Playing Oz: The Bridge From Page to Stage

Playing Oz: The Bridge From Page to Stage If children's literature still occupies, despite everincreasing intelligent interest, concern, and respect, something of a ghetto in many English departments, then children's theatre is in the unenviable position of being a ghetto within a ghetto, largely ignored and/or despised by those interested in children's books, as well as by those interested in drama as text and as performance. Plays written and performed primarily for children are generally considered unworthy of serious consideration by adults, be they directors, actors, audiences, or critics. Like most generalizations, this one contains a measure of truth. Too many scripts and productions churned out for child audiences are sadly lacking in originality and depth, combining a superficially frantic and noisy slap-stick energy with an equally shallow moral lesson. The assumption seems to be that children, particularly those brought up on a steady diet of television, lack the intelligence and the attention span to immerse themselves as individuals and as audience in a challenging theatrical experience. Live drama can only hope to hold them—if at all—with the ephemeral novelty of being in a theatre, watching real round sweaty people for a change, instead of the two-dimensional animated figures they see so much of at home. Children are frequently the victims of ageism. Like all the pernicious "isms" that afflict our culture, this one has the invidious power of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The belittling assumptions of the power groups, in becoming to a certain extent true, are held self-evidently to have always been truth. Children—especially ones who really are too young for a formal theatrical production—who are forced by well-meaning adults to sit through frenetically condescending performances of banal material do tend to be less polite (and more honest) than grown-ups in a similar position. Instead of quietly going to sleep, or exercising the freedom to slip out, they noisily rattle their programs, squeak their seats, and engage in lively conversations with their neighbors, whom they rightly perceive as more entertaining than what is happening on stage. It is difficult to fool children: Consider the succinct reaction of a five-year-old boy, leaving a bad live production, who remarked "Punch and Judy sucks." Moreover, children who have never been challenged by live theatre may in turn grow into adults who are unable to handle the power of great drama and who are uninter-ested in doing so. With the saving exception of remarkably strong individuals, members of any oppressed and deprived group tend to live down to the assumptions of the power-elite. Human beings are frighteningly able to adjust the scale of their sights to the parameters of 263 their decreed prisons for disturbingly long times: women in the kitchen, blacks on the streets, gays in their closets, kids in front of the television. , Children, though, are different in a crucial way. They have, by definition, an apparently automatic way out of their restricting category: They grow up. Another obvious difference is that the powerlessness of children is not simply or merely a construct. Children really are in need of protection, guidance, forming, and shaping by adults. They really are in a state of flux, immersed in a constant process of developing, changing, becoming, and what they turn into is an inextricable mixture of who they have always been from the moment of conception and all the things that happen to them from that moment on . One last obvious difference: We have all been there. It can be argued that no man can fully understand a woman, no white a black, no straight a gay (and vice versa) . It can also be argued, by the way, that art can uniquely enable us to enter into those ordinarily separate worlds and perspectives. But we all entered the world as babies and passed through childhood en route to our present exalted condition. We cannot get away from our child-selves; but we can blind and deafen ourselves to the child within. Fortunately, not everybody combines growing with forgetting or distorting. It is almost a truism to comment that the great books for children are written...