A thinking child’s theater

Walk into the lobby of professional theaters across this country and you’ll see people engaged in animated conversations about the provocative plays they have just seen. Perhaps a play transported them to the Warsaw Ghetto or to a school gym where homophobia is rampant. Perhaps a play invited them into an ESL classroom where Somali immigrants struggle to make sense of English or into a Caribbean coastline community where a father negotiates with his own principles to feed his children.

This is the reality of theater and its tremendous power of engagement. What is unusual, however, is that these scenarios are taking place in the lobbies of theaters for young people.

Professional theater for young people is experiencing an extraordinary renaissance of new work and classics reimagined that is yearned for by parents and community leaders alike.

I am not a sociologist, but I am a parent and the leader of a major U.S. professional theater for young people. We are living in a time when my generation is recommitting to cultural experiences where parents and children, children and children, and children and teachers can share a common event -- a catalytic and emotional spark that leads to critical thinking and meaningful dialogue and celebrates the power of imagination.

We are in a moment of extraordinary political schism, unparalleled global connections and constant ethical challenges in which it seems increasingly important to come together as a family to wrestle with issues, to remember the common ground we share and to understand the worlds of those so seemingly different from us.

Theater can be a powerful force to fight what is increasingly a culture based on fear -- fear of the other, fear of the unknown, fear of ideas and concepts that challenge accepted notions. Theater can be a powerful path for young people and families toward dialogue and engagement. Young people want to be trusted to think, to form their own opinions and to have their voices heard.

This is a time of remarkable growth and expansion for the field. Countless communities across this nation are supporting professional theater for young people and dedicating themselves to creating new spaces and new buildings that bring the highest-quality theater work to young people and families. Cities from Omaha to Tempe, Ariz.; Seattle to Bethesda, Md.; Charlotte, N.C., to Dallas and, of course, my own city, Minneapolis, have all had multimillion-dollar campaigns to create state-of-the-art facilities for professional theater for young people.

We are increasingly inundated with technology and media, which connect us virtually, but we are more and more hungry for the moments of live connection, where we share not only physical space with others but emotional and spiritual space as well. Theater is a place where we can breathe in the same tale, laugh together, be moved together. The theater creates a center where we enter as strangers and leave somehow more of a community.

There is increasing violence both in our culture and in our media, and theater is a place where we see that actions have consequences, that what we do affects other people, profoundly and deeply. Theater helps us engage the past and imagine a future. As advertising and commerce invade every corner of our lives, it is more important than ever that places like young people’s theater exist to reinforce that what is essential and exchanged is not money but story, character and the beauty of language and image.

Vibrant new works

In literature, the likes of Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman are creating new and original novels for young people. Leading theater artists too are finding the joys of writing and directing for this audience. David Henry Hwang (“Tibet Through the Red Box”), Nilo Cruz (“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”), Jeffrey Hatcher (“Korczak’s Children”) and Naomi Iizuka (“Anon(ymous): An Adaptation of the Odyssey”), among others, are creating vibrant, bold works for young audiences. These playwrights are realizing that such work is powerful, reinvigorating and challenging. It allows them to reach a diverse audience, an audience eager and excited to be in the theater. It takes them back to those profound impulses of why we do this -- to tell tales that must be told, to create forms that have never been, to merge language, song and visual imagery in this most collaborative of art forms.

These artists often make work for young audiences that speaks to the same concerns that they express in their adult work -- stories of growing up bicultural, of neocolonialism, of the dislocation of the refugee, of courage in the face of oppression. Writing for young people and families gives them access to audiences beginning to form their political, cultural and spiritual foundations. These works can play a critical role in that process. It is both a tremendous opportunity and a responsibility.

Parents are more active than ever in trying to ensure their children are able to function in an increasingly complex and diverse world; they want to help their children develop and articulate a moral compass to guide them.

They know that the theater is a place that is not afraid to grapple with ideas, moral dilemmas and critical decisions. We want children who can focus, listen and discern the nuances in a story -- and in life.

So we work to help young people develop a hunger for beauty, to understand the power of story in our own lives and in the lives of others and to believe in the possibility of creating worlds unimagined. Theater helps us share with young people how the world is mutable, that it can truly be transformed and that there is no greater power than that of the imagination.

Peter C. Brosius is artistic director of the Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis, which won the 2003 Tony Award for best regional theater.