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Those of us who can recall a black-and-white televised Mary Martin, as Peter Pan, being held aloft by a visible wire in the now-classic musical might assume that J.M. Barrie’s original play (first staged in 1904) was also about children—and for them as well. Barrie, after all, came to maturity in the late Victorian era as new forms of children’s literature arose. And Barrie himself noted that his play was an attempt to evoke the sensibility of childhood.

Credit the theater company Bedlam, then, with recognizing that the…