Setting a New Stage for Kids

By Richard Zoglin

Between their pushups and Power Bars, Matt and Luke, two high school wrestling buddies training for a big match, don't need any distractions. But they've got one: a rumor going around school that they are gay. The kids spreading it have plenty of their own issues to deal with, like the girl trying to live down her reputation as the school slut, and the clique-leading prom queen whose boyfriend is cheating on her. It sounds like the stuff of a TV after-school special, except for two things. They don't have after-school specials anymore. And this is part of a play, Laurie Brooks' Wrestling Season, so energetically stylized that it defuses any hint of preachiness or soap opera. The action takes place on a gym floor, where a referee periodically whistles scenes to a halt with calls like "illegal hold" or "unsportsmanlike conduct." When not in scenes, the class- mates turn into a chorus, chanting lines ("You think you know me, but you don't") that echo key themes of the drama. And when the play is over, a moderator guides the audience through a postshow discussion as the actors, in character, defend their actions and theatergoers assign them to chairs, ranking their behavior from most to least objectionable.

Jack and the Beanstalk this play is not. Children's theater--or theater for young audiences, to use the politically correct term--is growing up. Once a place where community actors donned bright plaid costumes to act out fairy tales for little tykes, it has become a haven for some of the most committed and creative theater people in the country. These venues still draw the biggest crowds with the familiar kiddie favorites, from Charlotte's Web to Go, Dog. Go! But increasingly they are commissioning new works, reaching out to older kids, who typically stop going to theater when their parents stop dragging them, and pushing the boundaries in both style and subject matter.

Children's theater got a major boost in the mid-'90s with the arrival of Disney on Broadway--particularly Julie Taymor's groundbreaking show The Lion King. The show not only proved that so-called children's theater could draw huge family audiences (it has raked in more than $1 billion from its Broadway and worldwide touring companies) but also expanded the vocabulary of the stage, embracing everything from puppetry to African dance. Everywhere in the culture, meanwhile, children's entertainment is crossing over to adult audiences and gaining mainstream cachet, from Harry Potter books to Pixar animation. London's National Theatre this year scored one of its biggest successes with a lavish, dense and sensationally entertaining two-part adaptation of Philip Pullman's young-adult trilogy His Dark Materials. In a world in which Madonna writes children's books and hip grownup film critics put Shrek on their 10 Best lists, it should have come as no surprise that a musical for little kids called A Year with Frog and Toad wound up on Broadway last year--and even got a Tony nomination for Best Musical.

The folks who created that show, the Children's Theater Company of Minneapolis, Minn., won their own Tony in 2003--for Best Regional Theater, the first children's troupe ever to get that annual award. It was both a watershed and an inspiration for the the creators of kids' theater. "The theater world often condescends to us," says Scot Copeland, producing director of the Nashville Children's Theater. "The Tony was a great shot in the arm." Funding, while never easy to come by, is flowing a bit more easily--partly because children's theater can be sold to community-minded donors not just as an arts project, but as a boost for literacy and education. A growing number of mainstream playwrights, like David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly), Nilo Cruz (Anna in the Tropics) and Kia Corthron (Force Continuum), are writing plays for children. New theaters are under construction in Minneapolis and Tempe, Ariz.; the Dallas Children's Theater has just moved into a spacious new complex; and Washington's Kennedy Center, which has taken a lead in developing and producing works for the younger set, is finishing construction of a new theater to open next fall, dedicated exclusively to children's plays.

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 Childsplaytheater 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. Main- stream 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. --With reporting by Amy Lennard Goehner/New York City

With reporting by Amy Lennard Goehner/New York City