J.M. Barrie’s character of Peter Pan is so indelibly etched in our minds (owing to the iconic performance in the character by Mary Martin, and the frequency with which community and school theaters perform the work) that the genius of playwright Sarah Ruhl in writing For Peter Pan On Her 70^th Birthday is one of marketing, and not so much in the writing.

After all, casual theatre goers will always gravitate to the familiar over the unfamiliar. To be tagged with “Peter Pan Complex” is to be accused of being afraid to “grow up.” It usually gets applied to men, though not exclusively, who act like a 14-year old when it comes to money, treatment of women, responsibility, accountability, etc.

In Ruhl’s play, the eldest daughter, Ann (Linda Rabin Hammell), of a dying father, George (Nick Szczerba) opens the show with a monologue of reminiscence about the production of Peter Pan in which her late Mother played the role of Peter in Davenport Iowa. The story even touches on a memory of  Ann getting her picture taken with the legendary Mary Martin when her touring show of Pan came to her hometown.

The play then moves to her father’s hospital room where he is laying awkwardly and in unconscious pain. Anyone who has sat vigil with a dying relative or friend nows what this is like, waiting for someone to die, having conversation with loved ones, telling stories, as the person lays in earthbound limbo.

Ann and her siblings, John (Robert Schorr), Jim (Phil Hughes), Michael (Sean Paraventi), Wendy (Kez Settle) gather around a couple of bottles of Irish Whiskey, get into their childhood stories, with their father, and their current-day politics (the story takes place in the Clinton era). And a common theme among the stories is when they each believe the moment was when they “grew up.”

The banter has a flavor of how it goes when adult children realize they are orphans, even in their 50s and 60s. The parallel to the “Lost Boys” in Pan is obvious. This second phase of the story is very familiar, and Ruhl’s dialogue writing is superb. It’s just that she doesn’t give them much interesting to say here. How about the chatter leading to an actual denouement?

The third phase of the play is a morphing of the siblings into Neverland, complete with costumes as the characters. Ann is Peter as she dons her costume right on stage. We even get a Captain Hook in full regalia.

Director Krista Schafer assembled a group of very talented actors to pull off what seems like a very autobiographical story of Ruhl’s. And the ensemble is terrific. One of the things they get very right is the chemistry of adult siblings, exercising their individual and conflicting personalities, while never letting you forget that they love one another despite those conflicts. It’s not hard to imagine them in the pajamas at Christmas even as they sit around in their adult clothes lamenting and celebrating their father and mother who are now together again, but removed from the siblings except in memory.

The set , designed by Ms. Schafer is simple, but effective as a series of hanging windows. Harley Miah is lighting designer. Cheryl Zemke is on costumes, and Nyah Pierson is prop designer.

For Peter Pan on her 70^th Birthday taps into a powerful and familiar literary framework to try to explain the feeling, familiar to many of us, one has as an adult when they are unmoored via death from their parents, especially when those parents were beloved.

This team of artists puts the heart in the tory even if Ruhl’s storytelling leaves us a little bereft of why her story is worth telling. For those of us who have been through it, our own feelings and reflections are a better catharsis. And as Ruhl’s story may take you back to your own moment of really growing up, her greatest service in her storytelling may be to take us back to own memories of passage.