Aurand Harris; Playwright Wrote Children’s Theater Favorites

Aurand Harris, the prolific and much-published playwright for children’s theater best known for his 1963 classic “Androcles and the Lion,” has died. He was 80.

Harris died Monday of cancer at Beth-Israel Hospice in New York City.

“Someone has figured out that the curtain goes up twice a day on ‘Androcles’ someplace around the world,” Harris told an interviewer in 1994.

The play, which makes regular appearances on television and in school and community theaters, has been translated into 20 languages and remains the bestseller of Harris’ publisher, Anchorage Press.

Harris penned more than 50 plays, beginning with “Once Upon a Clothesline” in 1945, which broke from the fairy tales traditionally featured in children’s theater, and instead profiled two characters dressed in yellow jumpsuits to resemble clothespins.

Among his most popular plays are “Steal Away Home,” “Yankee Doodle” and “The Arkansaw Bear.”

Harris was born in Jamesport, Mo., where his mother taught theater. By age 7, he had written his first play, which involved a maid and a butler discussing the disappearance of their mistress.

“I’d never seen a real maid and butler,” he said, “but the plays my mother directed always had a maid and a butler, so I thought that to have a good play you needed a maid and a butler.”

Harris earned degrees in theater at the University of Kansas City and Northwestern University, then went to New York. He decided to concentrate on children’s theater after a disastrous tryout of one of his plays in adult theater.

He often directed his own plays, and was invited to China in 1988 to direct his version of “Rags to Riches” at the Shanghai Children’s Art Theatre.

Harris also edited several anthologies, among them “Plays Children Love” and “Short Plays of Theatre Classics.”

The writer taught for 38 years at Grace Church School in Manhattan and for the past 10 years at New York University.

Among his accolades was a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the first given to a children’s playwright.