Mere Giants: The Child Protagonist In Drama for Intergenerational Audiences

Protagonist. Enchanting, mysterious word, rooted in the Greek meaning "first actor"—first in time, first in importance? Actor as player? As generator, agent of action? All of the above?

Thinking in Greek is beyond my American ken, but returning to the source of a too-familiar word can freshen the sense of it. Drawing on my own sources, which I have been invited to do here, reveals again the surprising paradox of unriddling your own works: that while you should be an authority on them, you continue puzzled as you look for clues that might be somehow useful to someone. Of course, all that has been read, seen, heard is intricately, permanently present in each writer's synthesis of commingled common/uncommon knowledge—unsorted, unfootnoted, too profoundly possessed track. So at the outset I own up to all that I own and owe to the world so far—the so far, so very far world.

Going back to first questions, why write anyway? Eudora Welty has said, "I try to dramatize something. . . in a way that can show it better than life shows it" (152). Perhaps the very existence of story and play in so many times and places suggests that the world, raw and whole, has always been too much for us. Without art, chaos has come again. The need for order—however partial and passing—is omnipresent. The heart is a hunter, often lonely. The central character in a play is engaged in what I see as the central action in life itself: the seeking of meaning, against the great odds of infinite, ceaseless, potentially overwhelming confusion. That, I think, is what the great protagonists in drama are up to, and to the extent that they particularize that desperate quest in ways that a witness can enter into and care about, the struggle of real life is fragmentarily reflected and experienced—even temporarily transcended. The nihilistic nightmare that there may be no meaning, either now or ultimately, is first reenacted (and this can only be sanely risked in the safety of illusion—"in-play"—while protected by the aesthetic distance on which empathic release is conditioned), and then exorcised, or at least momentarily held at bay. The deepest waters of psychic reality can be tested only in the "unreal" realms of dramatic imaginings, waking or sleeping. We cannot live long where the wild things are without trying to tame them for a while by writing them, dancing them, painting and playing them.

So what about this protagonist, this "first actor" that has evoked so much analysis for so many centuries? And what about one who, unlike Oedipus and Lear, is not a grown-up king, but a "mere" child? Well, if the growing-pain of struggling to find or make meaning is the protagonist's action, then a child is a natural for the role. When I was first asked why so many of my plays centered on child characters, I didn't "know" why (had not even noticed it). The troublesome joy of being questioned is cognitive discovery of holistic elements which, once revealed, seem so obvious that we wonder again at the intuitive invention initially needed to find and use them. But there it is, plain as the nose on your face, which you can't see unless, Alice-like, you look through the looking-glass.

Alice. It is a child's birthright to ask questions, openly, in action and word—even the hard, "obvious" ones which grown-ups forget or are afraid to ask. Children can even ask for love, out loud as well as secretly. My play Alice In Wonder is all about asking. Bodied forth in this politely plucky girl-child, you get to be the protagonist of your own wondering wanders (not an uncley friend's). You are the maker and survivor of your own journey, the brave innocent demanding that some sense be made of the nonsense—or recognized in it—as you strive to learn the world's secret languages and stand up to the irrational commands of the authorities above you. You are drawn on...