What would an 8-year-old do? What would a child have to say about this?
Artists and leaders who attended the recent TYA/USA Festival & Conference asked themselves these questions again and again, knowing that “the way forward isn’t easy, but it is simple,” as Douglas Clayton of the search firm Creative Evolutions put it.
As specialists and defenders of Theatre for Young Audiences from around the world gathered in the D.C./Maryland/Virginia (DMV) area May 5-8, in the immediate aftermath of National Endowment for the Arts grant withdrawals, not to mention the hostile presidential takeover of the Kennedy Center, TYA/USA attendees centered their thoughts and their dialogue on the youth who will be affected by each loss. Though planned months in advance, the nimble event responded to ever-changing times by adding responsive programming and moving its original location from the embattled Kennedy Center to Imagination Stage in Bethesda, Maryland, and Adventure Theatre MTC in Glen Echo, Maryland. But this festival and conference didn’t just reflect the fears of our broader industry and culture. Its multigenerational coalition-building and resilience through levity proved that TYA can help get us through an uncertain time.
Just ask Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who said the new musical based on her children’s book Just Ask! (adapted by Fran Sillau, with music and lyrics by Mark Kurtz) might be one of her “crowning legacies.” Sotomayor—known for being the first Latina to serve on the Supreme Court, where her rulings have included upholding the Affordable Care Act and the legalization of same-sex marriage—takes her “gig” making art for young people just as seriously as her “day job,” as she and Fran Sillau put it during the TYA/USA closing conversation. “We have a lot of power in young people,” Sotomayor said.
Just Ask!, performed at the conference, centers on a community garden and the young people who tend to it. The characters encourage people to communicate if they’re curious about someone’s differences or disabilities, and they inspire kids to embrace what makes everyone unique—just as a garden grows beautiful with different kinds of plants. What is really needed right now, Sotomayor shared, is “not physical or mental ability,” but “strength of heart.” Theatre, she said, offers an opportunity to “go to the heart, the spirit.”
We may have entered a season of compounding concern, but the TYA/USA gathering certainly reminded us we are not alone. During the performance of Just Ask, I looked over to see this tremendous trailblazer beaming, tears in her eyes.
“The conference became a container for everyone’s worries and concerns, but also a very deep desire to be joyful and in connection with one another,” said TYA/USA executive director Sara Morgulis. This year’s theme, “bloom,” emphasized attendees’ insistence on not only surviving this time, but thriving as much as possible. TYA/USA began in 1965 as the U.S. branch of ASSITEJ (Association Internationale du Théâtre de l’Enfance et la Jeunesse), and today represents more than 1,450 member theatres, organizations, and individual artists dedicated to professional theatre for children and families. The best part of the conference, TYA playwright and director Gloria Bond Clunie told me, is gathering and getting to see so many colleagues from all over the country.
A pre-conference event on May 5 split attendees into two categories—emerging and existing leaders—to make a more conscious effort to welcome theatremakers of all career stages, ages, and needs. Creative Evolutions, Orr Group, Seattle Children’s Theatre, and Tom O’Connor Consulting Group led those first sessions on aligning values to practice, adapting messaging and fundraising tactics, facilitating board-staff alliances, and charting career paths. Several leaders shared what percentage of their organizational budgets would dissolve without government funding: which shows might no longer be free, which workshops could no longer be offered, which staff could no longer work. TYA/USA itself lost a $65,000 grant for the festival. Once again, a lifeline for many kids has been undervalued by grownups.
While youth are the most important stakeholders and beneficiaries of this work, TYA in particular has needed to prove itself again and again to the caregivers and funders who have buying power. Throughout the week several leaders described feeling more exhausted yet also more determined than ever to defend this vulnerable population in the face of compounding challenges.
“TYA is art and needs the same degree of relevance as theatre for grownups, if not more,” said playwright and Childrens Theatre Foundation of America president Suzan Zeder. Over ice cream sandwiches by Adventure Theatre, she spoke about children’s vulnerability since pandemic lockdowns and amid political upheaval. Though there’s “never been a moment quite like this one,” she said, this art form has long been known to offer an antidote to audiences.
The seeds for professional TYA in the U.S. were planted by theatre for immigrant kids in 1920s settlement houses. The larger international TYA organization ASSITEJ began during the Cold War to bring people together for a better future. I could list off studies that illustrate the positive health and developmental impacts of TYA—but maybe it’s better to simply imagine the lights dimming for a theatre full of young people. There’s nothing quite like a puppet’s simplest motion in this space—a hand-wave, a leap—to rouse gasps, even screams from a crowd of all ages.
Presented early in the festival, Marooned! A Space Comedy proved one small step for a puppet, but a giant leap for hope and joy. The piece from a troupe called Alex & Olmsted integrates actors with physical theatre prowess alongside shadow, hand, rod, and marionette puppets, miniatures, and projections, to tell the story of an astronaut who crash-lands on a faraway planet. She communicates only through body language and struggles to find her way home, crying out to the universe, only to have aliens respond with nonsense like, “Please hold…We appreciate your call!”
Many theatremakers found the space play hit quite close to home in a time when we all feel a bit stranded. And the play’s primarily nonverbal nature, unveiling surprising storytelling devices at a steady pace, seemed to re-regulate nervous systems. Breath, gasps, sighs, “oh’s,” laughter, and tears rippled through the audience.
While much of the conference was spent chatting or listening, several plays on offer, like Marooned!, leaned into nonverbal storytelling, helping audiences practice presence and breath amid a busy day, hone in on action, take away distinct impressions and interpretations, remember what it’s like to consume art with a child’s eye, and reaffirm the magic of TYA. The Paper Escaper, from Australia’s Terrapin Puppet Theatre, charmed audiences without a single word. Its whimsical white world begins with an elder “Maker,” played by an actor in a large, expressive mask, who labors over pop-up books that bring color into his life. We soon learn things are not what they seem: His creations, made of rod-and-hand paper puppets, are alive and seek freedom. By the end, his workshop is no longer white, but an explosion of harmonious color.
Yet there is no villain—a striking similarity across several works at the festival. We begin The Paper Escaper with the Maker, appreciating his hard work and can empathize with him, his artistry, his loneliness. In Just Ask!, every character leads with best intentions, seeking to understand one another’s superpowers, from processing the world in a different way with Down syndrome to having autism and knowing cool facts about dinosaurs. In Marooned!, some characters are less than helpful to the struggling astronaut, but several try. The play ends with the audience becoming its own character: Projections give us lines and reveal that we have been aliens all along, bearing witness. We are both complicit and capable of help. No one is a bad guy; everyone is a possible friend.
TYA’s radical but knowing optimism—illustrating humans’ potential for kindness, resilience, and joy—has not wavered in spite of our times. Even BIPOC Superhero Project’s reading of Stella Sanchez and the Supernova (arguably the only work with an archetypal villain) by student playwright Cecilia Bermudez offers the possibility for change and understanding within the protagonist’s family. Indeed, time itself poses the greatest threat working against characters’ chances for survival, be it the time it takes for the Marooned! astronaut’s oxygen to run out, or how quickly the The Paper Escaper’s maker and his creations can reconcile, or time itself unraveling in Michael J. Bobbitt and Sandra Eskin’s Mother Goosed! nursery rhymes.
The U.S. has a complex relationship to time; I’ve even heard international artists in the past call the content of our stages “fast-food theatre,” indicating the product-forward, urgent conveyor-belting of art. Other cultures conceptualize the time needed to make art differently, and I appreciated TYA/USA’s inclusion of conversations about collaborating across hemispheres, cultures, and companies. Co-productions have become prevalent in the American theatre at large, and though the next few years will present challenges to international artists looking to work in the U.S. and obtain visas, some theatres presented potential solutions at breakout sessions.
Australian company Threshold and Chicago’s Filament Theatre began their collaboration in 2021, when Filament reached out with just an email to connect following a virtual conference. After hopping on a friendly Zoom, the teams scheduled consistent conversations—working around the time difference—about shared values, superpowers, areas of improvement, complementary artistic practice, and hopes for a co-produced show for the very young. They described each of these topics as ingredients for a wonderful tea, a true blend of their collaboration. More than one of those involved—Filament’s Rejinal Simon and Krissi Ann McEachern, Threshold’s Sarah Lockwood and Tahli Corin—repeated the phrase, “We’re rehearsing the world we want to live in.” Oceans apart, the companies’ newfound, close relationship has prepared them to co-produce in 2026 RAIN: for babies and their carers, an intimate piece with immersive sensorial elements that Threshold originally created in 2012 and has since charmed Australian audiences. True to each theatre’s mission of sustainability and local connection, the new U.S. staging will feature a cast drawn from Filament’s local artistic community.
When Filament earned an innovation award at the conference’s awards ceremony for the immersive FORTS! Build Your Own Adventure, co-founder and director Julie Ritchey uplifted the value of going “deeper” and reconsidering how we measure success as an industry, saying, “While sometimes getting bigger is a sign of growth, we need to remember that going deeper is a sign of growth as well. Not all independent artists aspire to join the staff of a large theatre. Small theatres aren’t small because they failed to be big.”
Budgets won’t get bigger this year, leaders admitted, citing the ever-changing landscape. Companies will need to learn to do more with less and reexamine how to fulfill their missions. “I don’t know who’s going to be able to do the big lavish productions,” Suzan Zeder told me. “But we are going to be able to make it work.”
There was no shortage of ingenuity among creatives in attendance. Teatro SEA founder, CEO, and artistic director Dr. Manuel Morán, honored with the Harold Oaks Award, showed me the company’s latest venture: publishing beautiful bilingual children’s books that contain their theatre’s playscripts. Imagine kids all over the country reading plays with their parents, integrating theatre more intimately with daily routine.
I relished the chance to meet many TYA artists and new companies changing the game, including Mélissa Smith and Brittany Parker, whose company STEMmersive uses a 360-degree, planetarium-like dome to immerse kids in story, science, and wonder. A new initiative called Mind Matters illustrated how TYA can offer pediatric care. In a breakout session, Emily Freeman and Elizabeth Horn walked attendees through a collaboration with University of Central Florida’s College of Nursing, which resulted in the publication of an anthology of carefully curated 10-minute plays about mental health plus workshops and lesson plans around difficult, sometimes taboo topics.
Various individual artists and identities were represented in “Song Slam,” a celebration of new music in TYA. “I Give You Shade” from Jonathan Keebler, Ryan Korrell, and Bryan McCaffrey’s Big Wig in particular moved me with its ecstasy of young queer expression, proving pride onstage for youth who will strive to survive this time. Stephanie Cowan from Broadway Licensing Global affirmed this, citing queer stories which are still being produced in the south, saying, “We get such a holistic view of what’s happening nationwide with theatres, and while there are so many theatres losing funding, I’m also seeing small organizations come together to tell the most sensitive stories right now.”
Researchers shared stories of both encouragement and areas of growth throughout the week. Most prominent was Dr. Matt Omasta’s TYA/USA State of the Field, a TYA-specific rundown akin to TCG’s Theatre Facts which offered both positive results (95 percent of TYA theatre companies’ leaders think plays that promote DEI are important) and slightly disappointing (only 64 percent offer sensory-friendly performances at their theatres). And while his study showed that 87 percent said a child in the audience is the best critic of TYA, only 39 percent of theatres actually consult with kids about season selection.
Taken together, these events left leaders with numerous actions and tools. But my overwhelming takeaway was the strength of this multigenerational community. The emotion in Idris Goodwin’s voice describing meet-and-greets with kid readers and audiences. The warmth in José Casas’s voice as he was able to say “Hey chica” in person to me after we’d talked for years over the phone and Zoom while I was still a student and he was developing the BIPOC Superhero Project. The powerful Q&As in Joanne Seelig Lamparter’s memory during her time as Imagination Stage chief artistic programming officer, wherein audiences and artists connected and affirmed the importance of the theatre’s work. The squeal of delight as each attendee realized the people responsible for countless joyful childhoods—the Magic Treehouse team—were in attendance, ready to share their beloved book-to-stage adaptations. The quiet embrace between a puppet and human. The smile in Suzan Zeder’s voice asking me to make her an Instagram. The excited wave to actors from Sonia Sotomayor.
Resistance isn’t easy, but in the world of TYA it is simple. The harbingers of hope keep the kids in mind, and they keep on keeping on. I thought, going into the week, that doom would loom as a haunting spectre, casting shadows over the event. It didn’t. It buzzed in the undercurrent, yes—a bee spreading anticipation of its sting. But oppression has been known to extract change and healing art in response. We will persevere. Wasps won’t know the beauty they’ve unwittingly flowered.
Said Sonia Sotomayor, looking around at this year’s TYA/USA attendees, earnest and energized, “I’m so grateful to everyone in this audience, in this industry. You continue to change the world and make it better.”
Gabriela Furtado Coutinho (she/her) is digital editor of American Theatre.
