Theatre Symposium, Vol. 23: Theatre and Youth

By Becky K. Becker, Camille L. Bryant, Jerry Daday and 14 more

The curtain rises on Theatre and Youth, volume 23 of Theatre Symposium with keynote reflections by Suzan Zeder, the distinguished playwright of theatre for youth, and presents eleven original essays about theatre’s reflections of youth and the role of young people in making and performing theatre.
 
The first set of essays draws from robustly diverse sources: the work of Frank Wedekind in nineteenth-century Germany, Peter Pan’s several stage incarnations, Evgeny Shvarts’s antitotalitarian plays in Soviet Russia, and Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, whose depictions of childhood comment on both the classical period as well as Marlowe’s own Elizabethan age.
 
The second part of the collection explores and illustrates how youth participate in theatre, the cognitive benefits youth reap from theatre practice, and the ameliorating power of theatre to help at-risk youth. These essays show fascinating and valuable case studies of, for example, theatre employed in geography curricula to strengthen spatial thinking, theatre as an antidote to youth delinquency, and theatre teaching Latinos in the south strategies for coping in a multilingual world.
 
Rounding out this exemplary collection are a pair of essays that survey the state of the art, the significance of theatre-for-youth programming choices, and the shifting attitudes young Americans are bringing to the discipline. Eclectic and vital, this expertly curated collection will be of interest to educators and theatre professionals alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817389130

Book preview

Contributors

Introduction

David S. Thompson

Those of us who study, teach, and create theatre can most assuredly understand its analogy to youth. Conceptually, both theatre and youth may contain moments of wonder and fresh discoveries, among other surprises. I find myself faced with a pleasant surprise in the form of a keynote speaker who fulfills the intent of an introduction and allows me to keep my remarks relatively brief.

In the first article of this volume, Suzan Zeder reflects on her experiences as keynote speaker of the symposium, the event that led to the volume’s publication. As an award-winning playwright, recently retired professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and artist of boundless creativity, she took a novel approach to a keynote address and conference response. The resulting article connects her experiences over the weekend of April 11–13, 2014, to the theme of Theatre and Youth, as well as to her remarkable career.

Although authors approached the symposium theme in varied ways, the organization of Theatre Symposium Volume 23 falls into three broad categories. Following Suzan Zeder’s keynote reflection, this edition offers analyses of youth in drama and performance. Edward Journey considers both genre and generational divides in the work of Frank Wedekind; Sarah McCarroll discusses the visual and performative implications of an iconic youthful character, Peter Pan; Kathryn Rebecca Van Winkle uses Christopher Marlowe’s drama to examine Elizabethan boyhood; and Seth Wilson highlights the political subtext of The Dragon. The volume continues with explorations of theatrical practice involving youth. Becky Becker, Camille Bryant, Andrea Dawn Frazier, and Amanda Rees outline their efforts in combing theatre and geography to enhance spatial thinking; Carol Jordan and Jerry Daday share the results of a theatre-in-diversion program; Aaron L. Kelly provides an example of devised theatre that serves as a rite of passage; and Beth Murray, Irania Patterson, and Spencer Salas discuss their unique adaptation project viewed against the backdrop of the New Latino South. Zeder’s opening article includes observations from the field regarding the state of the art. The volume concludes with two essays addressing related concerns: Ashley Laverty contemplates the significance of theatre-for-youth programming choices, while Christopher Peck offers thoughts on shifts in attitude that follow a youthful generation into the audience.

Each edition of this journal involves executing an event, creating a publication, and managing all of the associated steps of both. Just as youths need mentors and theatre artists need production teams, the effort surrounding Theatre Symposium requires many collaborators. The remarkable Suzan Zeder enlivened our April 2014 gathering of scholars in ways too many to enumerate. Although it is not possible for this volume to include every paper presented during the symposium, each presenter and member of the audience made valuable contributions and all deserve gratitude for their efforts.

By the time these comments appear in print, Agnes Scott College will have hosted its fifth event. While I have had the good fortune to call myself the host, the hospitality actually emanates from several directions—the college’s administration, led by President Elizabeth Kiss, for its continued encouragement; Gail Meis, Registrar, and the staff of the Office of the Registrar, Tanzania Revels and Cheryl Green, for securing space; Demetrice Williams, Director of Special Events and Community Relations, for logistical consideration; Pete Miller, Director of Dining Services, and his remarkable staff who make every guest feel welcome and every organizer feel proud; the student members of the Blackfriars of Agnes Scott College for their enthusiastic assistance; and the remarkable Leah Owenby of Faculty Services for never-ending creativity and goodwill. Thanks also are due to Dan Waterman and Vanessa Rusch of the University of Alabama Press for their ability to combine professionalism and patience. Jane Barnette, associate editor, has my thanks and best wishes for new adventures. My deepest appreciation goes to my wife, Sara Shockley Thompson, for making everything better, to my son Robert, who has made me proud by learning to navigate both the highs and lows of college life, and to my son Daniel, who has made me proud by learning to drive, learning to become academically curious, and learning to dodge errant sousaphone players. Finally, I offer my best wishes and continuing gratitude to the Southeastern Theatre Conference, my friends and colleagues from my home region and beyond who support theatre in its many forms.

Theatre and Youth

It’s All in the Prepositions: A Keynote Reflection

Suzan Zeder

For three magical days in April 2014 we gathered on the beautiful campus of Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, a collection of scholars, practitioners, artists, and educators to discuss the past, explore the present, and imagine future confluences of theatre and youth. I was honored to be the keynote speaker for Theatre Symposium 23: Theatre and Youth, a conference that would truly live up to its intentions as a forum for promoting the exchange of ideas and insights, experiences, and inspirations.

I was fascinated by the symposium’s scope and structure, with a range of papers and panels that reached back to the history of Elizabethan boyhood as revealed in Christopher Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage; forward to cyber-children on the virtual stage of Second Life; inward to plays featuring child characters ranging from Peter Pan to vicious Mary in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour; and outward to real children and adults using theatre to combat juvenile delinquency, to deal with bullying, to question assumptions about gender identity, and to imagine new ways of conceiving geography and shaping space. In three days we traveled from the streets of Kolkata, India, to a post-traumatic Ireland, to the repression of Stalinist Russia, and to a coming-of-age ritual at Roosevelt High School in Portland, Oregon.

It was a conference unlike any I had ever attended, perfectly summed up in the seemingly simple title Theatre and Youth: the most important word being the operant and. In those three little letters are nestled all the prepositions that describe the many dimensions of work for, of, about, and with young people and the fields of inquiry where they are theorized and practiced. These include professional theatre for children, plays with child characters, theatre for social change, historical and ethnographic studies dealing with children and youth, and practical hands-on work involving young people in schools, communities, detention facilities, and the like.

My duties as keynote speaker included delivering some opening remarks to chart a course for the weekend, listening to presentations of twenty-three fascinating papers and participating in the discussions that followed, and finally offering a response or conference reaction highlighting emergent themes made manifest during our time together. Not unlike Alice in Alice in Wonderland, who was told, Sentence First! Verdict Afterward!, I decided to invert the prescribed paradigm offering my response first, hearing the papers second, and finally putting forth a keynote call to action to all participants, challenging them to make a commitment to change one thing in their scholarship, artistry, teaching, or practice that would place theatre and youth in the center of some aspect of their ongoing work. It could be an idea, an image, an awareness, or a shift in perception that would lead to a tangible manifestation, something they would actually do to turn reflection into activism.

Using the abstracts kindly sent to me by conference organizer David Thompson, I framed my opening remarks around the topics in the hearts and on the minds of the conference participants. My resulting speech was an attempt to stitch together a conceptual path through their research and to offer my own experience as a playwright and educator to contextualize their inquiries. In this article I hope to capture the essence of that keynote, threading my observations about the papers into my own experiences and ruminations about the field in general. The articles in this journal represent a cross section of the papers presented in the symposium. Just as I sounded a clarion call to the symposium participants, I offer the same challenge to each of you: to be inspired by what you find here and to change one thing in your scholarship, artistry, teaching, or practice to include theatre and youth in a way that changes your work and, perhaps, your life.

As adults working in various disciplines involving children, we tend to put ourselves in an us and them binary. We ask: what can we as adults do for, to, about, or with them as children? We can teach them, entertain them, model, mentor, support, encourage, protect, and defend them! Much more rarely do we invert this paradigm and ask: what can they do for, to, with, and about us? How can a child’s view and voice help us see or hear our world differently? How does a child’s point of view inform our own perspective in ways that might radically shift not only a balance of power in our society, but inspire a new way of seeing, a shift in perception that might shake the foundations of our assumptions about our lives, our scholarship, and our art?

The historical foundations of professional and educational theatre for young people in the United States are deeply rooted in the us and them binary. Unlike theatre for youth in Central Europe and Scandinavia, where professional companies have a long history of government subsidy of the arts and where theatre for children has always been driven by experimental and aesthetic motivations, children’s theatre in the United States sprang from settlement houses, educational institutions, and social service organizations. The Henry Street Settlement (1893) and The Children’s Educational Theatre (1903), both in New York City, the famous and still fabulous Karamu House founded in 1915 in Cleveland, and many others grew from neighborhood associations concerned with providing immigrant children a safe and creative place to tell stories, make plays, and find a sense of community.

Theatrical performances and dramatic activities were seen as ways of instilling universal values through theatre and dance. Based in neighborhoods and staffed largely with volunteers, these institutions welcomed children and families of diverse backgrounds and found ways to use the arts to blend their heritages into a new American landscape. Social service organizations such as the Junior League (1901), The Boston League (1912), and the Chicago League (1912) provided outlets for wealthy young women to merge their proclivities for social work and the arts. Many started touring troupes taking performances of classic stories such as Aladdin, The Prince and the Pauper, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and The Little Princess to schools and community centers.

These emphatically amateur efforts were a far cry from the multimillion dollar professional TYA (Theatre for Young Audiences) companies today. Theatres such as Seattle Children’s Theatre, The Children’s Theatre Company and School of Minneapolis, Childsplay in Tempe, Arizona, and Metro Theatre Company in St. Louis have budgets, facilities, and a level of professionalism in dramaturgy and artistry to rival the best regional theatres for adults. But the field of TYA still bears both the stigma of its amateur roots and the inspirational optimism of its founders’ belief in the power of the arts to change lives.

When we are fighting the philistines to justify the presence of the arts in education, government or foundation funding, or any remotely political agenda, we are all fond of proclaiming that the arts have the power to change lives! This is our mantra, our core belief, the unassailable truth that we all know anecdotally but are hard pressed to prove in the cribbed criteria of the number crunchers. Melora Cybul, in her paper Integrating Theatre across the Curriculum, probed this query in the symposium, as did Carol Jordan in her description of a project that brought together college students in the field of social work and young juvenile offenders in Theatre-in-Diversion: Evaluating an Arts-Based Approach to Combating Juvenile Delinquency. But the only way to speak to the absolute truth of this statement is to look to your own life, to the tipping point of your personal experience where a spark of ignition changed your life. To get in touch with this primal source, I invited the symposium participants to remember the first live theatre experience that touched their lives in ways that were both subtle and profound.

I invite you to do the same: right now, sitting wherever you are, reading this on a computer or the old-fashioned way with paper volume in hand:

• Take a moment to clear your mind and take a deep breath.

• Think back to the most recent theatre experience you have had as a spectator, creator, critic, or participant.

• Hold an image of that experience like a photograph.

• Now visualize a book of time where you have stored all the theatrical images of past performances you have created, been in, or attended.

• Thumb back through the images until you find one that strikes you as the first, the most powerful, the ignition point that illuminated . . . something.

♦ Where were you?

♦ How old were you?

♦ What were you wearing?

♦ Who were you with?

♦ What were all the sensory experiences you remember: sight, smell, taste, hearing,