Maria is the One Piece. she is five years old. She was five years tall, fearless and swaggered like a pirate. She wears a red hood, a black felt pirate hat, and an old terrycloth bathrobe from her father tied around her waist and cinched tightly with an orange scarf. We made a blindfold out of black cardstock and nailed it to the shoelaces, but it annoyed her so she ripped it off. Maria’s sister Louisa tried to put it on the dog, but it annoyed him even more, so she threw it into imaginary oceans, Penzance Harbour, the dry, mottled grass in our backyard. We converted the back deck of our house into a pirate ship: white sheets for the mainsail, a Jolly Roger painted on the bulkheads, nailed to the bulkheads, and a clothesline tied to the deck rails as a lifebuoy. With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, it looks fantastic. Maria strode across the deck of the ship, slashed the air with her wooden sword, and sang:
It does, it does.
The exclusive, one-off performance, a radically abridged adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance, takes place on a Friday afternoon the week before Maria starts Kindergarten – preschool ends and school begins. I have exactly ten bad gig photos. Before iPhones, most adults didn’t have cameras, yet babies and toddlers slathered on sunscreen and slipped from our arms like seal pups. Spectators sit on wooden benches and borrowed chairs. Two sisters, Charlotte and Phoebe, ages five and eight, sell tickets, popcorn and lemonade from the window of the Wooden Puppet Theater — 25 cents each, or a dollar for everything — and no one complains Math doesn’t hold. The speakers blared CDs from the Doylicat Opera Company, but the show was mostly pantomime and dance: twirling, wriggling, and the occasional can-can.
There were eight kids at summer drama camp in our backyard that year. Seven years later, we’re blowing up black garbage bags like balloons, taped to broom handles, for Anderson Hill’s The Whale on Stilts. ’ I still have my favorite prop: the painted plywood sign from The Princess Bride. It says in red on one side:“pit of despair“; the other side is blue,”Miracle Max, Quack 25 Cents’. I keep it in my den and flip it over to one side or the other depending on how the day goes. I like having only two options.
If it was raining, we piled up a pile of pillows on the floor and dumped on the floor to watch DVDs of the Marx Brothers: Duck Soup, Horsehair, A Night at the Opera. By finding out which Marx Brothers a kid likes best, you can get to know him pretty well. (Harpo. I love Harpo.) “This is casting research,” I’d say if my husband walked by, raising an eyebrow at all of us. “Casting research? But you let everyone have whatever part they want.” At night, he writes the script. “Until you learn how to tie your shoes, you shouldn’t be disappointed,” I told him. Reading ability, learning disabilities, giftedness, tuning ability: Doesn’t matter. “Rule number one,” I would say to my kids, “Anyone can be anyone.” As if that made sense, as if it was an actual rule, as if growing up wasn’t about being stuck in one role forever , and forget that this is only part of it, and you are the one who created it.
The theater was born out of two simultaneous events: Charlotte and Phoebe’s mother’s decision to marry — same-sex marriage became legal in our state that spring — and the local Gilbert and Sullivan Society, which regularly Hosting Milk and the Under-Ten Cookies matinee has announced that its fall production will be ‘Penzance’. I bought the cd’s in preparation for the show and for the wedding I bought cheap polyester three piece bow tie suits for my little boys who thought they looked like pirates despite the fact that they looked like pirates . Vito Corleone’s great-grandson was going to be christened. They put on suits, I play CDs, they dance, stomp, shout, sail, not to mention history, math, and quadratic equations.
It also started for a more practical reason: there was no daycare or summer camp during the last week of August, which was also the week when college started and I had to teach. So I said I would have a bunch of kids come over to my house for a week and organize some sort of small production, because that’s what my mother would do, and because my next-door neighbor, Liz, volunteered to cover for me when I had to run to campus for class. I replace.
For the most part, this is the usual drill. get off at 8 o’clock yes4 point pick up afternoon, bring a hat and swimsuit. Snack: orange juice and goldfish, baby carrots and apple slices. At noon, everyone went to Liz’s for lunch: cheese tortillas served on green plastic plates on an orange paper tablecloth. A nap for children up to four years old. I clip the baby monitor in my back pocket. We’d rehearse, paint sets, make props, mess around. I’ll take everyone to the playground, or install sprinklers in the backyard, or we’ll go to the basketball court and play Fish, Fish Across My Ocean. We use a lot of Band-Aids, bug spray, and self-adhesive mustaches.
For kids who can already read, I print out the scripts and put them in colored folders. Children decorate them with their names and common doodles: rainbows, hearts, racing cars. Simon keeps his folder next to his bed and reads it every night before bed. In the morning, in the shower, he would sing all the songs. His breakthrough role was as Leo Bloom in “The Producers” at the age of eight. “I have a secret desire / Hidden deep in my soul / It fires my heart / To see me in this role.” Wearing a button-up white shirt, black trousers and suspenders, he wears A blue flannel blanket. “Watch out, Broadway!” He tap danced as hard as he could in his belt and sneakers. Enjoy yourself, Matthew Broderick.
We’ve never been to Broadway. But kids made posters and pinned them to nearby poles and notice boards, and these backyard dramas played out in front of curtains sewn from paint-splattered cloth to torn plastic shower curtains. And stretch between backs. The grandmas are driving. Elementary school teachers all take the subway. We had to borrow more chairs. We’re out of popcorn.
My lenient approach to casting means that some roles are played by multiple children. Our “HMS Pinafore” has Buttercup played by Liz’s daughter Zoe and Cutterbup played by Louisa. Watching the action doesn’t always help much if you’re the viewer and don’t know the story. Therefore, the screenplay relies heavily on the narrator.
Rackstraw’s Ben, six years old and missing four teeth, stands on a balcony, hoisting a Union Jack sail, trying to appear longing, lovelorn and patriotic. His younger brother Daniel saw it that year; later, he had his big break in The Princess Bride, where he played an albino and snarled at Prince Humperdinck’s prisoner in the depths of despair: “Don’t even try to escape !”
Photo courtesy of the author
Trying on roles is something young children do every day; they are always playing part. In “The Apron,” Wren plays a capable seaman who dances the horn dance, the two-step dance that every young child is born with. Maria is the bravado who loves parts that require swords; she’s Dick Deadeye. Year after year, the kids perfect their characters; the last week of summer, they get to play a supersized version of themselves. In “The Apron,” Wren’s eight-year-old brother Emerson, a born conductor, wants to become Sir Joseph Porter, First Lord of the Admiralty. Every year since, he’s turning his cane, and the cornstarch has turned his hair gray. In “Oliver! He is Mr. Bumble, director of the workhouse. He was inevitably also Captain von Trapp. Gideon had all the tyrannical tendencies of the firstborn. “That’s good,” he’d say. “I have to be bad.”
But there are also some kids who want to play with anything Apart from They are becoming themselves. One of Gideon’s brothers wore an old Flash costume when he was five: a red polyester suit with yellow lightning scratches on the chest, and a mask.
