Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, pirating it up. Photograph by Joan Marcus.
The award-winning Broadway play, Peter and the Starcatcher, first opened in 2009 and rapidly gained a name for itself as a brilliantly written, highly entertaining show for all ages. Though the play tells Peter Pan’s origin story, it should be clear that this is a grownup’s prequel to the classic children’s tale.
“People hear the name Peter Pan, and because they’re adults, they think they don’t want to see this,” says Ridley Pearson, coauthor of the book Peter and the Starcatchers, on which the play is based. “But they have to stop and think about this for a minute. The play won five Tony Awards for a reason. It’s very oriented for an adult audience. In fact, we discourage kids younger than 10 from coming, because they probably won’t get it, but it is nonetheless a family show. It’s clean, sophisticated, fast, and entertaining…I’ve seen it 26 times, and I’m going to see it again this weekend. It’s ingenious. Rick Ellis [who wrote the script] is brilliant.”
Though the play is geared toward adults, Pearson says the book is for both children and adults alike. In 2004, Starcatcher appeared on shelves everywhere; a decade later, it’s become a series of five books, has been turned into a Broadway play, and was about to become a Disney movie directed by Gary Ross (director of Hunger Games), before Warner Brothers announced their upcoming production of Pan, a Peter Pan origin movie starring Hugh Jackman, which, unfortunately, completely halted development of a future Starcatcher movie.
“It was just heartbreaking,” Pearson admits. “Disney could have green-lighted it much sooner. They’ve had Gary attached for more than a year, but they waited too long. Maybe in a few years they will revisit it. It’s really a timeless piece.”
The St. Louis author, though disappointed that the book won’t become a movie anytime soon, says he is thrilled that things have come this far. If not for an innocent question from his daughter, the world may never have thought to explore the origins of the impish boy named Peter Pan.
Your daughter first gave you the idea for Peter and the Starcatchers, correct?
That’s right. Paige was 5 years old at the time, and we read to her and her sister every night. One night, I was reading the novella of Peter Pan to Paige, and we got to about the sixth page when she got impatient and slapped her hand across the book and asked, “Dad, how did Peter meet Captain Hook, anyway?” and I went, “Oh my gosh!” Why does he fly? Why does he never grow old? Where did the shadow detachment come from? I thought there had to be a story about how a boy became Peter Pan, as well as an explanation for all of the hijinks that Peter Pan gets into.
And, clearly, there was. How did Dave Barry become involved?
I play in this crazy rock band with Stephen King, Amy Tan, Scott Turow and Dave Barry, among others, and we were playing a show about a week later in Miami, where Dave lives, and I was staying with Dave, and I happened to mention this idea of writing a prequel to Peter Pan and he got excited about it and we ended up doing it together.
What was the process like for the collaboration?
We divided the book by character, so it would be less obvious who was writing what. If it was a child, then Dave generally took the first draft, and if it was an adult, I took the first draft. Then we emailed those chapters back and forth and edited and rewrote, sometimes eleven times, and then we’d say, “Okay, I have nothing more to add,” and then we’d move on to the next chapter. What was fun about it was that by half way through the first book—we ended up writing all five books together that way—we were writing to a third voice. Instead of having to do the edit eleven times, we’d gotten down to three or four, because we knew what the other guy would and wouldn’t like. We learned a lot with the process and it was a great experience.
That seems like a process that would shape your writing quite a bit.
It was. Dave is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, and his approach is that when you finish it, it’s done. In novel writing, I had always taken the approach that you do a draft, you let it sit a couple days, then you do another draft, and it might take two months, then you let it sit again. His approach is that you do it chapter by chapter, and when a chapter is done, you don’t look back. It was very different from the way I work, but it was instructive, and I think I work a little more that way now.
The book ended up being quite long, more than 500 pages, correct?
It was 550 pages, and the second was 600, and the third was even longer.
And Paige was the first to see it?
Yeah, Paige was our first reader.
Did she give you any good feedback?
She had very funny feedback. By the time we finished the book, the manuscript was 550 pages long. Published it was more like 380, but it was a very big manuscript. I carried it up the back stairs—we lived in Kirkwood at the time—and went into Paige’s room for reading hour, and I asked, “Do you remember a couple years ago when you asked Daddy about how Peter Pan met Captain Hook?” She said, “Yeah, sure, of course I remember that.” And I showed her this giant book and said, “Well here’s the answer.” [Laughing] Her eyes went wide as saucers. I said I thought we should read it together. Up until then, her highest level of reading was a 38-page pre-chapter book. She wasn’t that big of a reader yet, which was disappointing her dad a little. But she looked at the book and said, “Oh, no, Dad. I think I have to read this myself.” So she took it upon herself and within about two or three weeks, she read the whole book and that opened her up, and she started reading big books after that. I never really knew what she thought of the book. She came in holding the manuscript, and she said, “I finished!” and that was the whole thing for her.
She was only 7 or 8 then?
Yep. It was great. It broke her through into a whole new world for reading.
Are there many significant differences between the world you created in the Starcatchers and the world J.M. Barrie created originally for Peter Pan?
Yes, I’d say they are two totally different worlds. Dave and I never set out to create the prequel to Peter Pan. We just set out to write a prequel to Peter Pan. Our world is inhabited by a young man named Peter, some boys that will become the Lost Boys, a girl that is not Wendy, and some material that is called starstuff. Starstuff might cling to every tenth or hundredth meteor that falls to earth. When the meteor hits and the stuff splashes around, if the starstuff is present and is gathered up, it will make people what they want to be. Because of the power of this starstuff, there has been a secret society for a couple hundred years that chases down these meteor falls and sees if there is starstuff. If there is, they collect it and destroy it, usually in high heat. That’s the “starcatchers,” and in the play, Peter and the Starcatcher, that’s been reduced to a very small number of people so you can understand it better, one of which is the young girl, Molly, as in our book. Peter and this girl have to battle the pirates for control of the starstuff.
In your book, the character of Captain Hook is called Black Stache. Where did that come from?
We knew that there had been a very feared pirate called Blackbeard on the high seas, so we named ours Black Moustache, and that got abbreviated to Black Stache. Of course, we came across this because we knew that there would be a character by the end of our book that would resemble J.M. Barrie’s Captain Hook. But what are you going to call him when you’re writing your story? You can’t call him Captain Hand.
Do the crocodile and Black Stache encounter each other in your book?
They do. It’s all in there. The fun thing was to find these six or seven touchstones that J.M. Barrie had laid out for us, and to create how they came about—we needed to create Tinker Bell, we needed to create Peter’s ability to fly, we needed to create the reason the crocodile is on the hunt, which we all know is because of the hand, but how did the clock end up in him? And it’s all retold differently in Rick Ellis’ wonderful play.
How involved were you in the process from book to play?
We were bystanders, but you often aren’t even granted that much, so we really tip our hats to Disney Theatrical for letting us be flies on the wall and watch the process. It’s really instructive and fascinating to watch your work be developed from a 550-page novel down to a small script for a play. There are very few scenes in the play that are in the novel, and yet when the play ends and you’re walking out, you think, “Yeah, I get it.” We get some kids saying, “That wasn’t really anything like the book…but I liked it!” You can’t put a book on stage; you put the idea of a book on stage, and Rick Ellis did that so brilliantly.
You were actually able to go to some of the workshops, which is rare.
We were part of the process, which is not common. It was really wonderful to watch them develop this. The first time we saw it, it was at a college. The second time, we saw five scenes that Rick had written, in a basement of a church in Manhattan. The third time we saw it, it had equity actors and it was at the La Jolla Playhouse where it was workshopped, which was a process I had never seen or understood. Rick literally rewrote pieces of the script every night, for all 30 performances, based on what a live, paying audience liked and disliked. He would rewrite it every night, and the actors would relearn it every morning and perform it differently every evening, which is why they’re actors and we all do what we do. It’s phenomenal to see that they can just forget a scene and learn an entirely different version so quickly.
You have to have very talented actors for that.
And they did it for 30 nights! After that, it was good enough to go Off-Broadway. Disney invested a ton of money and brought it Off-Broadway, where it received wonderful notices, had many extended runs, and then moved it onto Broadway where it won five Tony Awards. It’s had a charmed life, this play.
Were you surprised when it was nominated for nine Tony Awards?
Oh my gosh! When you write a novel, your big prayer is that it will sell nine copies. This book was on the best-seller list for 47 weeks. It then became this play that got these rave reviews, sold-out, extended runs, went onto Broadway and got more rave reviews, got nominated for a whole bunch of Tonys, and won five of them, which was more than any play had won. I keep pinching myself about this whole experience, but I think one reason—and this gets a little esoteric—but in my heart I believe this, that the reason this production and that the book and the series has been so charmed is because it came from the very innocent question of a child. No one at any point sought to make money off of this. When Dave and I went to write the book, we thought we were writing a book for our own kids. We had no idea that anybody would ever be interested in this thing. So it all came from a good place and it’s just stayed in a good place ever since.
You did have this eureka moment where you thought that it would be a good book, though, right?
You never know if it will be a good book, but it seemed like a great idea. When I shared it with Dave, his eyes went wide and he asked, “Has anyone written a prequel to Peter Pan?” I said I couldn’t find one and he said, “Oh my gosh! Yes!” And again, we didn’t write the prequel. We just wrote a prequel. We hope there will be others, but this is ours, and what a blast it’s been.
Peter and the Starcatcher runs from March 7 to 9 at the Peabody Opera House (1400 Market, 314-499-7600). For show times or to purchase tickets, visit peabodyoperahouse.com. SLM Staff Writer Jeannette Cooperman chatted with Pearson earlier this year; read her Q&A with the author, which appeared in our January issue, here.
