Without Distinction of Age: The Pivotal Roles of Child Actors and Their Spectators in Nineteenth-Century Theatre

Unlike in film and television, child actors are seldom seen on professional U.S. stages today, primarily for historical reasons. First, with some exceptions (e.g., Billy Elliot in 2009), whether on Broadway, at regional theatres, or in touring companies at performing arts centers, adult actors have controlled children’s roles ever since Maude Adams characterized Peter Pan in 1905. Casting petite women in boys’ or “breeches” roles had been a long-held theatrical convention established in England during the seventeenth century that “feminized, infantilized, and sexualized the cross-dressed actress” (Mullenix 4). Second, early twentieth-century child labor laws equated the exploitive labor of factory work with the commercialized labor of stage acting and thereby legally restricted child actors from performing in professional theatre. Third, these labor laws coincided with compulsory education laws that forced child actors and their spectators into public schools with teachers who had not been educated in the artistic crafts of theatre. With no professional acting coaches to guide their artistic development, children were deemed to be amateurs who performed in school plays solely for extra-curricular and recreational purposes, much like today.

Despite these historical reasons, most professional and university directors of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) today cast adult actors in child roles more for artistic and aesthetic reasons, based on the needs of specific plays, than for practical or ethical reasons, as explicated during contentious debates over “age-appropriate” casting in 2007. Many directors question whether child actors are sufficiently talented to master artistic truthfulness on stage and to sustain spontaneous freshness during long runs even when trained. While some directors argue that child audiences prefer and deserve to see themselves represented on stage, others also justify casting adults by clinging to romanticized beliefs that child audiences have vast imaginations through which they “suspend their disbelief” and “project themselves” into child characters performed by adults (Nolan 15). These ongoing assumptions regarding the hypothetical imaginations and artistic talents of children refuse to give way to the psychological actualities of children’s embodied minds and their expert acting abilities (Klein, “Mediating” 115–20).

In this essay, I will explain how child actors commanded their own roles as an integral part of nineteenth-century theatre culture until age stratifications segregated audiences and moved children into schools. Furthermore, I will argue that wholly competent child actors and their child spectators not only invented children’s theatre well before the twentieth century but were also primarily responsible for legitimizing popular theatre entertainments throughout the nineteenth century. Unlike the strict age stratifications of today, theatre back then was categorized not by age but by legitimate and nonlegitimate forms of theatre. Yet not until the 1970s were “nonlegitimate” popular entertainments more fully examined and thereby legitimized by theatre historians (Matlaw). Concurrently, in 1978, the Children’s Theatre Association of America sought to legitimize this burgeoning profession by redefining generalized conflations of children’s theatre on the basis of actors’ ages (Davis and Behm). This forcible separation of child actors from adult actors has led theatre academics not only to dismiss “children’s theatre” as “nonlegitimate” (Buckley 424) but also to neglect the significant impact of children on the very history of U.S. theatre.

Like the pernicious dismissal of “kiddie lit,” “children’s theatre” has had to justify its legitimacy against ambivalent attitudes toward childhood and ongoing misconceptions regarding its artistic, educational, and social aims, as Manon van de Water has observed (101). Scholars contend that theatre for children could not emerge as a distinctive profession until theatre managers acknowledged child audiences as unique beings different from adults with plays designed specifically for their aesthetic needs and interests (Bedard 1, 6–10). Yet limiting theatre to public performances of literary dramas intended exclusively for children excludes the highly popular nonliterary entertainments that populated theatre companies’ repertoires throughout the nineteenth century. Even Marah Gubar, who has explored the central role child actors played in nineteenth-century dramas aimed at mixed-age audiences, defines children’s theatre as “a genre whose existence depends on the idea that children...