NEW YORK CITY – Sometimes it takes more than a village to raise a child. In Sandra Dutton’s new play, “Just a Matter of Time: The Musical,” which opened last week in New York City, it takes a whole forest to teach a young schoolgirl to use her imagination.

Like Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy in Oz, 11-year-old Meg falls into a reverie that takes her on a journey beyond memorizing textbooks. A beaver, goose, duck, possum, pig, sheep, rat and rabbit are among the characters that pull her away from formal studies and into the riches of her own mind.

An admirer of the nonsense writers Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, Dutton, who lives in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, spins out a humorously absurd tale of an imaginary land where Time, itself a character, has been missing ever since losing a fighting match with a lop-eared rabbit. None of the citizens knows what day it is, how much time has passed or how to keep time. Time is lost. Even a rhymester mole has to go underground to recite his illegal syncopated couplets. The timing is all off!

Meg is overwhelmed by the slippage of reality, but she ultimately sets herself and her friends free by making the most of her time in the cartoonlike community of half-human, half-animal creatures.

An English teacher with a doctoral degree in rhetoric and composition, Dutton is familiar with the heavy load of memorization thrust upon students in school settings. When she was writing “Just a Matter of Time,” she was not thinking about the controversial No Child Left Behind legislation that standardized curriculums in public schools a few years ago. But she realizes that Meg’s story resonates with educators, children and parents alike.

“The major theme is of Meg being stifled by too much testing and not enough thinking,” said Dutton, who teaches a course on writing for children and young adults at the University of Maine at Farmington. “I don’t want to be didactic, and yet there needs to be a point.”

Her point is: Children are fed information to memorize rather than learn. “You need to give open-ended problems to solve – that’s where we fall short,” added Dutton. “Meg is given that.”

With “Time,” Dutton was given not only her first New York appearance but also some problems to solve. She began formulating a story about a child overloaded with rote learning and the idea of “time being beaten,” but did not have an agent to propel the child past her schoolbooks.

Then, when Dutton was on a garden tour near Boothbay, she met a grandmotherly gardener whose feistiness gave the writer an idea.

What if Meg’s grandmother accuses the child of losing her curiosity and thus sends her into a dream lesson? The story took off, first as a play, and finally with songs modeled on the blues, ragtime and marches.

Eventually, Dutton sent the script and music to a presenter in New York City, and the show had its first New York performance last year for one weekend in September at Theatre-Studio Inc. An early version of the play was staged at a writing workshop in Kentucky in 2000, and a reading was done last spring in Boothbay Harbor.

Although it is never named, the setting of the play is Southport, an island near Boothbay where she met the gardener, said Dutton. “But it’s also wrapped in a lot of places I’ve been. And it turns out that all the animals are indigenous to Maine, including the walrus,” said Dutton, who was born in Missouri and grew up in Ohio. Her ancestors once worked in the shipping industry in Bath.

The New York production runs through the end of this month at the Sage Theatre, a small, second-floor, black-box space in the theater district. Before each show, Dutton stands on the street wearing her signature fedora and handing out fliers to passers-by. The lights of Times Square twinkle behind her. An official Equity Showcase production – open to the public but intended to attract backers for a larger and longer run – the show features 10 professional actors dressed as animals that sing and dance in the spirit of the 1970’s TV show “New Zoo Revue.”

On opening night, adults and children in the audience responded to the 75-minute fantasy with laughs. Accompanied by an onstage music director on keyboards, expert performers make the most of Dutton’s word play on old adages such as “time flies” and “time creeps.” In one of the funniest scenes, the local “time” store shopkeeper, an opera singing walrus, tries to sell Meg his wares: Ripe Moments, Forty Weeks, Creamed Seconds and Pickled Hours.

In the end, Meg is the hero, landing safely back in her grandmother’s garden and armed with new insights about the value of thinking beyond her school lessons.

Earlier this week, Dutton said the 60-plus seats had been filled several nights since opening, and that weekend tickets were going fast. Since November, she and her husband, Wayne Sheridan, a marketing consultant and poet, have sublet a Greenwich Village apartment during the run of the show.

In February, the couple will return to Maine, where Dutton is working on a novel. A painter whose works have been shown in Maine galleries, Dutton wrote both the text and did the drawings for a children’s book, “Dear Miss Perfect: A Beats Guide to Proper Behavior,” which will be released by Houghton Mifflin in April.

Plans also are under way for a full-scale production of “Just a Matter of Time” in Boothbay this summer, but Dutton could not yet release details. But time, as the playwright well knows, will tell.

To learn more about Sandra Dutton’s play, visit www.JustaMatterofTimetheMusical.com. The Sage Theatre, where the show runs through Jan. 31, is located at 711 Seventh Ave. in New York City. For ticket information, call SmartTix at (212) 868-4444 or visit www.SmartTix.com.

A rhymester mole (David Demato) and the show’s hero, Meg (Jennifer Kersey), find surprises around every imaginary corner in “Just a Matter of Time.”