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.