At the beginning of J. M. Barrie's "Peter Pan" (the classic fable is 99 this year), posh Londoners Mr. and Mrs. Darling go out for the evening, leaving their children, Wendy, John, and Michael, in the care of their governess, an Old English sheepdog. Nana is an efficient guardian of her flock, but she can't keep the youngsters from flying off to Never Never Land with that mischievous lost boy. In those early Edwardian days, upperclass English parents saw little of their children, leaving them to be raised by nannies and limiting visitation rights to the nightly children's hour.
Flash forward a hundred years to an elegant New York townhouse, where a thoroughly modern Mr. and Mrs. Darling are preparing to go out for the evening. But not together. She's going to accept an award for her volunteer work on behalf of a politically trendy cause. He, a high-rolling corporate CEO, is about to be indicted for securities fraud, and is off to meet with a federal prosecutor to try to stay out of jail.
The children -- Wendy, John, and Michael -- are safely locked in their wing of the house, and the parents make sure to check on them before going out -- not in person, mind you, but via intercom. A few hours later, when the parents return, the kids are nowhere to be found. The sprinkling of fairy-dust on the window sill is assumed to be glitter the kids have been playing with.
Susan Eve Haar's play The Darlings, which is receiving its world premiere at the Miniature Theatre of Chester, is part literary joke, part social satire, and part sketch comedy. There are sly references to the original, as when Mrs. Darling recalls that Wendy had been having nightmares about a sinister man we recognize as Captain Hook. The playwright's satirical target is the lifestyles of the rich and narcissistic. Mrs. Darling is a mom who hasn't taken a picture of her kids since their infancy. The parents are upset over their offsprings' disappearance, but their anxiety keeps circling back to themselves. Mr. D's first reaction is to worry that this mess will make his legal troubles even worse.
These Darlings are parodies of a certain class of all-too-easily recognizable Americans -- materialistic, solipsistic, self-satisfied but vaguely dissatisfied with the lack of human connection in their lives. George Darling's best friend is, literally, the dog, with whom he shares late-night confessionals and shots of bourbon. Mark Giordano and Anastasia Barzee play these caricatures with the right combination of panache and restraint, giving us a couple we wouldn't want to know but get a kick out of watching. Barzee in particular is able to elicit not only laughs but a little sympathy for her exasperating character.
The Darlings are hardly full-blown dramatic figures, but they are positively three-dimensional next to the play's other caricatures, who are paper-thin lampoons of even easier targets. All six of these people -- well, five people and a dog -- are played by two versatile and entertaining actors, Glynis Bell and Andy Prosky. With quick changes of costume, voice and gesture they become the procession of strange visitors who show up in the Darlings' living room in the hours following the children's departure.
First on is the detective who responds to the Darlings' 911 call to report the missing children. He's a smug specialist in domestic crisis, for whom the parents' predicament may be an opportunity to get his own smarmy face on the national news. When he finds out that all three kids have gone missing he froths over: "Jackpot! Never had a triple".
While Mr. D is out looking for the kids, Mrs. Darling is visited by her friend Portica, an interior designer who brings plans for the decoration of the new, even more isolated children's wing and is annoyed that her client is so distracted from the business at hand.
These broad vignettes are amusing, but sometimes as thin and dopey as a Saturday Night Live skit. A case in point is Prosky's clairvoyant swami, who is both very funny and very clichéd. Called on to divine the children's whereabouts, this fortune teller instead homes in on a vision of George's potential future: "I see a jail cell, with a nice man. No! he is not a nice man. His name is Leroy and he wants you to be his wife".
The final visitors to the Darling home are a cloyingly upbeat couple bent on alleviating parental guilt over lost children. They offer an alternative vision, expressed in a platitudinous set of New Age affirmations. The solution to the pangs of parenthood and the unfortunate attachment to one's children, they suggest, is contained in accepting a simple truth: "Children are obstacles cast before us on the path to self-realization".
Twice during her long night of anxiety, Mrs. Darling is visited by her mother, who has been dead for ten years. This apparition is, in every sense of the word, a nightmare. This harpy can't stand to be touched, even -- or, it seems, especially -- by her own daughter, and as she recoils she recalls burning her infant daughter to make her stop suckling. In these dream sequences -- and they get even more bizarre -- we see why Mrs. Darling has become a distant mother herself.
But that's not Susan Haar's point. Her purpose here is to flippantly examine parenthood in the age of instant gratification. Vicki R. Davis's setting places the Darlings' ultra-modern living room in a framework of tangled silver brambles -- a shiny Never Never Land they've woven around themselves. If the script itself were not so hooked on the instant gratification of easy laughs, this play would be a more satisfying riff on parents who don't want to grow up.