Theatre and Youth: It’s All in the Prepositions: A Keynote Reflection

For three magical days in April 2014 we gathered on the beautiful campus of Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, a collection of scholars, practitioners, artists, and educators to discuss the past, explore the present, and imagine future confluences of theatre and youth. I was honored to be the keynote speaker for Theatre Symposium 23: Theatre and Youth, a conference that would truly live up to its intentions as a forum for promoting the exchange of ideas and insights, experiences, and inspirations.

I was fascinated by the symposium’s scope and structure, with a range of papers and panels that reached back to the history of Elizabethan boyhood as revealed in Christopher Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage; forward to cyber-children on the virtual stage of Second Life; inward to plays featuring child characters ranging from Peter Pan to vicious Mary in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour; and outward to real children and adults using theatre to combat juvenile delinquency, to deal with bullying, to question assumptions about gender identity, and to imagine new ways of conceiving geography and shaping space. In three days we traveled from the streets of Kolkata, India, to a post-traumatic Ireland, to the repression of Stalinist Russia, and to a coming-of-age ritual at Roosevelt High School in Portland, Oregon.

It was a conference unlike any I had ever attended, perfectly summed up in the seemingly simple title Theatre and Youth: the most important word being the operant “and.” In those three little letters are nestled all the prepositions that describe the many dimensions of work for, of, about, and with young people and the fields of inquiry where they are theorized and practiced. These include professional theatre for children, plays with child characters, theatre for social change, historical and ethnographic studies dealing with children and youth, and practical hands-on work involving young people in schools, communities, detention facilities, and the like.

My duties as keynote speaker included delivering some opening remarks to chart a course for the weekend, listening to presentations of twenty-three fascinating papers and participating in the discussions that followed, and finally offering a “response” or “conference reaction” highlighting emergent themes made manifest during our time together. Not unlike Alice in Alice in Wonderland, who was told, “Sentence First! Verdict Afterward!”, I decided to invert the prescribed paradigm offering my response first, hearing the papers second, and finally putting forth a keynote call to action to all participants, challenging them to make a commitment to change one thing in their scholarship, artistry, teaching, or practice that would place theatre and youth in the center of some aspect of their ongoing work. It could be an idea, an image, an awareness, or a shift in perception that would lead to a tangible manifestation, something they would actually do to turn reflection into activism.

Using the abstracts kindly sent to me by conference organizer David Thompson, I framed my opening remarks around the topics in the hearts and on the minds of the conference participants. My resulting “speech” was an attempt to stitch together a conceptual path through their research and to offer my own experience as a playwright and educator to contextualize their inquiries. In this article I hope to capture the essence of that “keynote,” threading my observations about the papers into my own experiences and ruminations about the field in general. The articles in this journal represent a cross section of the papers presented in the symposium. Just as I sounded a clarion call to the symposium participants, I offer the same challenge to each of you: to be inspired by what you find here and to change one thing in your scholarship, artistry, teaching, or practice to include theatre and youth in a way that changes your work and, perhaps, your life.

As adults working in various disciplines involving children, we tend to put ourselves in an “us and them” binary. We ask: what can we as adults do for, to, about, or with them as children? We can teach them, entertain them, model, mentor...