This book introduces readers to the world of children's theater by highlighting one specific model, The Oyster River Players, a small children's theater company in New Hampshire. By exploring the history and dynamics of their own theater company, authors Kelly and Walter Eggers apply broader implications, expanding their focus to include children's theaters of other kinds and in different cultural settings. Throughout the book, the Eggers show how children's theater succeeds in helping young people learn in ways that would be otherwise inaccessible. Through forays into philosophy and history, as well as personal testimonies, the authors present a coherent argument for the need for children's theaters in nearly every community.

If you are an elementary school teacher or parent of an elementary school student who loves the theater, but has no theatrical experience. Then this book is for you. This teacher was the student council advisor for the school and a true lover of the theater who went to the theater often and exposed her students to the theater by helping them raise money in many ways to bring a performing arts traveling theater company of a local college to the school. When this college lost their funding and could no longer travel to perform for the various schools in the area, the children in this school asked their advisor to organize their very own theater group for the school. Well, this teacher told them in no uncertain terms that she knew absolutely nothing about acting and would not even know how to begin a drama program. Well, the children convinced this teacher to at least try. So she did. This book shows how this teacher through her friends and family members who knew people who knew theatrical people who guided her and showed her how she really could organize a real drama program for her school. This book shows the elementary teacher how to teach the children to write their own script from their favorite book in their library. Then eventually write their own version of popular stories such as "The Wizard of Oz". It also shows the teacher how to organize the parents of the students into the essential needs of a drama club by assessing the various talents of the parents and interested members of the faculty. This book also shows the drama teacher how to introduce to the students various improvisations and exercises for developing acting skills. It also includes the scripts and directions for nine different plays, including suggested music, all suitable for elementary students. In other words, it is a book of how an elementary teacher went from having no theatrical experience to how she was able to organize a very successful drama club, that was invited to perform for the D.A.R.E. conference and the governor at the capitol building in Sacramento, California.

In this milestone collection, the noted director of the award-winning Bilingual Theater, Joe Rosenberg, has brought together a selection of successfully staged and critically acclaimed Hispanic plays for children. ¡Aplauso! is innovative in its offering of plays in English, Spanish, and bilingual formats, and will be a welcome addition to all school and public libraries.

Five Plays from the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis was first published in 1975. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Among the notable productions of the Children's Theatre Company of the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, a leading exponent of children's theater in this country, have been plays that are adaptations of classics in children's literature. This volume makes available the scripts of five of these adaptations, along with illuminating information about the productions and the company itself. The plays include two adaptations by Frederick Gaines, two by Timothy Mason, and one by Richard Shaw. Mr. Gaines's plays are based on Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.One of Mr. Mason's plays, Kidnapped in London, is an adaptation of part of Master Skylark by John Bennett, and the other, Robin Hood: A Story of the Forest, is based on part of the Robin Hood legend. Mr. Shaw's play is an adaptation in Kabuki form of the Grimms' fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. Linda Walsh Jenkins writes a general introduction and commentary. Background information about each play includes excerpts from discussions among directors, composers, designers, and playwrights about the plays themselves and about various phases of the development of the productions. Highlights of the history of the Children's Theatre Company and of the aims and accomplishments of its director, John Clark Donahue, are given, and these will be of particular interest to anyone in the children's theater field. The photographic illustrations, which include a number in color, show various aspects of Children's Theatre Company productions. There are also musical examples from the original scores for the plays.

This book chronicles the child performer as part of the Chicana/o/Mexican-American theatre experience. Borderlands Children’s Theatre explores the phenomenon of the Chicana/o/Mexican-American child performer at the center of Chicana/o and Latina/o theatre culture. Drawing from historical and contemporary theatrical traditions to finally the emergence of Latina/o Youth Theatre and Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences, it raises crucial questions about the role of the child in these performative contexts and about how childhood and adolescence was experienced and understood. Analyzing contemporary plays for Chicana/o/Mexican-American child performer, it introduces theorizations of "performing mestizaje" and "border crossing" borderlands performance, gender, and ethnic identity and investigates theatre as a site in which children and youth have the opportunity to articulate their emerging selfhoods. This book adds to the national and international dialogue in theatre and gives voice to Chicana/o/Mexican-American children and youth and will be of great interest to students and scholars of Theatre studies and Latina/o studies.

This book is a journey into the dual territory of educational and theatrical settings. It advances the knowledge in these settings by touching upon provocative questions, by dealing with the limitations and challenging the new possibilities of theatre for young people. It is an attempt to bring intellectual rigor and some theoretical perspectives drawn from recent theatre and aesthetic theory to the field of theatre for young people.