Play! follows two cousins and their eccentric neighbor as their outing to see Peter Pan takes them on a time-traveling adventure through theatre history. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

As a young theatre professional, I worked often with Birmingham Children’s Theatre, and I spent a lot of time in audiences full of schoolchildren and the brave teachers trying to remind them, just before the curtain rose, that this was not quite the same thing as recess. I remember thinking how helpful it would be if there were a fun way for children to learn a little theatre etiquette before they ever set foot in the playhouse.

Later, while I was teaching theatre at Samford University, I wrote an early picture-book version of Play! and had an art professor colleague illustrate a few pages. We came tantalizingly close to publication, but the editor who was championing the project moved to another company that didn’t publish children’s books. Then life did what life often does: my artist friend and I both hit stretches of personal upheaval, and the manuscript sat quietly on a shelf for quite a while, trying to be patient.

A few years ago, a school librarian encouraged me to return to it, and I sent it to Sheila Booth-Alberstadt of SBA Books in Daphne, Alabama. She loved the idea, but wisely suggested that instead of a picture book for younger children, I turn it into a chapter book for middle graders. Once I made that shift, the story opened up in all sorts of exciting ways. I found a wonderful illustrator, Jarrett Rutland, and we worked on the book for about a year. After several rounds of editing and design, Play! is now heading out into the world, which is both thrilling and slightly surreal.

As for the setup itself, I wanted two children because I liked the idea of a boy and a girl responding differently to what they were seeing. And since I wanted them to travel through important eras in theatre history, they clearly needed an adult guide. At that point, an eccentric professor more or less materialized, tapped me on the shoulder, and informed me that he intended to be in the book. It is generally unwise to argue with someone named Dr. Dante Marlowe Browne, so I let him in.

Why did you choose Peter Pan as the event that launches the adventure?

I have always admired J. M. Barrie. Peter Pan is one of those rare children’s stories that is full of delight and theatrical fun, while also carrying something deeper and more wistful underneath. It turns childhood into myth, but it also tells the truth about it: that it is radiant, reckless, imaginative, and already shadowed by loss.

The story captures both a child’s fear of growing up and an adult’s longing for the vanished world of childhood. Peter represents freedom, adventure, and the intoxicating idea that no one can make you do arithmetic ever again. Wendy, on the other hand, brings story, tenderness, order, and the first stirrings of maturity into Neverland. I love that balance. Barrie gives us both the wild freedom of childhood and the ache of knowing it cannot last forever.

But Peter Pan also seemed the perfect launching point for Play! because it is such a glorious theatrical experience for children. Characters fly, a crocodile ticks, pirates swagger, fairies interfere, and the whole thing is drenched in stage magic. Nana is portrayed by an actor in a dog suit, and Mr. Darling and Captain Hook are traditionally played by the same actor, which is exactly the sort of glorious stage nonsense children ought to encounter early in life. It is a play that invites young audiences not only to watch, but to fall in love with the sheer imaginative mischief of theatre itself.

How did you balance historical accuracy with storytelling and humor?

Having worked in theatre for nearly sixty years, I know the history pretty deeply, so I wasn’t starting from scratch. I certainly wanted the historical material to be accurate, but I never wanted it to feel like children were being marched through a lecture with a few jokes scattered on top as a reward for proper behavior.

The good news is that theatre history is wonderfully cooperative in this respect, because it is already full of larger-than-life people, ridiculous mishaps, flamboyant personalities, and moments of sheer absurdity. In other words, it comes with its own humor built in. I didn’t have to manufacture too much of that. I simply had to let the children and the professor stumble into it.

So my goal was always to make the story feel alive first. I wanted young readers to have the sense that they had slipped backstage into the past and found it still bustling along, with everybody in costume and nobody entirely behaving.

What can young readers learn from live performance that they can’t learn elsewhere?

Live theatre is one of the richest gifts parents and teachers can give children. Reading is, of course, foundational and wondrous. It shapes language, imagination, attention, and a lifelong love of learning. But theatre offers something reading alone cannot: an immediate, communal, multi-sensory encounter with story.

In a theatre, children are not simply being told that a character is frightened, brave, selfish, lonely, or kind. They are watching those emotions and characteristics unfold in real time through voices, faces, bodies, music, silence, scenery, and the electric presence of living actors only a few feet away. They learn empathy because they can feel an entire audience leaning toward the same moment together. They learn attention because theatre asks them to listen, watch, and imagine all at once. And they learn that stories are not abstract things trapped in books; stories can breathe right in front of them.

Theatre also teaches children how to be an audience, which is no small thing. It teaches patience, curiosity, concentration, and respect for a shared experience. It says, in effect, “For the next little while, let us all agree to enter another world together.” In an age of constant distraction, that may be one of the most valuable lessons of all.

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