We know all about what Wendy and her brothers got up to in Neverland. Bumbling Smee, jealous little Tinker Bell, cocksure Peter — J.M. Barrie and Walt Disney and Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Spielberg have kept us hooked on these adventures for more than a century.

But as with so many tales of wayward youths, one question inevitably surfaces to today’s hypervigilant audiences: Where were the parents? What were fretful Mr. and Mrs. Darling up to when their three kids went (with apologies to Tiger Lily) off the reservation?

“Mary Rose,” a curious play receiving an intrusive but eye-catching revival at the hands of director Tina Landau, doesn’t exactly answer this question. But long before “Wicked” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “March” subjected beloved childhood texts to a perspectival shift (“The Wizard of Oz” and “Little Women,” respectively), Barrie revisited some of the most prevalent themes from his earlier classic in this perfumed 1920 ghost story.

Barrie, whose own confused, tragic yearnings for eternal youth are well documented, harnessed his preoccupations by viewing them through the eyes of those left behind. He once again stops time, but makes this ageless fugue state intelligible only to his unearthly title character. Peter Pan wouldn’t grow up, but Mary Rose couldn’t, even if she wanted to.

Given its reliance on “shiversome” events, as one character terms them, a plot synopsis for “Mary Rose” is tricky. But this much can be said: George and Fanny Morland (Michael Countryman and Betsy Aidem) exhibit a solicitude toward their teenage daughter Mary Rose (Paige Howard) that goes beyond Victorian formality. When an eagerto-please sailor named Simon (a superb Darren Goldstein) asks for Mary’s hand in marriage, they are forced to inform him of an unnerving episode that took place in the Outer Hebrides years earlier.

An 11-year-old Mary Rose had vanished for 20 days on a desolated island, only to emerge with no sense of any lost time; the Morlands never told her of her absence. “You know how just a touch of frost may stop the growth of a planet and yet leave it blooming?” Mrs. Morland explains. “It has sometimes seemed to me as if a cold finger had once touched my Mary Rose.” Barrie had originally depicted a mute Peter Pan on this island, but the idea was wisely scuttled. Mary Rose and Simon tempt fate with a second trip to that uncanny Scottish island, an event with consequences for her family.

These events unspool within an alternately spooky and maudlin narrative, one that draws upon some of the period’s hoarier conventions. (A pair of deadly scenes involving Mr. Morland’s “comic” squabbles with a local clergyman might benefit from a tick-tocking crocodile.) Rather than try to dust these scenes off and present them naturalistically, Ms. Landau takes them in a curious direction.

Like many of his peers, Barrie included droll stage directions, filled with witticisms about his characters and settings. Ms. Landau has included huge swaths of these with each scene change, as a rather self-satisfied Keir Dullea strolls around James Schuette’s drawing-room set and dispenses choice bits of information. (“Their talk is the happy nonsense that leaves no ripple unless the unexpected happens.”)

This decision yields some questionable results. The added layer of artifice inevitably dampens the play’s chills, and the actors are occasionally forced to stand awkwardly as Mr. Dullea describes things that are apparent to the eye. (This is most obvious in the case of Ms. Howard, an industrious actress who has by far the evening’s most difficult role and who performs it adequately.) Mood is everything in this strange tale, and Ms. Landau’s interpolations can be a bit of a buzz kill.

Paradoxically, though, hearing Barrie’s wry voice also dilutes some of the psychological underpinnings that accompany any interpretation of his work today. If audiences in 1920 saw “Mary Rose” through the prism of the just-ended world war that had claimed 770,000 Englishmen — including one of the five boys under Barrie’s care — modern-day audiences hear the words “Peter Pan” and automatically think of a syndrome as well as a daredevil in a green cap. By adding Barrie’s commentary, Ms. Landau flips the pages backward, restoring the tale to a tidier time.

Late in the play, after the Morlands have been forced to deal with the absence of their otherworldly daughter, they engage in some banter inspired by Mr. Morland’s latest run-in with that clergyman:

MR. MORLAND: I suppose you think of the pair of us as in our second childhood?

MRS. MORLAND: Not your second, George. I have never known any men who have quite passed their first.

Wishful thinking on Barrie’s part? Perhaps. If so, he suggests, some women are just as lucky. They remain lost girls, and they may never really be found.

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