Don't Order the Pretzels!
Don't ask why. (Or, an update on writing plays with kids.)
So it’s June and we’re down to the dregs of the school year. In fact, we’re into the snow/flood/ice/whatever-else-happened-this-year make up week. So maybe I’m a little punchy? Or I’ve already kinda gotten into summer mode and spent an hour and a half sitting in the sun on my back steps “painting my toe nails.” (And you know you can’t move and no one can come near you when you’re painting your nails, so this was extravagantly blissfully slow time.) But I digress.
The dregs of the year. Intentional coffee metaphor. Because guess what folks, tomorrow is the world premiere of Coffee and Chaos, that little play I was talking about a couple months ago where not only do the animals have to stop the humans from cutting down the forest, their coffee shop is out of coffee! Friday was the premiere of Hate Each Other in Peace, which also involves saving the forest, as well as a Foxglove who wants to be dictator, a Sitka Spruce who is also a human, and many feuds and enmities between woodland creatures. This Thursday Sawyer’s class will premiere their play, in which Sawyer aka Blackberry aka the king of the forest gets deposed and then there is chaos.
By premiere I mean staged reading, because we’re playwrights. But it’s still super exciting and has been a big process.
Why the plants and animals?
I really like starting with animals and plants as characters when I write plays with kids. I’ve done this a few times, and here’s why I think it’s great, even if you do get a lot of plays about bad humans cutting down trees.
There are baked-in conflicts, restrictions, personality traits, and alliances. Salmon and salamander both eat each other’s babies? Questionable Rock Frog is a lichen and can’t move? Devil’s Club is kind of…thorny? All great stuff to work with.
There’s no automatic main character. While some characters tend to come to the forefront in the story, starting with a web of interrelated characters (hi, ecology!) instead of a plot, means there can be several interwoven stories/desires/conflicts, and many characters get a time to shine. Having different groups of kids write the different scenes helps a lot with this too.
There’s a whole starting world. A forest is a complete world, already in the imaginations of the playwrights and audience. Of course, you can make it weird by adding anything you like — wood chip powered cars, animal coffee shops, caddisflies that turn into chihuahuaflies and then ghostflies (don’t ask why), oak trees that head off to Paris — but the world building is mostly done for you.
We also learned a LOT about ecology researching these species. And getting to be the creatures moves that knowledge away from dry objectified “leaves are 2.5 centimeters long” kind of knowing into imaginative, empathetic fellow-being kind of knowing. Which is important, I think. Nobody saves forests because they contain trees with 2.5 centimeter leaves.
A couple of other highlights
Inside jokes: Like the pretzel line. And Flying Squirrel’s “warrior face” that prompts Cougar to ask if he needs to use the bathroom. And Bitter Cherry’s obsessions with pop tarts. In years past, our play’s inside jokes became lines we said for years. Like, if we were sad we’d say, “I guess I’ll go back to my dirt.” We’re making culture here. And that always feels good.
Working together: Part of what’s always felt magical and rich to me about theater is the way it is everyone working together to create an imaginary world. There’s something so satisfying about that. Like it taps into some really important possibility in being human, the ability to imagine and create together.
Kids coming out of their shells: There’s just nothing like watching the reserved kid who never raises their hand in class standing on a stage yelling, “Pop tarts!” Or whatever.
Being cool with imperfection: The more I live, the more I become critical of perfection. Or bored with it. Uninterested in it. Perfection is a kind of death, I wrote once, on somebody’s white board full of optimization slogans. (I was a very low-key rebel.) And that was before I started thinking about how perfection is mixed up with things diet culture and white supremacy and consumerism in a big gross soup of things I don’t want to feed children. Anyway. But there’s also value in working hard on things, doing things well. These plays are a great space for both hard work and imperfect results. It’s going to be pretty rough around the edges, AND kids are giving it their all, and I think that’s a kind of beautiful combo.
Anyway, let’s hope they all break a leg/fin/root/thallus! And that nobody orders the pretzels.