Playwright Sarah Ruhl has become a favorite at Berkeley Rep over the past decade, beginning with a production of her play Eurydice in 2004. That play, which imagined an Alice in Wonderland-like underworld, was an homage of sorts to Ruhl's late father and his fascination with language, and she wrote it, she says, as a way to "have a few more conversations with him." Her newest work, For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, she wrote as a birthday gift for her mother, an English teacher with a degree in rhetoric who is also an actor and theater director — and who, famously within their family, once played Peter Pan in a community theater production in Davenport, Iowa. Like her other work, the new play, which had its West Coast premiere at Berkeley Rep Friday night, juxtaposes the tensions and mundanity of family life with myth and dreams, this time using the story of Peter Pan as a foil and foundational text for a discussion about growing old, becoming an adult, and watching a parent die.

At the center of the Berkeley Rep production, directed by the great Les Waters and coming fresh from a run at the Actors' Theatre of Louisville where he now serves as artistic director, is veteran Broadway, television, and film performer Kathleen Chalfant. Chalfant is best known for originating the role of Hannah Pitt / Ethel Rosenberg / and the Rabbi in Angels in America on Broadway, as well as starring in the original off-Broadway production of Wit — and fans of Showtime's The Affair will recognize her as Noah's mother-in-law. She's a deeply empathetic actor with a mischievous glint in her eye who commands the stage for all of the play's 90 minutes, despite sharing it much of that time with five other actors, who play her brothers, sister, and father.

Like Ruhl's mother, the character of Ann is a professor of rhetoric and once played Peter Pan in a community theater production in Davenport, Iowa, and her family still talks about it. The play opens with Ann and her four siblings — three of whom are coincidentally named like the siblings in Peter Pan, Wendy, Michael, and John — at the hospital bedside of their dying father George. Two of her brothers are doctors, all three of her brothers are Republicans, and the youngest, Wendy, remains the most sensitive. Their family dynamics play out across their father's final hours and back at the house following his passing, and Ruhl begins to play with reality here as George begins making appearances, invisible to the family but visible to the audience, as Ann and her siblings compare notes on when they each began feeling like grownups, and then devolve into an argument about politics.

Here's where I'm going to have include a spoiler, so please just stop reading if you already think you're going to see the show because it'll be better this way.

Not satisfied to leave this family wallowing in their mourning, or bickering as they always did but without any parents there to mediate, Ruhl has all of them head off to bed in their childhood bedrooms, and Ann tells the audience that she had "the strangest dream" following all that talk about growing up.

This of course takes us to Neverland, where Ruhl said she knew her play had to end up, and Waters gets a chance to draw from his bag of theatrical tricks and pull out the flying apparatuses.

Chalfant pulls a Peter Pan costume out of a trunk that appears on stage, and Wendy, Michael and John all reemerge, out of bed, as the children in the tale, half aware though that they have complicated and mundane lives as adults back in the real world. It's a funny and ultimately delightful conceit, and characters we saw as stodgy, cranky, aging people in the first two acts suddenly become childlike and joyful — and that glint in Chalfant's eye becomes a full fledged sparkle as she hoots and sprinkles pixie dust all over the stage.

Ann's brother Jim appears here as a cartoonish Captain Hook, and within the dream Hook comes to symbolize death — he is, after all, in the original story, the enemy of all things fun, untethered, and forever young. But in Ruhl's third-act dream play, death isn't washed away so much as it's laughed at and danced upon. Just as the audience gets swept up watching several not-exactly-young performers go flying through the air (on highly visible wires), Ruhl wants us to see a new, more adult layer to the Peter Pan myth. It's a game of pretend, ultimately, with a world in which there are no parents and no one dies, but a world where none of these characters want to stay very long. Reality, for all its faults, is a necessary evil, while the escapes of fiction and theater are the balms that make the mundane less painful. Though not a revolutionary idea, the execution and admittedly hokey stage magic make the final moments of the play especially moving, endearing, and even transcendent.

Waters' direction and the modular set by designer Annie Smart deserve special praise, as does the supporting performance by Ellen McLaughlin as Wendy.

If I had to guess, this play will be Ruhl's next to head to Broadway following her 2009 hit, which premiered at Berkeley Rep, In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play). It's just quirky, original, and redemptive enough to stand out among contemporary theater, and while the issues it deals with are heavy, it arrives at a lightness that some might say is too literal, but I'll just say left a lasting smile on my face.