HAMMING IT UP Kids put on their own plays during Family Saturdays.
Photo: Jay Kelly
Jay Kelly, Victory Gardens Theater's director of marketing and public relations, noticed something a few years back: His theater-loving peers were often missing from the audiences. "Why are people in their thirties and forties not coming to the theater?" Kelly recalls thinking. Then it dawned on him that he himself, a 44-year-old father of two, had been attending fewer and fewer theater performances as he juggled a full-time job and family life with leisure time that didn't always involve his kids.
He took this observation to VGT's arts-education department, along with a compelling solution. "You bring the kids; we'll provide the baby-sitting," he suggested. With that, Victory Gardens' Family Saturdays were born.
The theater company offers Family Saturdays one time during the run of each of its productions at Lincoln Park's Biograph Theater. For $5 each, kids ages 4 and up can hang out in the theater's upstairs rehearsal room with the education staff while their parents catch the show. But no one's left alone with a tub of crayons or Game Boys; instead they play theater games and make crafts, often relating in an age-appropriate way to the adult performance downstairs. "You can have an adult experience again and know your kids are safe," Kelly says.
In October, while parents watched a modernist take on the Greek myth Eurydice, arts-education assistant Kate Boisseau worked with eight kids, ranging in age from 4 to 10. "I showed them examples of Greek vases and urns that had Greek myths depicted on them, and they painted their own tiny clay pots, which they could take home," she says. "Then we talked about what a myth is, and they took turns acting out different roles of the [Eurydice] myth. When the parents got done watching the show, they came upstairs and watched their kids do their own version of Eurydice."
The grown-ups got a kick out of watching a four-minute version of the same story they'd just spent two hours watching, and the experience had everyone buzzing, says Boisseau. "All the parents were talking about how they're going to tell their friends."
Victory Gardens is offering the program again on December 6 during a matinee performance of The Snow Queen, it's homegrown adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's tale, running for the third straight year. The wintry folk musical is filled with witty wordplay and puppet wizardry (and a new opening number) and, though family-friendly, is considered most appropriate for older kids.
The staff is prepared for kids who might turn up midway through The Snow Queen performance, Boisseau says. "Some of the younger audience might start to get restless. If kids come upstairs after [Snow Queen] starts, [we'll make it] easy for them to slip in."
The Snow Queen runs at Victory Gardens through December 28; your little snowflakes can come to Family Saturday on December 6.