Quiet Revolution: Feminist Considerations in Adapting Literature for Children's Theatre

COMMENTS ONPROCESS Quiet Revolution: Feminist Considerations in Adapting Literature for Children's Theatre Assunta Kent //feminists agree that the social construction of gender must be changed, and also that theatrical representation, even though it usually supports dominant definitions of gender, can disrupt or even contest these gender constructs, then why do we wait until people are 18 or 22 years old to challenge already longestablished habits and beliefs, when we can offer them alternative world views while they are very young? We must examine our acceptance of the traditional marginalization of children's theatre in higher education. We must support the inclusion of theatre for young audiences in university curricula and seasons and insist on rigorous training and production standards. For feminists, these training and production standards must go beyond aesthetic considerations to an insistence for responsible social relations and contexts, for both actors and characters, in the rehearsal and presentation of child drama. It is not without caution that I urge producers of drama for children to be aware of the social and political implications of the fare we offer. Theatre for young children (K-5) is an area in which it is both more effective and more responsible to mainstream feminist views than to propound feminist precepts or simply critique the dominant order. Though theatrical productions are never innocent of ideological viewpoint, children are an especially impressionable audience; and I do not advocate a return to moral preaching in art for children, no matter how progressive the message. I am advocating subtle and, at the same time, fundamental changes in the world view presented for young audiences. In my recent story adaptation, Old Friend, New Friend, Best Friend, Blue Friend, I attempted to present, through stories of everyday life, a world in which an interracial couple have lived together for fifty years; girls who aren't anything alike argue yet remain best friends; both females and males cook and share food; and small, timid and handicapped protagonists win at least some of their battles. 35 36 Assunta Kent I want to differentiate in production style from Paul Sill's Story Theatre, which focuses on plot, leaving characterization and context relatively flat and sketchy. This limitation of story theatre was redressed by employing oral interpretation and readers theatre techniques. Using text analysis and interpretive scripting to round and deepen characterization and a complex treatment of narration, shared between an on-stage narrator and characters in the story, we were able to stage social context and commentary. Though most commercial story theatre presents conventional tales with "traditional" values and thereby perpetuates unequal gender and other nonegalitarian social relations, a script compiled from stories necessarily involves actors changing characters from story to story. This scripting technique invites the feminist director to abandon typecasting, to show different sorts of people in conventional roles, and to foreground behavior rather than the "natural" body, voice, or personality of an actor or character. Even in one dimensional story theatre, all semiotic systems are sending messages to the audience all the time. Children in response to the production drew pictures of visual elements with great specificity (the physical differences among the actors, moments of physical contact, and details of props); they also rendered unintended visual elements of our makeshift theatres such as strip lights and off-stage areas seen from their positions on the gym floor. In short, they noticed everything. We did not rely solely on the words of the text to convey a feminist world view, but employed a variety of sign systems, scripting and performance techniques. We assumed that the temporal and thematic arrangement of the stories, sets and costuming, gesture and spatial relationships , narrators' relationships to the story, and "strategic" casting affected the impact of the stories. Though some of these elements were rather subtle intellectually, they were perceptible emotionally or kinesthetically. For example , I chose a male narrator for the story of Mr. Breton's friendship with the (male) Moose; I chose to have no narrator (and certainly not a male) mediate the misunderstanding and rapprochement between the Italian grandmother and her granddaughter. This production was commissioned to provide a 60-minute touring show for children K-6, requiring a simple...