Excerpt from

Putting on a Show:
Theater for Young People

For kids, there's nothing more exciting than putting on a show. I remember the great flurry of activity when my kids and their friends would announce, "We're putting on a show. You have to come see it!" A show time would be announced. The fold-up puppet theater would be trundled out of the closet. Small slips of paper would be cut up into "tickets". The show would begin as the kids crouched down inside the puppet theater to provide the characters' voices, which were often drowned out by their uncontrollable giggles.

As they grew older, the kids dispensed with the puppet theater and raided the dress-up box for costumes so they could act out the parts themselves. Sometimes they wrote original songs for their shows, sometimes whole scripts. And sometimes the build-up to the big show was so intense, they didn't have much energy left for the show itself.
These shows were a lot like their usual pretend-play, but with an important difference: The kids weren't just playing for their own enjoyment. They were performing for us, their audience. From a very young age they'd figured out that these three ingredients are all you really need to put on a show: A story, performers, and an audience.

Real life, real time, real space

The essence of theater is make-believe. From a high-tech Disney extravaganza to a local theater production to a puppet show in someone's living room - all theater is simply a version of "let's pretend". But in theater it's not only the performers who pretend; the audience has to pretend too. The name for this phenomenon among theater people is the "willing suspension of disbelief". The phrase is a bit of a mouthful, but what it means is that although the members of the audience know perfectly well that the events unfolding on stage aren't "real", they willingly put this rational knowledge aside and enter into the make-believe world of the play. As an audience, when we take our seats in the theater we make a collective decision to go along for the ride. By "suspending disbelief", we allow ourselves to experience the same emotions and sensations we'd feel if the events in the play were real. Because that's what theater is for: To expand our horizons, to take us places we can't - or don't want to - go in real life.

Movies and TV shows are also forms of make-believe. But watching a play is a very different kind of experience from watching movies and television. The term "theater" encompasses many different forms, from scripted plays to mime to opera. But the one thing that that all forms of theater share, and that distinguishes them from film and other forms of entertainment is that they are performed live. A play is not a filmed or videotaped record of what a group of actors did weeks or month ago. It's happening right now, in real time and space. This creates an air of unpredictability and even danger that doesn't exist in film and television. In theater, things can and do go wrong: Actors forget their lines or miss a cue; a prop breaks or a costume rips. When these things happen, the actors and stage crew simply improvise a solution to the problem right there on the spot, and go on with the show. More often than not, the audience isn't even aware that something went wrong. This quality of immediacy, of "aliveness", is one of the things that makes the experience of watching theater so special.

There's another important difference between film and theater: Though we also suspend our disbelief when we watch stories on film, the illusion looks much more "real" to us. This is especially true nowadays, with the hyper-realism of special effects and CGI (computer- generated imagery) in blockbuster fantasies like Lord of the Rings and disaster movies like The Day after Tomorrow. Some people worry that these ever-more-lifelike special effects in movies may be spoiling the experience of live theater for audiences. But in my view, the low-tech "artificial" quality of live theater is precisely what makes it unique and exciting. Theater draws upon an audience's imagination in a whole different way from film and television. The illusion is right there for us to see through, yet we accept it. We embrace the world as the play presents it to us. In theater, we have to use our imagination to fill in the blanks. We, the audience, actually participate in creating the illusion. It's a special kind of magic that only live theater can provide.

What reviewers are saying about Putting on a Show:

"Hard-hitting plays for older children that tackle subjects like self-esteem and being an unwanted foster child. Her stories are compelling and are, of course meant to be performed, but would also be suitable for reading aloud with students in a classroom setting." - Canadian Children's Book Centre

"Expertly written by award-winning children's playwright Kathleen McDonnell, Putting On A Show is a simple but effective guide to introducing young people to the joy of performing. A superb tool for teachers as well as aspiring actors, directors, and playwrights." - Midwest Book Review

"Putting on a Show will be very useful in a drama class. The plays will educate students and give them an opportunity to develop their dramatic talents through interesting, challenging plays. Highly recommended." - CM magazine, Manitoba Library Association