I was downright fulsome in my praise of the recent production of Treasure Island in Fort Greene, so it might surprise you to learn that I was downright disappointed in the very theatrically inventive and engaging Peter and the Starcatcher, the final performance of which I caught at New York Theatre Workshop last weekend.

It surprised me. The production was really outstanding; the cast uniformly strong, timing sharp as a knife, and every effort made to create theatre magic out of minimal stage equipment (a ladder to perform levitation; bits of rope to create television screens, a boxing ring; the actors’ bodies themselves to serve as doors that, when opened, turn into the people engaging in nefarious acts on the other sides of them).

But the story was just, frankly, a mess. The play, based on a novel, is intended to be Peter Pan’s origin story. As it turns out, Peter wasn’t self-created, as he maintains in the Barrie original. Rather, he was imprisoned in a hellish orphanage, then sold into slavery (and likely execution) to the king of Rundoon. He is only rescued from this fate by a plucky girl, an apprentice starcatcher ferrying a crate of starstuff (the detritus of falling stars) to be destroyed in a volcano (lest this incredibly powerful magic stuff, having already fallen to earth, now fall into the wrong earthly hands). Through her example, and through the adventures he has helping her save the crate from the clutches of various villains, including the purportedly evil but mostly just over-the-top campy Captain Black ‘Stache (a pre-amputation Hook), he learns to have hope, believe in himself, yadda yadda yadda – and then he’s abandoned again, left behind on the island while his new girlfriend gets to go home to England with her father, his only consolations being that a couple of other orphans elect to stay with him and be his gang and that, having been bathed in the starstuff when it leaked out of the crate, he can now fly.

What all this has to do with Peter Pan I have no idea. And even if you pretend you don’t know who Peter Pan is, and treat this as a completely independent story, the entire ending is deformed into meaninglessness by the need to end where Peter Pan begins. I mean, why exactly can’t Peter go back to England? There would have been an emotional logic to having him choose not to go back – to decide that he wants to stay on his magic island forever. But the authors chose to have him be abandoned because, well, he’s covered in starstuff and we can’t have starstuff-coated-people flitting about the London skies now can we? (Why can’t we? That sort of rule never stopped Mary Poppins.)

And why does Hook (who, in this version, amputates himself accidentally, and only subsequently throws the hand to the croc for reasons that are decidedly obscure) suddenly announce that what would be really, really awesome would be to get to play villain opposite Peter for eternity? What does that mean? Part of the point of Hook always was that while for Peter everything was a game, for Hook it was all deadly serious. There’s some kind of symmetry in reversing this, having Hook be the playful one and Peter having to learn how to play … except that this is supposed to be the prequel to Peter Pan, and if Hook started out just playing a game, then why does he … oh, never mind. It all feels like so much inversion for the sake of inversion, rather than for the sake of telling a story that is compelling in its own right.

In its own right, this is a story about a poor boy who has suffered terribly at the hands of grownups, and learns not to trust them. Then he does a great deal of growing up himself – fighting bad guys, being true to his word, kissing a girl. As a reward for which he is told – by the authoritative voice of the grownup world, his girlfriend’s father – that he must lose the girl and remain boy eternal, outcast from human society, locked in eternal combat with a pirate doing a Tim Curry impersonation. No amount of dressing this up by saying no, wait, he becomes Peter Pan, no amount of repetition that the island creatures will be his family, and that he’ll be able to play all the time, can change the fact that this story arc is dreadful. It doesn’t make any emotional sense at all, except as tragedy, the story of a boy who was rejected and abandoned by his first love and so retreated into a permanent pre-adolescent state. And that, my friends, is not a story for children.

But my son liked the show, so what do I know. Heck – it was funny, it was exciting, there were awesome drag mermaids (metamorphosed from ordinary fish by the starstuff – they have a real show-stopper number at the top of Act II), a shipwreck, a knock-down fight, a giant flying crocodile … who needs a story that makes sense?

Apparently, only us cranky old grownups.