Setting a New Stage for Kids

GO, DOG. GO! Adaptations like this Dallas show are popular, but serious fare is catching on

LINDA BLASE

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The most striking change is the influx of new creative voices and stylistic experiments. Children's theaters started in the 1930s as amateur community projects, mainly doing adaptations of fairy tales and classic kids' stories. More professional children's theaters started sprouting in the 1960s and '70s in cities such as Minneapolis and Seattle, and children's playwrights began to tackle more serious social issues, from adjusting to a stepmother (Suzan Zeder's Step on a Crack) to the Holocaust (James Still's And Then They Came for Me). A landmark play like The Yellow Boat—which David Saar, who runs the enterprising Childsplay theater in Tempe, based on the death of his son, a hemophiliac, from AIDS at age 8—is as theatrically bold and emotionally wrenching as any recent American drama.

The challenge of getting kids engaged seems to have inspired writers and directors to experiment more freely with the form, integrating movement, music, puppetry, dance and more nontraditional techniques. And sometimes they strip theater down to its thrilling essentials: a bare stage and the imagination. A production of Moby Dick from Germany's Theater Triebwerk (presented at New York City's New Victory Theater last spring) re-creates Melville's tale with just three actors, some costume changes and a few minimalist stage effects—like a swaying lamp to represent the rolling sea. A new version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, first produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and restaged this fall by Jeff Church of the Coterie Theater in Kansas City, Mo., features one prop, a cage on wheels, and four actors—including, in a startling but wonderfully apt innovation, one for Jekyll and another for Hyde.

"The goal is to create theater that is dynamic, inventive, challenging—and that won't bore kids," says Peter Brosius, artistic director of Minneapolis' Children's Theater Company, who regularly checks out companies in Europe, where theater for young people has long been more audacious (and, not coincidentally, better funded) than in the U.S. "Young audiences are more associative, nonlinear. They're willing to go on the journey." Brosius' company has staged an interactive, site-specific production of Antigone and, last spring, an evocative performance piece called Prom, in which students and teachers re-enact the anxiety- ridden rite of passage known as the high school prom. In Minneapolis, they don't even play the old fairy tales straight: in this fall's dark adaptation of Hansel and Gretel, two children are left in the woods not by an evil stepmother but by two loving parents who simply don't have enough money to feed them—and the story is turned into a commentary on poverty and hunger.

Those ambitious ventures, of course, can sometimes run up against commercial realities. The older kids that many of these new plays are geared toward are also the hardest to lure into a theater—especially a theater with "children's" in its name. When the Nashville Children's Theater staged Wrestling Season last spring, the crowds were thin. Old reliables like The Velveteen Rabbit are still the way to fill the theater—"the tyranny of titles," as some put it. There are those who argue, moreover, that the traditional book adaptations shouldn't be dismissed so readily. "It's more important to do Tom Sawyer now than ever," says Nashville's Copeland, "because a lot of kids are not going to read it."

Children's theaters also have to face the problem of getting past the gatekeepers—parents, teachers, school administrators—to reach their primary audience. Along with weekend shows aimed at family audiences, these theaters subsist on weekday performances for school groups. But getting schools to commit to a field trip to the theater—instead of, say, a day of preparing for standardized tests—is becoming tougher in the age of No Child Left Behind. Then there are the morals monitors, who sometimes balk at more adventuresome children's material. When the Dallas Children's Theater three years ago staged Laurie Brooks' Deadly Weapons, a play about teen violence, the Fort Worth school district stayed away because a knife was brandished on stage, violating its zero-tolerance policy on weapons.

Yet for anyone interested in American theater, the boom in theater for young people is mighty encouraging. Mainstream theaters are worried about their audiences aging; children's theaters foster a love for drama almost from the time kids can walk. Theaters are seeking to expand their audiences; children's theaters have long pioneered color-blind casting and plays aimed at an ethnically and racially diverse audience.

The more freewheeling aesthetic of children's theater—with its openness to fantasy, movement, participatory elements—is also energizing for adult audiences and creators. "You can never take yourself too seriously when the audience is full of young people," says Linda Hartzell, artistic director of the Seattle Children's Theater. "Kids let you know when they're not engaged. I think it must be what audiences were like for Shakespeare." Children's theater isn't always Shakespeare, but it's often such stuff as dreams are made on.