SCR’s Youth Theater to Stage Drama for Children

Good children’s plays are hard to come by. That’s one reason you see so many Snow Whites and Cinderellas treading the boards.

Last spring, though, South Coast Repertory asked its own literary manager, John Glore, to write a play for the Young Conservatory Players, 10-to-17-year-old members of SCR’s youth theater training program who put on several shows a year.

The result--Glore’s refreshingly different “Wind of a Thousand Tales,” in which a pragmatic little girl named Kimberly-Kay discovered her own imagination by taking a magical journey through three folk tales--was one of the Players’ finest offerings.

Glore’s sequel, “Folk Tales Too,” opens Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center Founder’s Hall as part of SCR’s California Play Festival, a showcase of nine new plays by California writers.

As literary manager, Glore (with SCR dramaturge Jerry Patch) reads and screens the 1,000 or so scripts SCR receives each year. He also writes program notes and background information for plays in production, and works with writers. He finds writing for children to be “a blast.”

Still, in a recent phone conversation, Glore admitted that when Players’ artistic director Diane Doyle first approached him with the idea of bringing back Kimberly-Kay, he had been hesitant. “I felt Kimberly-Kay had fulfilled her purpose--she had found her imagination,” he said.

But then he decided a second play could give her a way of using her new-found imagination.

“She has an argument with her father and decides to run away. When she goes up to the attic to pack, one of her friends from the first show, a breeze named Bluster, turns up. He suggests that instead of running away, she let her imagination run away for her.”

The result is a “sort of epic tale, along the lines of ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” told through six North American folk tales that share a common theme: the relationship between fathers and their children.

Glore “read or scanned close to 1,000 folk tales” before he chose six to work with. “One of the stories,” he said, “houses all the rest. It’s akin to Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ with elements of ‘Cinderella.’ It’s about a father who banishes the daughter he loves the most when she defies him.”

A secondary tale is about a boy named Tom who isn’t as stupid as everyone thinks. The most serious story is an American Indian tale about a great hunter who hunts for sport as well as food, offending the tribal elders and the spirits. He is punished by being turned into a mountain lion, and he ends up being hunted by his own son.

“It’s a tragic tale,” said Glore, emphasizing that “this show is definitely not for those under 5 years old.”

Doyle, who is directing the production, added in her energetic staccato: “It’s fun. Not traditional, goofy fun. It’s not what we call children’s theater for 2 and under: ‘color and noise.’ It’s 60 minutes of narrative dialogue, conversations, relationships. No hairy monsters.

“I’m in love with the story,” she said. “Father screams at the child; child retaliates in her own wonderful way. Kids in the audience will see how to deal with anger. And maybe realize parents have a right to be angry too.

“We’re not just pulling out the old set and slamming another three stories into it. John interwove the six stories into a tapestry so you can’t tell where one ends and another begins.”

“It has a different kind of rhythm,” Glore said, “a different pace and shape than last year’s show.”

He wants the youngest members of the audience to “simply be engrossed by the story--if they pick up on how it applies to their own lives, that’s great.” He hopes that “older kids pick up on some of the more sophisticated aspects of the play; the way things connect.

“Too often,” Glore said, “plays (for children) tend to be condescending. I write for myself, to amuse myself, to be gripped by a story, and I hope and believe even the youngest kids respond to that.”

The South Coast Repertory Young Conservatory Players’ production of “Folk Tales Too” opens Saturday in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive , Costa Mesa. Show times: 1 and 3:30 p.m. Saturday, Sunday and May 13 and 14; 7:30 p.m. May 12. Tickets: $6. Information: (714) 957-4033.