Captain James Hook has spent more than a century as one of literature's most reliable villains, a man remembered chiefly for a steel hook, a powdered wig, and a losing feud with a boy who refused to grow up. On Saturday, Oct. 17 at 1 p.m., the Laconia Public Library will hand him the microphone. Powerhouse Theatre Collaborative presents a staged reading of "Hook's Tale," John Pielmeier's play in which the notorious pirate finally gets to tell his own version of events.
The premise is a reversal of everything J.M. Barrie's play and its many adaptations taught audiences. In Pielmeier's telling, Hook is not the monster of "Peter Pan" but a badly maligned gentleman, and with the help of his loyal friend Smee he narrates a life story that includes his friendship with and ultimate betrayal by Peter Pan, a romance with Tiger Lily, a familial connection to the Darling family, and the adoption of a lovable crocodile named Daisy. Along the way he uncovers the hidden treasure of Neverland, learns the identity of his long-lost father, and arrives at a lesson about the importance of growing up and growing old.
The play did not begin as a play. Pielmeier first wrote "Hook's Tale" as a novel, published by Scribner in 2017 under the full title "Hook's Tale: Being the Account of an Unjustly Villainized Pirate Written by Himself." Kirkus Reviews, noting that the author's "thorough, affectionate knowledge of both the original book and the historical period" grounds the fantasy, described it as the work of a playwright best known for "Agnes of God." The novel imagines Hook as a lost boy in his own right, sent away to be bullied at Eton, orphaned early, and shanghaied onto a British ship that wanders into a temporal loop in midocean. There he meets the rotund Smee and the other men who will become his crew, and there he finds his way, crocodile in tow, into the real Never-Isle, populated by whiskered mermaids and an erratic Peter Pan whose memory stretches back only as far as yesterday and whose darker nature inclines him to sprinkle unsuspecting comrades with fake fairy dust for the pleasure of watching them fall off cliffs. Kirkus found the long months at sea occasionally tedious but called the revisionist Neverland "vividly sensuous," praising the particular pleasure of watching the novel explain the key points of the original in new ways.
The stage version followed, adapted by Pielmeier from his own novel. It received a world premiere at Stages, the Houston theater company. The Houston Press, reviewing the premiere, described the show as flying off to the Never Isles with Hook as protagonist, with the pirate telling "his own story, the true one, not the lies spun by Barrie." The reviewer, who confessed to having run around his childhood home in an oversized bathrobe with a bent wire coat hanger shoved into one sleeve to stand in for the hook, noted that Hook "reeked of class" even in his villainy. The play is now licensed through Theatrical Rights Worldwide, which markets it as a family-friendly piece.
Pielmeier's career gives the material an unusual pedigree. Born in Altoona, Pennsylvania in 1949, he began as an actor with repertory companies including the Actors Theatre of Louisville and the Guthrie Theater before turning to writing. His first play was produced in Minneapolis in 1976, and three years later "Agnes of God" was performed as a staged reading at the O'Neill National Playwrights' Conference in Waterford, Connecticut, where it won the 1979 Great American Play Contest. It went on to Broadway and then to a 1985 film adaptation directed by Norman Jewison and starring Jane Fonda, Anne Bancroft, and Meg Tilly. Pielmeier's other plays include "The Boys of Winter," "Sleight of Hand," and "Voices in the Dark," which won an Edgar Award. He also wrote the musical "Slow Dance With a Hot Pickup" with Matty Selman, which won a New Hampshire Theatre Award for Best New Play. He has been married since 1982 to the poet and author Irene O'Garden.
The Laconia reading is part of Powerhouse Theatre Collaborative's Spark Series, the company's strand of smaller productions, staged readings, concerts, and special events designed to spark creativity, conversations, collaborations, and community building. Powerhouse was created in 2020 to serve as the resident theatre company of the Belknap Mill and the Colonial Theatre in Laconia, both of them historic downtown gathering places listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The company describes itself as a professionally managed community theatre outfit, pairing local participants with professional directors and designers, and it has been in residence at the Colonial since that theater reopened in 2021.
The venue for Saturday's reading has its own history. The Laconia Public Library occupies the Gale Memorial Building at 695 Main Street, a Richardsonian Romanesque structure designed by the Boston architect Charles Brigham and built between 1901 and 1903 with money left in the will of a local banker named Napoleon Bonaparte Gale. Constructed of red granite from New Brunswick with white granite trim from Maine, it has anchored the north side of downtown Laconia for well over a century and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. Laconia's library traces its origins further back still, to 1878, opening its doors in a rented downtown space the following year before the Gale bequest made a permanent home possible.
That a free public reading of a revisionist Peter Pan story should land in a granite library in the Lakes Region is a small piece of symmetry. Barrie's original play was itself an exercise in reworking familiar material, and Pielmeier's Hook is a character who insists that the record has been written by his enemies. The event is free and open to the public. Powerhouse notes that the play is best suited to adults, mature children, and teens, and is not appropriate for young children. More information is available at powerhousenh.org.