Chuck & Lola Wilcox
About this essay
See also: The Children’s Theatre section carries a modern practitioner-oriented version of this material — the “600 noisy kids” telling — at Why These Plays Work. This Legacy essay is the original text from the Wilcoxes; the practitioner version is the how-to distillation.
This essay by Chuck and Lola Wilcox distills three decades of insight from touring children’s theatre across North America, Europe (including Russia), and Australia. Their plays, performed for audiences totaling over six million, never once produced an out-of-control crowd. The Wilcoxes trace why — explaining how myth, archetype, oral tradition, and ensemble discipline combine into what they call an “alchemical reaction” between players and audience. Required reading for anyone facilitating the plays in this collection.
Full text
The work of this children’s theatre tradition spans thirty years and three continents: North America, Europe including Russia, and Australia. Each of the plays has been performed for thousands of children, parents, and teachers; for all the plays together audiences number over six million persons. In every one of those performances the audience never was out of control; their experience is to become immediately engaged, to use their imagination, to connect to the characters and the situation and go with them to a catharsis, and then return to “home,” and the place where the play is being performed. When we first began doing these plays, it was three years before we realized we had rediscovered an ancient pattern, solidly embedded in the oral tradition. It took longer to isolate the four key elements that ensured success. Then we experimented to see how far we could push the boundaries of those elements.
The plays are part of an oral and mythic tradition restored in our time in large part by the great teachers Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly. The plays are based in a myth or fairy tale; they stay very close to the story, and keep as much of the detail as possible. Source tales are indicated on the scripts when appropriate.
The majority of the people in earlier times were educated in history, philosophy, psychology and spirituality through the oral tradition. They believed, as we do in our age of relativity, there were several concurrent levels of truth in any situation. This is to say that truth happens, but on various levels, or from various perspectives, all at the same time. Going further, these levels were expected in any story, myth or work of art. At times modern readers, trained in linear thinking processes, become confused when a leap in a story occurs — the action is improbable, a non-human character enters, or the story suddenly seems to be about something else. What really happened is that the story moved from one level of truth to another. In most of us there is an innate capacity to respond to these stories in the traditional way. These plays are designed to evoke that capacity.
We know in the ancient and medieval times there were at least seven levels of truth or perspective:
- the literal or sensate worlds (both our world and the play’s setting)
- the historical period in which a person is or a myth is set
- the teaching (exegetical) or moral point being made
- the psychological, set up by the story’s situation and relationships and the outcome
- the symbolic or metaphoric, where paths to the higher levels are discovered
- the allegorical, where archetypes are found
- the anagogic or holy level, where a leap in consciousness occurs
In most universal myths or stories these seven layers occur, and, like their source material, these plays are constructed to create a leap or change in consciousness. We count on the audience coming with a desire, perhaps unconscious, to connect to the ensemble’s work and experience something that changes them. Success occurs when the text and the ensemble connect to the audience members’ desires and abilities to identify with the production. The two work together to create a synergy that changes both; it takes both the metal of the audience and the fire of the ensemble to create the alchemical reaction.
We think there are four key ingredients that create this theatrical experience: Audience, Ensemble, Text, and Collective Unconscious. Certain ingredients connect to certain layers of truth; for example, the Collective Unconscious holds the symbolic, allegorical and anagogic layers. The Audience and Ensemble bring the literal and historical layers, the Text provides the psychological and the teaching layers.
TEXT
The text exists to provide pointers to the seven possible layers of meaning, so it immediately provides the historical period, and the psychological level (the situation, and the relationships between the characters that create the situation). Often children’s theatre makes the level of teaching a moral point very explicit, as Aesop does in his Fables. In these plays, however, the moral points are made through modeling and rarely stated; we see how the characters treat the heroine, and what comes of it, rather than hear a moral. The solving of the psychological situation by the hero and/or heroine is often the crux of the play; the moral point is made through the action. The symbolic or metaphoric level is usually offered directly from the old tales; this is why we stay very close to the story, and keep as much of the detail as possible. As important as the text is, the allegiance is to the theatrical event, not to the text itself.
An ancient pattern of the oral tradition is to first engage the audience by surprising them. When the audience comes in, something different, something exotic and previously unknown, must occur. For instance, there is strange music, the audience is broken out of its accepted seating arrangements, the production is set in a different culture — something that creates an unfamiliar time and place. The language of these plays is sparse. Everything said or done is a clue to the children about what is happening. They must pay strict attention or they will miss something. The actors create dramatic pictures from sound and movement and the children imagine the rest, flesh out the information given. It is exciting to do this, and to concentrate.
The more exotic the situation, the faster the audience makes the switch from their literal world to the play’s literal level. One mark of this kind of theatre is that 600 noisy children enter the space, sit down on the floor, and from the first moment instantly are silent, caught up in the play. This happens every time.
Comprehension of who and what and when often occurs when the audience connects to the psychological situation presented. Each scene then builds to the catharsis, or moment when the hero/heroine solves the problem. The last scenes restore the theatrical situation (the hero returns, the king is healed, the family reunited, etc.).
Characters, issues and storyline often come from a traditional story or myth. The hero and/or heroine have a universal issue which both creates the storyline and connects the audience to the play. The experience begins with the playwright’s ability to provide the ensemble with the text that will create the alchemical reaction. Elements to be included are the audience’s entry to the theatre space, the exotic opening scene that captures their attention, the sequence of scenes to the catharsis and the closing or return of the audience to their literal or physical space in the school or theatre building.
The text is of course the language — the particular words chosen and how many of them. In most of these plays, the text is also silence. Often an actor moves about at length without speaking, or movement is accompanied by musical sound. The language is clear and, whenever possible, sparse, providing food for the imagination. These plays are spoken, they are oral, not visual. Every word counts. It is through the sound of the words that archetypes are evoked, not through a visual of them.
Repetition is useful if a major plot shift is happening or an important idea is being offered. The language is often repetitive, just as it is in source texts. There is a lack of conversational, referring pronouns (“I’m going over there with him.”)
“There is no wood on our side of the mountain. I will go to the other side of the mountain. I will find wood there.”
Remember, as much of the text is made up of words, the other half is made up of silence. An example from The Magic Lantern:
Actress: (Goes to the edge of where the children are seated, looks out, to the right, to the left.) I have come to a lake. I can not see across it. I cannot see around it. What will I do now?
Boatman: (Approaches by means of a center aisle from behind the children. The boatman has no lines. He mimes bobbing in a boat, and poling it along as he passes through the children to the actress. When he reaches her, ties the boat to shore and motions her to come into the boat. They mime a discussion around payment. She finally enters the boat, and it bobs up and down briskly, adjusting to her weight. The boatman tries to pole the boat into the stream but is unable for some unknown reason. Finally he gets gingerly into the water, trying to free the boat, when he discovers that it’s tied. He laughs and frees it. They then pole back through the children. The action then shifts to the next scene when they are half way through the children.)
This scene can take up to five minutes or more, depending upon the ingenuity of the actors and the director.
This play’s first tour was to approximately 80,000 children; in the 30,000 pictures they sent in, every lake went beyond the edges of the paper. On the other hand, not one boat looked like any other. As there are no text cues about the boat, the memory of the audience furnished whatever existed in their experience or their imagination provided something (from battle ships to leaves). The language and the action that the actor supplies, create the parameters of the experience; what is not provided will be imagined.
The text of each play offers a key concept or learning to the audience. It uses archetypes and symbols to help the audience realize the learning point, and make the leap to integrating the knowledge forever. In every case the play’s key concept is linked by the archetype to each individual’s collective unconscious. If these words or concepts are unfamiliar, please pay particular attention to their explanation, as they are the heart of why this kind of theatre works.
COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
The “collective unconscious” is a term introduced by Carl G. Jung to name that part of our psyche which is common to all humankind. If the play contains elements common to all of us, those elements become the connector; the ensemble delivers the elements that hook the common experience, and through the common experience the individual audience member.
We have a collective history as a race; we all understand oppression and freedom, joy and sorrow, journey and return. We have common values, named different things in different cultures (the Tao, the Ten Commandments, etc.) We all understand the power of love and hate, fear and courage. We come into the world equipped to empathize with collective characters in collective situations. These are the central issues of the human race, explored and resolved (or not) by each individual in each generation.
We use the word archetype in the same sense as Jung, who believed that buried in our psyche are images or forms that have no material existence of their own, but are common to people everywhere. These archetypes crop up in stories from all cultures, in the newspaper, in daily conversation. They exist in us as a stored, flat pattern, and only become conscious when activated. These plays intentionally activate key archetypes stored in each audience member’s psychic reservoir.
Stored in us, for example, are archetypes of good and bad kings and queens, mothers and fathers, witches, giants. Symbols can function as archetypes, such as a knife, flower, cross, crown. In these plays the words and actions used evoke an archetypal memory, which hooks the unconscious and connects the audience to the material of the play. Symbols and archetypes are tools of the collective unconscious, and tools of the text and the ensemble.
Even though the performance creates an opportunity to call up these archetypes, it is not frightening to the children. They are startled at times, but we have not experienced a child becoming scared. We think it is because they pull the archetype or imagine the situation from their raw material, and they don’t provide images which scare them. What we create from our imagination is ours, not some other person’s. Unfortunately, the more television in a child’s life, the less there is this safety net.
We notice the ancient texts use subtle words which do not directly evoke experiences of incest or sexual violence, leaving it to the individual to provide the imaginative interpretation as it fits their reality.
In these plays, there is no violence for the sake of violence or spectacle, either in the action or in the language. There is no roughhousing or violent play, nor violent, hurtful verbal battles between characters. However, we do not avoid violence when it is part of and necessary to the levels of truth in the story. It is usually very real violence. Spiderwoman tells the hero he must kill his friend the swallow; if the swallow doesn’t die, corn will not come to the People. The hero doesn’t know about the corn at the time; he must trust. The hero and the audience must make the leap of faith, as Abraham is required to with the sacrifice of Isaac. This is the fundamental truth of the death and resurrection of the spirit of life, and provides hope in a world of confusion and despair. This violence is not frightening as it is archetypal; it speaks to what children know — this is not an easy world.
In many of the plays there is the central archetype of the Hero/ine’s Journey, where the protagonist leaves home, enters into a new world, solves the problem, wins the way back home. Because this archetype is stored within us, when the ensemble brings it to the audience, it activates and the people “remember” it, pulling it from the collective unconscious. We realized that the tasks of the audience member in each play were to become engaged, comprehend the situation, experience the near impossibility of winning through, move through this to catharsis, and finally “come home.” This is the ancient pattern we rediscovered as we developed this theatre; interestingly, it is also the pattern of most religious rituals, such as the mass.
The universal learning is that characters do survive impossible situations, that the psyche wins through. For all children, perhaps for all people, in our time this message is critical. Hope can not be taught; it is a leap of faith to the anagogic or holy level, where our understanding is not so much in the conscious mind as in the depths of our souls.
We went to a school on an ordinary day and did an ordinary performance — nothing remarkable occurred. Then, as we were loading the van, a teacher came running out and begged us not to go. In a while, another teacher and a seven year old boy came out. The boy handed us a piece of paper on which was written:
“Tnk u. I nvr met aney pepl lik u B 4. Cm bak. I luv u.”
(“Thank you. I never met any people like you before. Come back. I love you.”)
After he went back in, his teacher explained that in all his life he had never written anything before.
This is a favorite of hundreds of anecdotes of children who made a leap to another level of consciousness through the work of these plays. Expect miracles.
ENSEMBLE
The ensemble is made up of the playwright, director, actors and technical designer. Ideally, they each understand and respect the other’s task and contribution.
In a commissioned play for Hansel and Gretel, we divided the witch in two, with an archetypal black witch whom Gretel could see and talk to, but a Gingerbread witch for Hansel. The two witches were to move back to back, in a dance movement, with one facing Hansel, one Gretel. The psychological theme was that Gretel carried the negativity of the mother, and Hansel the naiveté of the father. As Hansel learned to be less naive, and Gretel to hope for sweetness in her life, the witches’ power lessened and the children were able to be free. Children’s audiences have no trouble understanding this. However, one director was unable to present anything negative to the children of his town, and he put both witches in fluffy pink clown suits.
It is critical for the members of the ensemble to trust each other, and trust the text to do its part.
Playwright: The playwright’s task is to create the Text. This is first, for without the text, the words, the play does not exist. The first task of the playwright is to find the myth or story that speaks to them, and which will speak to the audience. Then the parameters have to be explored. For example, the number of actors the theatre has available and can afford for a season’s tour is usually between three to six people. Plays often have a forty minute time limit, and the myth or story may be more naturally material for ten minutes or five hours.
Director: The director is charged the responsibility of bringing all the other parts of the ensemble together. Added to this must be an understanding of the audience. All together, these elements can make a complete alchemical experience. This is a truly awesome responsibility. Children’s audiences may not be highly trained, formal critics but they will willingly visit their contempt on anything less than excellence by simply ignoring it and going about their own business.
Adults are also a part of the audience. Several years ago we wrote a children’s play based on Norse mythology. Two different groups were performing in schools throughout the Rocky Mountains. Even though it was well received by children, teachers seemed not to like it as well. Finally one teacher told an actor, “Although she didn’t understand the play, the children liked it and seemed to understand it, so it must be just fine.” We never again wrote a play just counting the children as the only part of the audience.
“Less is More” — simplicity — is the central production theme. The goal is not to dazzle an audience with too many concepts and effects, too much to see, hear, feel or remember. It is not necessary to be fast paced and provide a laugh a minute in order “to keep the children’s attention.” We intend to make one, perhaps two, theatrical points clearly. From the first moment the actors come into view the economy of movement and dialogue, the spareness of the texture of the production, captures and then frees the audience’s imagination. These plays are not viewed, but experienced. Merely holding the attention of 700 students for forty minutes, while an admirable achievement, is not enough. By asking the audience to use their imagination, we are asking them to bring something of themselves into the production.
Casting and Company: Traditional auditions alone may not reveal all the characteristics needed in an actor working with children. Among the usual criteria of actor selection, physical dexterity and a well modulated voice are essential. The close contact with the audience needs an actor comfortable with intimate environments. Actors prone to rely on an established pattern or set of gimmicks will be hard pressed by audiences keenly sensitive to a performance gone to sleep. Some sort of informal individual interview can help a director determine about an actor’s strength of character and durability. A sincere respect for children, for the joys and the incredible struggles of growth and learning in which our young are engaged, is essential in every actor of these plays. Children can sense who loves them and who doesn’t.
The development of the company’s cohesion is the director’s task. While the company needs to trust and depend on each other, attention is outer directed to the audience. The company needs a creative and giving attitude.
Rehearsal Schedule: It takes 30–50 hours over two to three weeks to build both production and company cohesion, assuming the actors are script free after the first blocking rehearsal. Use a variety of rehearsal spaces if the play will be performed in a variety of places. Schedule early preview performances to both push the actors and to develop the performance; the audience gives the actors much of the action needed in the play — they watch the actor crawl over trees or discover a bird and signal the length of time this interests them.
Blocking: If most productions run between forty to sixty minutes, the text read end to end may give the director between fifteen to twenty-five minutes of spoken material. What happens in the rest of the time is up to the director and the acting company’s invention. Rehearsal is spent not so much in improvisation as much as exploration. Music is included in this exploration, so a variety of instruments lying about encourages actors to explore sound as well as movement.
Giving stage often can be choosing a lower level, such as kneeling, sitting, squatting, lying down.
Important movement patterns are determined by audience arrangement, and that is often suggested by the Text. In the Native American plays the audience is in a circle for the hoop of the world, and four exits are required to allow for each of the four directions. In the Innuit play one exit behind the audience represents a typical entrance to an igloo. Positioning of the exits provides a number of spaces where actors working in the round can be placed so as to allow any audience person to see and hear. With four exits, four dominant positions are available and an “X” pattern for strong crosses results.
The director needs to create a fluid performing atmosphere; this can be aided by moving around and viewing the production during blocking from several points of view. Include sitting on the floor as the audience will be, and standing near or among the actors to give them a feel for audience proximity.
This style of theatre prefers action followed by speech followed by action. This pattern allows the audience time to digest each unit of thought or activity and keep clarity as an important element in the communication process.
Careful selection of action and effects by the director leaves questions or strikes chords of memory and experience in the audience’s mind which create a ripple effect. Each performance becomes the property of the audience for it lives, after the fact, only in each person’s memory. The special images created belong only to that individual.
Actors: The actors’ task is to comprehend the playwright and director’s intent, and to work with the audience to create the alchemical reaction. The emphasis is on the actor who creates the character from sparse text and much action. Often much occurs between lines in the text and the actor is required to fill the space with movement and character interpretation.
Touring to spaces with a wide variety of extremely difficult acoustical problems demands time spent in rehearsal developing crystal clear articulation and flexible delivery rates, in order to allow for a variety of echo effects. Words of a speech can be rated as to importance: first, nouns, then verbs, then adjectives and adverbs. If the actors had $100 maximum to spend and each word cost $10, which words will they use to telegraph meaning? These plays often make clear how few words are needed to communicate meaning. This style adds to the sense of the exotic and encourages listening for the imagination cues provided in the text.
Ensemble acting is demanded; a strong company consciousness, a framework for continued exploration and a free wheeling atmosphere for creative problem solving must be established. Actors often play two or more parts and must rely on each other for timing and cues. They must work together and together work with the audience. This isn’t the forum for an actor interested only in center stage; ego is given over to the goals of the ensemble.
Actors sufficiently trained find this kind of performing exciting and produce beautiful theatre. Proscenium bound actors can be encouraged to be freed, paradoxically, by the limitations of mimic technique and to perform with imagination stretching beyond previous acting efforts. Close proximity to the audience creates a richness of shared experience between audience and actor; the actors contribute skill, imagination and dexterity, and the audience brings a happy suspension of disbelief and a willingness to create what must be imagined.
Technical Designer: Theatre in the ancient, medieval and Shakespearean times happened on bare stages. A character announced “Here we are in the forest of Arden” or “We enter Thebes” and the audience provided the forest or the city from their experiences. We believe their need to imagine this is part of what hooks the unconscious, and makes the event fascinating. Therefore the setting is non-existent for plays in the round, and a neutral backdrop is enough for three-quarter round productions. In tour settings we do not work with lights or sound; in theatre settings the lighting can really aid in creating the sense of exotic, or mystery.
Costumes become critical in this kind of setting. They can be very simple and uniform in shape if brightly and differently colored. They can also be quite elaborate. Both choices add to the exotic or mysterious feeling desired. It is not the costume that creates a character — no matter how stylized the costume used, it must allow the actor maximum flexibility and movement. Shoes that grip and will be allowed on gym floors are a very important part of the costumer’s work. If the play is touring, costume durability and portability are important; costumes have to look good on stage fifteen minutes after being taken from their carrying place.
Choosing to use mime and pantomime to eliminate props altogether is logistically simple and artistically demanding. In these productions props are few, carefully chosen and intended to evoke an archetype: the ocean from a large light blue piece of material that is “waved” by two actors, a horse by Ivanna holding a rider’s whip, the Rainbow Serpent by streamers on a stick.
Music: Music is used to set and change mood, serve as transition, illustrate, divert attention or just be for fun or to show off. Larger instruments such as banjos, guitars and large drums are used to good effect. Flutes, recorders, concertinas, and lesser known sounds such as the African thumb piano called a kalimba, or mouth harps, or Audubon bird whistles are also useful. Percussive instruments are very important and even unmusical actors (if such truly exist) can be taught to produce striking sounds from bells, wood blocks, claves and tambourine. Special sounds related to an individual show are important, so dance drum and bells are used in Native American scripts, and rawhide stretched over large quilting hoops built a close copy of the Innuit dance drums. Wind chimes are often useful. The junk yard is full of wonderful sounds; nothing matches the use of a brake drum as a gong, and car springs have a unique sound also.
The use of audio tape for musical effects is generally less useful for most of these plays. Often there are differences in power availability and acoustical properties in a wide variety of touring spaces. Although taped music may add to a performance, an on-stage musician may add even more.
AUDIENCE
The audience comes to the theatre space from a literal, sensate place — the school, the bus ride, their home. The performance space for school tours will probably be in an area that has a different psychological preparation or warm-up than a theatre: the gym, multi-purpose room, lunchroom. The audience may walk in with a warm-up about “theatre” — perhaps teachers warned them to be quiet, parents suggested good manners, friends said “plays are stupid” or “plays are fun.” Maybe today they got an A or an F, their parents hugged or yelled at them, they just ate and are sleepy or they forgot their lunch and are hungry. Something must happen to change these hundreds of individual warm-ups into one unified expectation, where all are committed to the event and willing to risk changing their current state of being to the new one created for them by this event. The Text and the Ensemble must create this commitment.
Once the audience is “hooked,” the ensemble must provide connectors from an individual’s personal history and experience to the new world opening for them in the play. If an audience identifies with the situation and the characters, if they care about what happens, they offer their undivided attention at the least and actual spoken advice at the most, to help the outcome be positive.
Each audience person risks becoming committed to the production in the hopes that something useful will be learned through the theatrical experience. When that learning occurs, the person feels pleasure — they risked, they learned something, they feel good about it.
In these productions the audience often participates, often because they are directly invited to make choices for the characters as in The Water of Life or the plays using riddles. Other times they will spontaneously provide sound effects.
In Ivanna and the Rainbow Serpent as Ivanna travels along she sees a hawk, and the children often make the sound of the bird. Then she sees the bees, and they buzz. When she comes to the castle they begin to bark like a dog, until the line “they were stone statues” — the children instantly stop barking, startled by the idea of a stone dog.
Audience Arrangement, Entrance and Exit: The arrangement of the audience is important to the success of the production. The goal is to get every child as close to the actors as possible. In long gymnasiums with a proscenium stage at one end, we ignore the stage and put the performance in a circle in the middle or three-quarter round along one long end of the rectangle. Sometimes action occurs outside this space as well, behind or among the children. Putting the performance against a long wall or in the center of the space will also bring more of the audience close to the performance.
Many schools have small stages of which they are justly proud. Often these stages are offered as a performance platform the first time a school experiences this kind of theatre. However, everyone needs to recognize that the use of such a stage immediately separates the story from the audience. Generally, these plays are most successful when the audience sits very close to the production.
It is generally easier for very young children to enter into the magical space of the production than for the sophisticated older grades. In large school situations we ask the audiences be mixed, for example, with K, 2, 4, 6 at one performance and K, 1, 3, 5 at the other. The young ones encourage spontaneity, and the older ones help attention span.
When the children arrive in the performance space, we have the actors quickly seat them. Adults can sit with the children or sit on the edge of the performance space; they often try to make the children be quiet, and the nearby actors can quickly explain that it won’t be a problem, not to worry. We discourage announcements before a school performance as we find these affect what happens for up to fifteen minutes into the performance.
The final moments of the performance are equally as important as the warm-up. Some vocal or physical activity in which the audience may participate can signify the end of the performance and bring attention from the special reality generated by the actors to the immediate reality of the performance space. Performers are not “offstage” until the last child has left the performance space.
We believe our actors are role models, and go so far as to ask them to monitor their behavior; for example, not to smoke or swear on site.
CONCLUSION
We have noticed that many children are able to reenact a play, including nearly letter perfect memory for the words. One of our measurements of success is that the play is being performed on the playgrounds after we’ve been there. The plays are stories exploring love, companionship and filial devotion. As the children “play” the play, we hope they will make the models provided part of their everyday life. Strength, consideration, wisdom and courage are values taught better by example than by moralization.
When produced as intended, these plays are sure to bring favorable results. We ask you to experiment with these plays within their paradigm, and to experience, with us, the miracles that occur when an alchemical space is consciously and unconsciously created by the audience and the ensemble.