Some serious child's play

Teresa Eyring picks up a small cardboard box sitting among papers scattered on her desk and opens it. Inside is a gleaming 2003 Tony Award, naming the Children's Theatre Company (CTC) of Minneapolis as the best professional regional theater in the United States.

For nearly three decades, the regional Tony has acknowledged that great theater happens nationwide, not just in New York. But this year's award was special: It was the first ever awarded to a children's theater.

The achievement has put a spotlight on the CTC and more broadly on professional children's theater. This is a corner of the theatrical world that, as Rodney Dangerfield would say, has gotten no respect, but may now be seeing a renaissance. Although economic times are tough for all regional theaters (the CTC ran a small deficit in its last fiscal year), its artistic director, Peter Brosius, sees today as "a remarkable time" for children's theater. There's been "nothing less than a sea change in the field," he says. "It's a significant historical moment."

Theater for young audiences is growing across the country, agrees Scot Copeland, president of ASSITEJ/USA, an association of professional theaters for children. The group has grown 28 percent over the past decade and today has 120 member theaters.

The field also has become more professional, with more theaters employing Equity actors. Some organizations, like the respected Dallas Children's Theater; Childsplay in Tempe, Ariz.; and CTC, have built or are planning new facilities.

In addition, major regional theaters principally aimed at grownups, such as South Coast Rep in southern California, the Denver Theater Center, Indiana Repertory, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, are now "taking children seriously" by adding productions and programs aimed at young audiences, Mr. Copeland says.

"What I think the Tony shows is that theater for young audiences already has had an impact," says Copeland, who is also producing director of the Nashville (Tenn.) Children's Theatre. It's "not somebody's irrelevant fairy tale done with dancing elves to sell a lot of tickets. Our motivation for doing theater for young audiences is the same reason any artist does theater. And the work that we do can be extraordinarily complex."

Often, when you mention "children's theater," people think, "Oh, it's not going to be very good: You know, two chairs and a clown," says CTC's Eyring, laughing. "It's gonna be some silly thing. It's not real theater. [But] people come here and say, 'I had no idea! This could be on Broadway.' "

Actually, it has been. Earlier this year, the CTC sent its production of "A Year with Frog and Toad" off to New York, where it received three Tony nominations, including one for best musical. Back home, it produced other world premières, including "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," adapted by Pulitzer Prize-winner Nilo Cruz, and "Korczak's Children," a play about orphans in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.

Last season, CTC reached some 330,000 young people and families, including 22,000 season-ticket holders, through productions at its 744-seat main stage or on tours and its theater-arts classes for children and teens.

The CTC theater features a glass-paneled quiet room at the back for viewing a production with a noisy child and extra-wide aisles between the rows of its stadium-style seats.

"One thing we know about our audience is that they get up and go to the bathroom," says Jim Tinsely, production manager of the CTC.

The facility was the state of the art when it was built in 1974. But CTC has outgrown it and is beginning a $27 million expansion of its home adjacent to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in a low-income inner-city neighborhood. The addition, scheduled to open in 2005, will provide a smaller second stage (up to 288 seats) and classrooms.

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