A new way to play

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT The Emerald City troupe tweaks productions based on audience suggestions at staged readings.

Photo: Ernie Nolan

It’s no secret that plenty of parents—and even some kids—moan at the thought of sitting through a children’s theater production.

Karen Cardarelli, executive director of Emerald City Theatre, knows this first hand, as she perpetually looks for fresh works that meet the theater’s standards for both entertainment and educational value. “The quality of scripts available for young theatergoers is nowhere near the caliber of what’s out there for adults,” she says.

When several of the Lincoln Park children’s company’s original works, including longtime holiday favorite Frosty and last season’s How I Became a Pirate, were commissioned by eight other theater groups in the United States and Canada, Cardarelli realized Emerald City wasn’t alone in looking for better scripts. And she felt they were prepared to help change things.

“Our company is in a position to develop world-class theater specifically targeted to this [young] audience and do so with their development in mind,” she says. “We want to address both the community and industry needs, and feel we can do that in a city with so much amazing writing talent.”

With that in mind, the company formed Emerald City PlayGround, a lab that includes staged readings in front of test audiences, to serve as an incubator for its original works. The PlayGround’s first production, If You Take a Mouse to School, opens this weekend. Based on a book from the popular Laura Numeroff series, If You Take a Mouse underwent several script changes following summer readings—something writers might not have had the luxury of making during a traditional preview week.

“The kids gave us ideas about what they would—and wouldn’t—like to see the character of Mouse do,” Cardarelli says. And parents noted that some three- to six-year-olds—the play’s target age group—may not yet know what a school principal is. “Feedback like that helps us improve the experience for everyone,” she says.

An original adaptation of Hansel and Gretel, written by Jeff Award–winners Ralph Covert and G. Riley Mills, is in development for a holiday run and will be followed by The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle, in early 2009.

In addition to children and parents, the PlayGround also uses advisers from Head Start, a government-funded education initiative aimed at low-income families, and other learning programs to provide feedback. The benefits work both ways, Cardarelli says. “It helps us to get advice from educators out in the field, and by inviting them to our staged readings, they learn theater techniques they can use for storytelling in their classrooms.”

Emerald City also plans to hold informal “Ambassadors Club” meetings, starting with one educator and one parent representing about 10 Chicago schools, to discuss student needs and how the company can help address them. Cardarelli says she hopes to eventually expand the group to include more schools representing more parts of the city. “We obviously have a lot to learn,” she says.

Among the things Cardarelli says they’ve already learned is the strong need for “character education” at preschool level, i.e., teaching kids to be good citizens and kind to others. “Theater can help by providing good role models by way of characters,” Cardarelli points out. “We’ve heard from parents that they love it when we have characters who brush their teeth and listen to their mothers.”

If You Take a Mouse to School opens Saturday 20.