Theatre as a Medium for Children and Young People: Images and Observations

This book opens doorways to new understandings, even as it poses a challenge to educators, theatre people, and others concerned about the lives of today’s children. At once it raises a wealth of questions regarding the meanings of theatre, the role of imagination, the difference (especially for children) between the fictional and the real. Indeed, one of the attractions of Dr. Schonmann’s book is her evident cherishing of open questions, many of which involve her readers in explorations of their own experiences and in a renewed wonder at what the arts can bring to human lives. Her focus is on children’s theatre as a unique art form with its own symbol system and its particular demands on audiences. Dealing as she does with images and enactments as well as with a range of theories, she makes readers aware of unexplored possibilities—pedagogical and aesthetic—for early childhood and elementary education. Her core argument is that children’s theatre is not a reduced version of adult theatre. Nor is it arbitrarily concocted in accord with adult notions of children as incomplete adults. It is well known that the idea of a child as a being in process of growing, of becoming, stems from the work of John Dewey and others at the turn of the last century. Dr. Schonmann’s conception of children’s theatre responds to such a view. Plays for children, whether in or out of school, whether performed by the young or by professionals, are not developed by formula.