Comment on Berkeley Rep’s “For Peter Pan” never takes off

When playwright Sarah Ruhl was envisioning the structure of the piece, as she recounts in an interview in the show’s program, she “knew that it began with a hospital scene when the show’s patriarch is dying” and also “that it would end in Neverland.” “For Peter Pan” is the theater’s fifth Ruhl production, the most notable of which was the world premiere of “In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play),” which was also directed by Waters and went on to Broadway, garnering nominations for both the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Awards. The show begins in front of the stage curtains with a brief reminiscence from the aging Ann (Tony nominee Kathleen Chalfant) about playing Peter Pan in a children’s theater in Davenport, Iowa — “I wasn’t ever scared to fly in a theater,” she recalls with delight — before cutting to one of the least magical, the least aloft scenes imaginable: Ann and her four siblings (David Chandler, Ellen McLaughlin, Keith Reddin and Charles Shaw Robinson, all nuanced and at times superb with lackluster material) gathered around the hospital bed of their unconscious father. Here, Waters adheres to the actual rhythms of waiting for someone to die — characters drift about the stage, silences sprawl — which should be anathema to live performance, particularly when you haven’t yet been given enough plot to care about the dying or his survivors. [...] there are rewards to settling into the unusual pace; Ruhl is a master of dialogue, and five distinct, fleshed-out personalities quickly emerge from spare, idle chat about crossword puzzles and football games. At one point, a sibling actually says, “Let’s fight,” presumably because the ensuing political discussion (too tame to be called an argument) feels so tired and pointless that the only way into the exchange is for someone to announce what’s about to happen.