Suzan Zeder versus Pinkalicious: Today’s Theatre for Young Audiences

In his passionate and pessimistic rant in Seattle’s newspaper The Stranger in 2008, Mike Daisy sarcastically called attention to American theatres’ obsession with safe choices: “Better to revive another August Wilson play and claim to be speaking about race right now. Better to do whatever was off Broadway 18 months ago and pretend that it’s relevant to this community at this time. Better to talk and wish for change, but when the rubber hits the road, sit on your hands.”¹ While Daisy was mostly speaking about commercial theatre produced by and for adults, in the field of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) companies have also halted the forward momentum of the past. In 2000, after interviewing the artistic directors at America’s top TYA companies, Russell Scott Smith wrote, “Nowadays, almost any topic is on the table for children’s theatres,”² but the last few production seasons at these companies seem to prove otherwise.

When closely examining the trends of American children’s theatre, it is hard to ignore that it has always and continues to be dominated by educational lessons. Must all children’s theatre teach a lesson? Despite the clams that “any topic is on the table,” it is evident from perusing the production histories of regional children’s theatre companies that the majority of commercially successful children’s theatre is moralistic in nature.

Many theatre companies around the country include a TYA season, but the powerhouses of the field, the ones that hold a vast amount of responsibility for exposing thousands of young people to theatre each season, are the regional, professional children’s theatre companies. Childsplay in Tempe, Arizona, serves an annual audience of two hundred thousand students, teachers, and families,³ and Seattle Children’s Theatre is regarded as one of the twenty largest regional theatres in America.⁴ Along with these two, other leading companies in the field—Nashville Children’s Theatre, Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis, Oregon Children’s Theatre, and Lexington Children’s Theatre—are examined here.⁵

These theatres’ current seasons are saturated with clear, teachable moments in adaptations of beloved children’s books. They are being ruled by Pinkalicious, Charlotte’s Web, The Cat in the Hat, and other adaptations of children’s literature. Childsplay is advertising their 2014–15 season as the “Storybook Season,” since five of their seven plays are adaptations of familiar stories.⁶ As a playwright, I must ask: Will I be more successful if I give up aspirations of writing original TYA plays and just write the sequel to Pinkalicious?

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, many emotionally challenging and innovative plays were being written and produced nationwide. Aurand Harris’s The Arkansaw Bear (published in 1980) addresses the death of a family member,⁷ while David Saar’s The Yellow Boat (premiered during Childsplay’s 1992–93 season)⁸ focuses on Benjamin, a child who contracts the AIDS virus. This “Golden Age” of the field was vital to gaining respect for the field, first, as Russell Scott Smith writes, by setting an atmosphere for professionalism, and then by moving away from fairy tales to produce emotionally engaging work. Linda Hartzell, artistic director of Seattle Children’s Theatre, decided to hire only union actors and even set rules for her theatre: “No blue or pink plaid on stage. No bad synthesizer music. No fake furry animal costumes. Nothing that people thought children’s theatre [is].” Today, Childsplay and Children’s Theatre Company employ full-time teams of professional designers, directors and actors, as well.⁹

Suzan Zeder, playwright and recent winner of the American Alliance for Theatre and Education (AATE) Campton Bell Lifetime Achievement Award, has been a key player in rerouting the course of TYA history.¹⁰ Like Harris and Saar, her original and emotionally charged plays cover realistic problems that children experience—divorce, death, fear, and bullies. Zeder holds four Distinguished Play awards from AATE¹¹ and is widely regarded as a vital member of the TYA community. Yet when perusing the current seasons of the nation’s leading children’s theatre companies...