A MAGICAL `PETER AND WENDY'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

A ``reluctant radical'' is what Lee Breuer sometimes calls himself. But at age 61, the renegade theater artist sounds remarkably mellow. Fatherhood will do that to a guy.

Actually, Breuer says, his 7-year-old boy - his fifth and last child ``unless something insane happens'' - is more like a grandson than a son to him.

He's also a link to the eternal inner child in Breuer's newest stage work, ``Peter and Wendy,'' an adaptation of J.M. Barrie's ``Peter Pan.''

``I was lucky as hell to have this wonderful last child through whom I've been able to experience this story,'' Breuer said between rehearsals earlier this week. ``This is why I went into art: I wanted to be able to fly forever.''

The uplifting ``Peter and Wendy,'' which is having its West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, may come as a down-to-earth jolt to those familiar with Mabou Mines, the avant-garde, Lower Manhattan theater company Breuer co-founded 27 years ago.

Better known for such spiky creations as its gender-flopping ``King Lear'' and the nightmarishly funny ``Dead End Kids: A History of Nuclear Power,'' Mabou Mines now turns to a classic Victorian children's text most Americans probably associate with Disney's cartoon and Mary Martin's high-wired Broadway and TV performance.

One actress, many puppets

Adapted by Liza Lorwin and directed by Breuer, ``Peter and Wendy'' attempts to conjure the fantasy realm of Neverland with a single actress, Mabou Mines regular Karen Kandel. She performs all the characters, from Wendy and Captain Hook to Nana the dog, but she's seldom alone on stage.

Assisting her are a swarm of veiled, linen-draped puppeteers manipulating life-size Japanese bunraku puppets of Peter Pan, Hook, the Lost Boys and so on. Tinkerbell is represented by a tiny pair of finger cymbals. The live Celtic score by fiddle virtuoso Johnny Cunningham alludes to Barrie's Scottish upbringing.

Breuer's central idea was to turn Wendy (Kandel) into a woman in her late 20s or early 30s who has come back to her childhood nursery to revisit her adventures with the boy who could fly. The show becomes Wendy's nostalgic memory play, an attempt to make peace with her own secret ghosts.

``Really, it becomes a rhapsody for lost youth and for the lost romance of her life,'' Breuer said.

Out of Wendy's bittersweet reveries, the nursery reassembles itself into a mythical playscape. A bathtub becomes the lagoon at Neverland. An ironing board and bedsheets transform themselves into Hook's pirate ship.

``This is a book about spring cleaning,'' Breuer continued. ``This is a book about cleaning out your emotional house, your emotional life. If you've gone back to your high school room and looked at your old pennants and looked at old pictures of your girlfriend, and out of these objects re-manifested yourself at 14, I think you would experience this play.''

Breuer, who attended North Hollywood High School and studied at UCLA, said he arrived at the show's Freudian key after reading Andrew Birkin's biography, ``James M. Barrie and the Lost Boys.''

The man behind `Pan'

Born in Scotland in 1860, Barrie was only 6 when his brother died prematurely. Barrie would pretend to be his brother in conversations with their mother, who'd gone mad with grief.

Breuer speculates that the young James Barrie never could grow up for fear he would lose his mother's love. Frozen in time, Barrie's idealized love for his mother was similar to the love the grown-up Wendy still feels for Peter Pan.

Breuer calls Barrie's original book ``one of the sexiest things I've ever read, but I think the feeling was very pure.'' Like his contemporary Lewis Carroll, Breuer said, Barrie was essentially an asexual creature, one of ``these wonderful kind of spiritual pedophiles around turn-of-the-century London who took out their spiritual longings through these wonderful children's books.''

With ``Peter and Wendy,'' Breuer wanted to create a ``yin'' show that would would capture the story's Victorian, sentimental, profoundly feminine sensibility. Not coincidentally, most of the show's key artistic personnel, including actress Kandel, adapter Lorwin and Julia Archer, who designed the sets, lighting and puppets, are female.

``My personal take on this is that any kind of study of Victorian sexuality is that it was a very sexy period that was totally repressed,'' Breuer said. ``Queen Victoria had eight children, and nobody ever saw her toenails.''

All these paradoxical elements are intended to fuse together in Kandel's multiple portrayals.

``Karen has this exotic brilliance ... but one part of her is the soul of a Victorian lady, and (she is) able to externalize this,'' Breuer said. ``I'm absolutely amazed by her performance.''

``Peter and Wendy'' premiered at the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina in 1996, then moved on to New York's Public Theatre and the New Victory theater uptown for a six-week run. Although the show never made it to Broadway, the Geffen has made noises to the effect that it may bring ``Peter and Wendy'' back next year if it turns into an L.A. holiday hit.

Breuer is cautious about such an outcome, although one of his previous high-concept pieces, ``The Gospel at Colonus,'' a Deep South reimaging of the Oedipus legend, is still touring after 13 years.

But Breuer believes that the current roaring success of Disney's $20 million Broadway musical ``The Lion King'' - which is being helmed by another avant-gardist, Julie Taymor - underlines how effective ``children's stories'' can be in transmitting cultural values.

``You'll find, I think, that our real moral plays in America have really kind of come down to cartoons and to soap operas. All we've done is add a little technology to the same tried-and-true formula.''

THE FACTS

What: Mabou Mines' ``Peter and Wendy''

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays; through Dec. 28.

Tickets: $17.50-$37.50. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

Photo: Karen Kandel is the sole nonpuppet star in ``Peter and Wendy, '' Lee Breuer's adaptation of the classic ``Peter Pan'' tale.