CHILDREN'S PLAYS

I've been making up plays since childhood. Having three sisters I thought I had a cast except that invariably one or other or all three would get bored and abandon the project, much to my chagrin and frustration. Now I have no cast at all except in my imagination so now I can amuse myself indefinitely, which I have indeed done with these scripts. They came about because a friend of mine wanted to set up a little travelling theater troupe to play in the malls and parks in the holidays. After an economic feasibility study we found that it could only support two actors. So I set about writing plays for two actors but which had more than two roles. You will notice that there is always a large something or other in the middle of the set. Usually a mobile castle. One actor is always disappearing around the back of the castle and reappearing as a different character. I visualize the whole thing as being quite hilarious.  How I wish a couple of young actors would take up this challenging opportunity. Why are they not lining up for it? Why?

About the Reader Theater plays: well, there's a whole community of people in the US who do this. They are devised to help students with fluency of language. The plays are read in a group and then the roles are passed around for each subsequent reading. When a student is a little familiar with what's coming next they develop more confidence in reading and in hearing the sound of their own voice. It isn't something that has caught on in NZ. Yet. I invented a whole town of characters. In the plays they all appear in each other's stories. No one role in a play is more import than another. Each child needs to have about the same amount of speaking. It's not easy writing a play like that. But I naturally found it to be a lot of fun. The plays are written as if the kids are just making it up as they go along. Sort of. They are pretty wacky.

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The other two plays, SWAT and SPACE TRACTOR are even more than wacky. Quite deadly in fact.

Try them at your own risk.