Theater for Young Audiences

by Kirk Woodward 

[Mega-contributor Kirk Woodward’s next topic, following his look at the craft of writing plays, is, as he points out below, what used to be called “children’s theater.”  Both Kirk and I have been involved in theater for young audiences since the 1960s; it’s something that we both think is an important artistic endeavor.

[I’ve published two previous articles on this blog about TYA: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Children’s Theater in America” (posted on Rick On Theater on 25 November 2009), which was initiated by my attendance at a performance of one of Kirk’s own young person’s plays, and “Missoula Children’s Theatre” (25 August 2009), which I wrote when I was impressed by a report on MCT on television,

[That last post was follows many years later by another, entirely serendipitous guest article.  My friend Oona Haaranen sent me “Nobody Wants to See a Tired Bat on Stage” (9 January 2014), about her young son’s first theater experience with MCT in their Long Island hometown.  Oona’s a dancer, choreographer, dance notator, and dance teacher and I’d been trying to get her to write something about her field for ROT, but she kept putting me off.  Then she sent me this wonderful piece about her son and the visit of MCT.

[Kirk writes that theater for young audiences is sometimes still dismissed as “kiddie theater.”  Back in the late 1980s, I did a one-year leave-replacement stint at the State University of New York College at Oneonta where I found that it had a children’s theater course.  It was the only one I’d ever heard of, so I sat in on one class and it seemed quite good.  I don’t know if SUCO still offers it, but Kirk reports, “Looking at Google, there seem to be at least a few schools that offer something from a class to a program now.”

[I’ve told Kirk this, so it shouldn’t surprise him to see it again:  I think he’s a good and, what’s more, interesting playwright.  I especially enjoy his mystery plays—probably because he’s such a devotee of the genre.  (Kirk has a three-part post on ROT on Perry Mason, 19 and 22 February and 19 March 2018, and he took great delight that an office where he worked for several years was in walking distance of the Manhattan building that occupies the site of the fictional home of gourmet detective Nero Wolfe.)  

[But, I’ve said to Kirk and others, I think his plays for young viewers are truly special.  I tried to convey this feeling in “Sleepy Hollow,” referenced above, and every time I read or see one of his young people’s plays, I’m more and more convinced of this.  (I’m further convinced when I see or read many of the other authors’ children’s scripts.  There’s just no comparison.)]

“Theater for young audiences” (TYA) is the accepted term today for what used to be called, when I was first involved in it, “children’s theater.” Why the name change? In part, I’d guess, the reason is that “children’s theater” might sound like it meant “theater by children,” and although there’s plenty of that, in the theater companies I’m writing about here, adult actors perform for children.

There are a number of good books and articles about TYA (e.g.: TYA: Essays on the Theatre for Young Audiences by Moses Goldberg [Anchorage Press Plays, 2006]; TYA Today magazine [http://www.tyausa.org/publications/tya-today-magazine/, a membership organization] has regular articles on the subject), and from them one can get a good idea of the history of the field, since although its antecedents go far back in time, basically it took shape and prospered beginning in the Twentieth Century.

I don’t intend to retell the story of TYA here, but only to describe my own experiences with it, to talk about some issues involved in writing for it, and to try to convey my enthusiasm for the form, with some reasons why I feel that way.

I was introduced to TYA – then “children’s theater” – some 59 years ago by my friend Perry Baer, who was working at what was then called Louisville (Kentucky) Children’s Theater (LCT). It was founded in 1946, just after World War II.

When I joined the LTC, the theater was still, as it had been since its founding, a completely amateur operation except for a paid director. A much respected leader, Rick Schiller, had moved on to Texas at the end of the previous season; the current director was a man named Claude Astin (1939-2003).

Perry brought me to a Saturday morning “tech day,” which on that particular Saturday was devoted to straightening up the clutter in the basement below the stage of the old University of Louisville (U of L) theater, an historic wooden structure that still exists, although it’s now been moved to a different location on campus. Later Saturdays were devoted to building sets, assembling costumes, and the like.

LCT was a somewhat uneasy guest of the University theater, because they both used the same space. There was some movement between the two, especially on the part of the unofficial leader of the LTC group, David Semonin (1941-2010), about whom I have written elsewhere on this blog (see “Saints of the Theater,” posted on Rick On Theater on 30 December 2011). David was enrolled at U of L, as were some of the others of our group. I was dazzled by the talent in the group, and I wasn’t wrong; several continued with fine careers in theater.

Males are often in short supply in community theaters, so I was cast in a show called Seven At One Blow and then in another called Robinson Crusoe (I am not sure who wrote either of them, but they were published scripts). The other production I remember best from those days was an original musical called Reckon With the River, with a score by Nelson Keyes (1928-1987) and a book by Clark McMeekin, a pen name for two ladies named Dorothy Clark (1899-1983) and Isabel McMeekin (1895-1973).

I go into this detail because plays written for TYA often fall into these three categories: plays based on folk tales; plays based on stories or books; and original works. Any of these can be either musicals or “straight plays.”

TYA has changed enormously since those early days, and LTC is a good example: it is now called StageOne Family Theatre, and it is a well-known and respected professional operation with its own theater space at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in Louisville.  For some years it was led by Moses Goldberg (b. 1940), an outstanding figure in TYA both as an author and as a director.

There is now an umbrella organization, TYA/USA, with over a thousand members including “theaters, organizations, and individual artists.”  (TYA/USA, or Theatre for Young Audiences/USA, is the U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People, known by its French initials, ASSITEJ.  TYA/USA—which sometimes goes by the initials USA/ASSITEJ—is a membership organization and publishes TYA Today for its members; the biennial publication is available in some libraries.  The organization’s website is at http://www.tyausa.org/.)

For me the experience of working at LCT was formative. I’ve loved TYA ever since (although I only recently learned not to call it “children’s theater”). After college, in Rockbridge County, Virginia, I directed my first venture with a “children’s show,” an adaptation of Twelfth Night for children (see “Directing Twelfth Night for Children,” 16 and 19 December 2010).

I’ve had many wonderful experiences with TYA. Here are a few: I wrote and directed several TYA productions for the Attic Ensemble in Jersey City, New Jersey. The first came about when I was asked to direct a play based on the Aladdin story, and I realized not only that it was a terrible script, but that it had almost no roles for women. I wrote a new version, which has since been produced a number of times.

Mona Hennessy and I created a professional company for which we both wrote and performed. I remember David Semonin asking me why I thought the world needed another TYA company. I said I thought we could write some worthwhile things, and we did, including a Christmas play (Waiting for Christmas) that was produced as recently as this past holiday season.

Elsewhere I directed TYA shows wherever I could, usually writing the shows as well. I acted and played piano for a year for Pushcart Players, an outstanding New Jersey company, and led the TYA wing of 12 Miles West, a professional company in Montclair (later moved to Bloomfield), New Jersey. More recently I’ve directed TYA for the Theater League of Clifton (New Jersey).

As a matter of fact, a commentary on one of the TYA plays I wrote, a musical version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, has appeared on this blog, as has a fascinating piece about the Missoula Children’s Theatre, and links to both articles can be found in the comments at the beginning of this article.

As I pointed out, TYA is a much more vigorous field than it was when I began working in it. Nevertheless it is still something of a last resort for many actors – often seen mainly as a way of getting their Equity cards – and for theaters, who may have a sort of “second unit” TYA for apprentices, prospective company members, and students in the theater’s training wing.

Many times I have had to scratch for actors to cast in children’s plays. Lenny Bart, the artistic director of 12 Miles West, would try to nudge performers toward our productions by telling them their prospects of joining the main acting company would be much higher if they used TYA to demonstrate what they could do. No soap.

Part of the problem – assuming that the same thing has been and is a problem for others – is the notion of TYA as “kiddie theater,” a notion encouraged by an impressive number of badly written plays, often badly produced. One cringes at the memory of all the TYA plays in which two actors, walking backward toward the center of the stage, bump into each other and scream in mock alarm. One wouldn’t see that in a play by Ibsen!

And that’s the point: TYA demands the same respect for audiences that a play by Ibsen does, and that any other kind of theater does. A sloppy script, poorly directed on a minimal set and filled with acting shtick, deserves exactly the amount of approval that the same things would receive in a play by Shakespeare.

There are differences, of course. In the first place, a young audience isn’t monolithic. (Neither is an adult audience, but ordinarily the distinctions are less clearly defined.) An audience of, say, kindergarteners through third graders is not the same as an audience of, say, up to seventh graders, or tenth graders. As a result, many TYA theaters specify in their advertising the age range for which a particular play is written.

“Writing down” to an early elementary school audience is certainly not a good option. Instead, the playwright must focus on vivid action and clarity of ideas – a good thing no matter what the age of the audience.

Another issue in writing for TYA is that in many cases up to half the audience is likely to be adult – that is, parents and caregivers who, however unwillingly, have accompanied the children to the play. One of the pioneers of TYA in the United States, Charlotte Chorpenning (1873-1955), in her seminal book Twenty-One Years With Children’s Theatre (Children’s Theatre Press, 1954) noticed this situation and advised playwrights to be sure to consider the adults now and then.

Obviously the attention spans of children differ from those of adults. (Some might say they are longer!) I use a school assembly program as a standard for the length of a play for a young audience. Many plays for adults, of course, are also too long and could use the discipline one gets from writing for children.

As a friend of mine says, then, good advice for someone writing a play for a young audience is: “Cook with a wine you like.” You wouldn’t drink a wine you didn’t like; why would you write a play that you wouldn’t want to see?

A crucial issue in writing plays for TYA is the question whether or not such a play should deliberately teach a lesson, a moral, a principle, or a belief. In many cases the answer is “yes.” There is a great deal of excellent writing on the subject, much of it available through the Educational Theatre Association (“shaping lives through theatre education”), supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Theater is a valuable tool for education. I have written instructional plays for both school and church, and have also taught and used what is sometimes known as “creative dramatics” (see “Creative Dramatics,” 30 September 2013), described by The American Association of Theatre for Youth as “an improvisational, non-exhibitional, process-centered form of drama in which participants are guided by a leader to imagine, enact and reflect upon human experience,” often with an emphasis on learning something specific.

Few would disagree with the idea that education for children is important, and that theater can be an effective tool for teaching when guided by people skilled in the field. There are definitely things we want children to learn. Of course, whenever theater is used as a tool for teaching, something specific is being taught. For example, I would want children to learn about the prevalence and the danger of racism.

However, theater as a tool can be used for varied purposes; it could, for example, be used to promote racism. This is not inconceivable. (Some in fact would claim that any use of theater to educate and train is necessarily oppressive and inevitably is going to be culturally biased. I find this position overstated but important to consider.)

Starting out to teach a lesson is not necessarily the best approach for a playwright anyway, and not necessarily better for an audience either. As an audience member, do you enjoy a play more when you see its point coming at you a mile away? And as a playwright, do you feel at your most creative when writing as though you were following a recipe?

I realize that, as George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) says, every play that’s not the merest tissue of effects must have some kind of idea behind it. But often that idea emerges, both for the audience and for the writer, from the interaction of the characters in the play. (Shaw himself, although a fervent Socialist, makes almost no mention of Socialism in his many plays.)

My conclusion is that there is a place for TYA plays deliberately designed to educate, but that there has got to be an important place as well for TYA plays written out of an unforced artistic impulse. Children can gain as much from such plays as adults can from similar plays written for them. The many works of the outstanding TYA playwright Aurand Harris (1915-1996) substantiate this claim.

Earlier I said that the major categories of TYA plays are plays based on folk tales; plays based on stories or books; and original works. Most but not all of the fifteen produced plays for TYA that I’ve written belong to the first two categories, usually to the second, plays based on folktales or books, including, among others, The Bremen Town Musicians, Alice in Wonderland, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Aesop’s fables.

I love the discipline of adapting books and stories for young audiences – the requirements of time, and the demand for a clear storyline and characters. The storyline doesn’t have to be linear either – Alice in Wonderland certainly is not. Working with an established author on material in the public domain is like working with a brilliant collaborator who trusts you.

Mentioning the public domain reminds me that the expansion of TYA goes hand in hand with the expansion of literature for children. The two face many of the same issues, and many stories written for children can make terrific theater – only, of course, if the author grants rights to the playwright, or writes  the plays herself or himself.

One final thought: in an era in which electronic entertainment is rampant, young children still enjoy seeing a play, and that enthusiasm may continue into later life, if it’s encouraged by exciting and interesting theater experiences. If only for the sake of providing an alternative to mass produced experience, TYA is an important and valuable asset for our society.

[Aside from performing in school plays in elementary and middle school (and seeing at least one memorable children’s play, recounted below, in the mid-1950s), my involvement with theater for young audiences didn’t start as early as Kirk’s.  My first real experience with theater for children was in the spring of my senior year at college (1969). 

[I’d been active in the university theater program from my freshman year (which is when I met Kirk, incidentally), but during that final spring, the wife of the university theater director and another faculty wife put together a performance for children that was to tour elementary schools and local libraries in Rockbridge County, Virginia.  

[The production was a version of The Emperor’s New Clothes, though I don’t recall the writer of the published script.  I played the villain.  As much fun as it is to play a bad guy—Iago was my dream role and I played Don John in Much Ado About Nothing—playing a children’s villain is even more fun!

[After I graduated from college, I had several months to wait before reporting for active military duty. The university theater director offered me a gap job in the theater shop, so I was back in Lexington, Virginia, for the fall. When the two women who’d produced ENC proposed a children’s acting workshop, I took a third-grade class.  This was my first experience teaching any kind of theater or acting.

[In the army, after I arrived in West Berlin in the summer of 1971, I became involved in the Berlin Brigade theater activities at the Berlin Entertainment Center.  Then a small group of us formed a theater group independent of the BEC.  One of our members was an air force tech sergeant and he got the Tempelhof NCO club to sponsor us.  (Tempelhof was West Berlin’s main airport at that time, and a U.S. Air Force base.)

[We called ourselves the Tempelhof American Theatre, or TAT, and our first show (December 1972) was a children’s play, The Wonderful Tang by Beaumont Bruestle (1905-89).  It was a fairy tale set in China and I played a character, The Chorus, who’s like a children’s version of Our Town’s Stage Manager. 

[The show was a huge success.  TAT was invited to do a cut-down version of the play on a Saturday morning children’s show on Air Force Television that was taped in Berlin.  The AFTV show also included some interviews—children’s style—about who TAT was and what we did and what the play was about and so on.

[After the army, I came to New York and went to Rutgers University for a Master of Fine Arts degree in acting from what became the Mason Gross School of the Arts.  During my second year at New Jersey’s state university (1976-77), I signed on as touring stage manager for The Brave Little Tailor, a children’s musical by Aurand Harris that traveled around Middlesex County throughout the school year.

[During the summer following my second and final year at Rutgers, some of the MFA students put together a traveling children’s theater, which we called the Loose Caboose.  We had a rep of two shows which schools, summer programs, libraries, and community centers could book.  One was The Dancing Donkey, a children’s musical by Erik Vos (b. 1929).

[The other show was a story-theater piece all about animals we assembled from a number of sources.  It included an African folk story about Ananse, the trickster spider; a couple of Thurber fables; and the Bremen Town Musicians.  (I don’t remember for sure anymore, but I think I was the hound dog.) 

[This wasn’t Kirk’s script of The Bremen Town Musicians, which is a musical, since I’m pretty sure he hadn’t created his yet.  I believe, however, BMT is my favorite of Kirk’s young-audiences plays—but that may be solely because it contains a song called “You Can’t Stay Mad at a Dog.”  You see, both Kirk and I are dog-lovers.  If you’re a dog-lover, it’s just plain true: you can’t stay mad at a dog!

[I directed a December 1978 production of Kirk’s Aladdin for the American Theatre Arts Project, which was working out of the Provincetown Playhouse near Washington Square in Greenwich Village.  That’s  the historic theater where Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) had gotten his New York start (there was still a permanent cyclorama on the stage which he’d helped build and which bore his initials!). 

[I talked to some of the ATAP leaders about starting a children’s theater program and they were receptive.  I chose Aladdin for our first full-length children’s play.  As Kirk mentions in his article, men are scarce in TYA, and I ran into this issue when I was casting Aladdin.  I had to break one of my own rules and take a part in a play I was directing because I couldn’t get enough male ATAP actors to audition.

[I also cast the Genie as a woman because I didn’t have enough men.  I think that was fine, but I had to drop the Groucho Marx imitation Kirk had written into the part because I didn’t feel it worked with a woman doing it—it didn’t make sense.  (Groucho, 1890-1977, had just died the year before, but I was still pretty certain that the little kids in our audience wouldn’t see the joke anyway—even if the adults with them might.)

[Kirk talks about “exciting and interesting theater experiences” in childhood spurring interest in theater later and I’m reminded of an anecdote I’ve told before (in “A Broadway Baby,” 22 September 2010).  When I was very young, under 10, I’d say, when my family spent part of the summer on Cape Cod, we used to go at least once a season to the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis.  One show I remember, with one scene in particular, was The Wizard of Oz.  It was more than 65 years ago, but I still have an image of that scene, which I described thus:

I still remember being astonished at a production of  The Wizard of Oz there when, after a tornado generated by the techies, the lights came back up—and there was Dorothy’s house on stage, on top of the Wicked Witch, her legs sticking out from under one side!   It was impossible!  How did that house get there?  It was magic!

[Obviously it made an impression on me that lasted over six-and-a-half decades.  I’ve always seen it as my earliest experience of live theater that stamped me for life.  (I think I may have been on stage at a younger age at school.  One time was the dramatization of a folktale or traditional story—I don’t remember which one (maybe the Pied Piper)—and I had a speech down front . . . and I went up! 

[I absolutely froze, so much that when people off stage tried to prompt me, I couldn’t pick up what they were saying and I just stood there.  I remember it as minutes, but I imagine it was actually only seconds—and you’d think that would have cured me of being stage-struck.  Nope!  (But that never happened again—at least not that way.)]