I want you to know that I have tried.
When schools closed in March, I decided that I would use this time – which means that time not already spent working, cooking, homeschooling or sitting on the couch I took to call Mom’s Special Crying Place – to mine vices to make a family thing. I would force my kids to love theater, or at least movie musicals.
It’s creepy and selfish that our children want to love the things we love – they deserve the freedom to develop their own tastes. If those tastes are terrible, well, then that childhood is for you. How else to explain the popularity of Pixy Stix and “Paw Patrol”? But with a hubris born out of too many progressive Brooklyn baby groups, I thought I could convey my enthusiasm somehow. That I asked film recommendations from colleagues, researched online catalogs, paid attention to new archive offerings. And wow I failed.
My kids, 4 and almost 7 and apparently devastated by too many Nick Jr. cartoons, bailed 25 minutes in “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” 20 minutes in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” 15 minutes in “Shrek the Musical.” We did it almost entirely through “The Sound of Music,” just before the Nazis skipped, but they still let me know “Mary Poppins.”
I also sample more stuff, like a narrative adaptation of a story by Herman Hesse and a play by Leo Lionni. No sales. That I have stopped, withdrawn myself into a world in which I and the children can never discuss the merits of the various cast recordings of ‘Chess’. And then, in July, I got several news stories announcing announcing theater for children.
Most live children’s theater has a participatory element, often just clapping or stomping or trying to make more noise than the people on the balcony. But it’s enough to make you – even you so small that she needs a booster seat to see – feel that the play could not have happened the same way without you.
That piece is lost in archived performances, so I could not fully blame the shorter members of my family for leaving an Anansi the Spider myth in favor of Disney + cartoons. But these immersive works, performed via phone, email and Zoom, promised to include her in the show, and demand her involvement and attention.
First up was “Mundane Mysteries Playdate,” a kid version of an improvised phone game I enjoyed in April. The all-audio project promises to connect distant children and send them on an adventure. To participate, we chose a friend of my daughter’s who had left New York for Vermont and on a Monday morning, through conference call and tinny mobile speakers, we all found ourselves with Inspector Doyle, who quickly deputed the children as junior inspectors and taught them a simple secret code.
In five sly, nice phone calls over five days, the three children discover a mystery involving pizza, buried treasure, an underground maze and multiple unicorns. Is this panning? Absolutely! I have children who like to be pandered.
That same week, we also started “Madame Kalamazoo’s Magical Mail”, a text-based project by England’s National Theater. (You would need to be a UK resident to participate, but I searched online for a postcode in London and made it in.) For 19 days, adult participants will receive a personalized email to read aloud to all resident children. Each email contains a story in which these children have adventures with Madame Kalamazoo, described in the stories as a lady with wonderful hair and a thing for wide-legged pants.
The stories deal, softly, with the boredom and isolation that many children now feel, and try to foster the resilience and evoke the imagination. Many end with a suggestion for an activity at home, such as drawing a picture or making a list. Work can be shared via a fatted platform called the Whale Pod (Madame has whales in her hair – long story short) and further emails contain links to artwork from unknown friends.
The Britishisms did not fade my children (they have seen so much “Peppa Pig” that has legally influenced their speech patterns), although the stories were sometimes too dreamy and elliptical for me little literalists. However, the excitement of receiving email, especially email that you mention by name, has kept them listening.
The following week, during a short vacation in a living room, we saw ‘Alice: A Virtual Theme Park,’ a brilliant, over-stimulated performance by Creation Theater and Big Telly Theater Company, in collaboration with charisma.ai. I had seen her version of “The Tempest”, one of the first pandemics to really explore and enjoy the possibilities of Zoom. This new attempt, an interactive adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” has more ambition, but less of the bare bones let be set-on-a-show exuberance that made “The Tempest” so fun .
After an introduction, audience members – like their parents – can navigate from one Zoom Room to another, interacting with the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Red Queen. (Their monologues are mostly Carroll-derived, with a few current asides.) You can also, briefly, play a croquet-related game on your phone.
But these technological possibilities seemed to divert from what little story “Wonderland” has. I had to use blue raspberry gummies to lure confused children (“What is Brexit?”) To the couch. Then again, this was on the morning of a glorious day when a trip to a lake was promised and even the craziest tea parties could not attend. Also the queen ordered that our heads hang down.
In addition, just a few days earlier, they had seen the absolutely iconic “The Wizards of Oakwood Drive”, Tom Salamon’s rough dog from an online show, courtesy of the La Jolla Playhouse’s Without Walls festival. After parents enjoy a long Zoom tutorial, children watch as two rival siblings – at our performance, Jonathan Randell and Edred Utomi – show off their spelling.
Their pop culture-added sayings – “David Beckham, Mandy Moore / Send It Just Out the Door” – support children to discover magical items (heavy on the balloons and candy, more panders) hidden in and around their homes. The 4-year-old had spent most of that morning either standing or lying on the bench or lying down, but he got up to ride as well. The kids still don’t know how it was done, but here’s a hint: Her dad stayed up all night for 2 hours in the morning and went through most of a roll of sticky tape. The one downside: Disappointment in any future event that does not include failed candies.
These different shows all insist, with sass and compassion, that meaning even within is possible, that absent friends are closer than you think, that a lockdown is not a bar for adventure. Which is a very nice reminder of what theater can do, even from a distance. Now if only one could place those wizards to work on something for the adults – reliable testing and contact tracing, they say. Or lack that, more candy.
Mundane Mysteries Playdate
By August 24; wsw.markhomes.com.
Alice: A virtual theme park
By August 30; ferienhaus-jansen.de.
The Wizards of Oakwood Drive
By August 30; lajollaplayhouse.org.
The magical post of Madame Kalamazoo
madamekalamazoo.com
