Back to the Books: Evaluating the Economic Factors behind Literature-based Theatre for Young Audiences Productions

The origins of this article stemmed from a classroom conversation several years ago. In my Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) course, I distributed a series of prominent Canadian TYA scripts and asked the students to search for general trends in theme, topic, or aesthetic. When the class regrouped the following week, I invited my students to share their preliminary observations. One wry student offered the following comment: “In the past, all Canadian TYA plays were about pioneers; today, they’re all about crystal meth.” In Canada, TYA-focused scholarship—when it exists at all—tends to highlight specific productions or artists; few academic projects consider longitudinal perspectives. Curious about the accuracy of my student’s whimsical appraisal of the shift from settlers to substance abuse, I embarked upon a research campaign that aimed to identify generational trends in English Canada’s body of TYA texts. After a comparative review of TYA companies’ season histories, I discovered an increasing phenomenon of theatre productions based upon literary works. This article begins with a presentation of the survey documenting the source material of Canadian TYA plays, coupled with a brief analysis of the results. From there, the article argues that material conditions, rather than artistic goals, have fuelled the surge in literary-based TYA productions, raising some problematic concerns.

Relative to the TYA histories of the United States and Europe, Canadian activity lagged about a generation behind. In 1953, the Vancouver-based Holiday Theatre was founded, with an operational model and repertoire that consisted generally of “weekend and holiday entertainment for boys and girls and their families with scripts based on fairy tales, classic children’s books, historical incidents or biographies of great men” (Doolittle and Barnieh 70). For a decade, the Holiday served as Canada’s only professional theatre company devoted to productions for young audiences; through the late 1960s and early 1970s, a proliferation of companies appeared across the nation, often sparked by federal and provincial grant incentives.

The 1979 publication of Joyce Doolittle and Zina Barnieh’s A Mirror of Our Dreams: Children and Theatre in Canada provided the first book-length study of the Canadian TYA scene. The text’s appendix contains a list of notable scripts, which provided a logical starting point in the task of surveying any generational trends in Canadian TYA activity. For this phase of the project, I grouped the English-language plays from the appendix according to the source material used by the playwrights. The three following categories were devised and used:

1. 1. Historical: scripts that focused on people, places, and events in Canadian history, including tales from the pre-Confederation era as well as First Nations stories.

2. 2. Literary: scripts that were adapted—in whole or in part—from written sources such as fairy tales, canonical works, and contemporary books.

3. 3. Original: scripts that featured negligible connection to historical situations or literary sources; this category included a range of creations spanning lighthearted adventures to sincere depictions of social issues.

Note that this survey ignored whether scripts were intended for production in a theatrical venue or for touring into school gymnasiums; moreover, the project excluded any consideration of presentational format or dramatic genre.

The Mirror appendix lists seventy-five scripts; most of the works were created during the 1970s. In many instances, “the effort to gather, edit and publish the definitive version [was] beyond the human and financial resources of the troupe[s]”; as such, a number of prominent productions from this era lack any surviving script (Doolittle 17–18). For TYA scripts, the paucity of publications appears to be compounded by the perception of their inferior artistic merit, as evidenced by the comment in 1976 from playwright Jon Redfern, who cynically notes, “there are not many people who seriously read children’s plays. Once produced they are stored away like old toys never to be seen again. In most cases their immediate oblivion is a good thing” (36). Eventually, archival research for the scripts, reviews or promotional materials produced sufficient information to categorize seventy of the seventy-five titles listed in...