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September 13, 2017

Ghosts, pets and arguments without outcomes: These are reliable telltales of the work of Sarah Ruhl, whose new play, “For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday,” includes a long, digressive scene featuring all of them.

In it, five Irish Catholic siblings, now of Lipitor-popping age, sit bickering aimlessly around the kitchen table of their childhood home in Davenport, Iowa. They have reconvened, for the first time in what seems like forever, on the occasion of the death of their father, George. And George, too, is there, if only they could see him, along with their long-dead dog.

It’s a perfect example of what Ms. Ruhl, in her marvelous book “100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write,” calls the “Ovidian form”: Magic is everywhere, stories don’t have arcs and nobody learns a lesson. The theater, she argues, should be more akin to poetry and pageantry than (as she sometimes despairs) legalistic argumentation.

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