitate, and shadow them periodically throughout the play.

  ALICE: Once she was born, part of me ceased to exist. As if she had taken part of me.

  PETER: Or like a brother.