Life is Rough... Draft.

Hello all. Here's my super rough draft. Beware that I have a tendency to use rather colloquial language in my writing. Don't worry, kids, it'll alllll be cleaned up. Basically, I'm using the Henry V production we saw as a case study (along with a few other productions I am currently conversing with) and comparing their success techniques to those of scholars and of my own humble opinion. If there was a mark that was missed---was it one of the things that a scholar instructed blatantly? etc. For now, i don't really think it's necessary to have a stance on if I think these types of performances are successful or not. I think it varies from performance to performance. Instead, I'm clearly stating what I think a performance NEEDS in order to be successful. 

How to make a child targeted performance more successful? Title to be determined?

Upon attending Brigham Young University’s Young Company’s production of Henry V, I was captivated, certainly. Interesting lighting, contemporary top-40 music, dance numbers, and rap-like speech made me pay attention to what was happening on the stage. However, even with the strategies used to captivate attention, it was not evident that the child audience really understood what was going on. The fact that there was a war taking place and that there were ‘good guys and bad guys’ was understood, yes. The importance of some major intricacies, however, may have missed the mark. This begs the question: “Can younger children relate to Shakespeare’s Henry V”? And even more specifically, “Are Shakespeare productions that target child audiences successful?”  In this paper I hope to prove that the aims and goals of child targeted Shakespeare productions meet the goals and standards that educators would have for them---what they would have their children learn from the play. To start off: what measures success?  Four key elements come to mind for a successful learning experience. A child targeted production if nothing else must: captivate the attention of the child audience, it must create familiarity with Shakespearean style speech and language, it must convey the major themes of the work and,  it must highlight the importance of the key scenes.

In Henry V, A major underlying theme is desires vs. duties. Several times throughout the play, the king must abandon friendships he knew and loved for the greater good of England (INSERT PRIMAR TEXT REFERENCE HERE). In BYU Young Company’s production of Henry V, Mackenzie Larsen (who plays the title character) states what she desires in the success of a thematic interpretation:

“When we have discussions with them [the child audience] they pull themes out of the show and relate them to what is going on in their lives, and that's our main goal. We're happy if the kids even get that the show was about a war and that's all. Often they pick up on much more, and we can discuss how the characters behaved and what choices they made were good or bad.”

How then, does a production go about expressing such thematic ideas like war, death, duty, and sacrifice to such a young audience? In ACT____ Scene ______ of Henry V, Henry must once again choose duty over friendship, executing Bardolph. (PRIMARY TEXT REFERENCE HERE) Through the text alone, the theme seems to be personified in a straightforward fashion. Though an old friend and loved one, he must be executed for his wrongdoing in stealing from a French church and serve as a lesson to the rest of the English Army to remain faithful to their code of honor. Mackenzie Larsen again shares that it is this scene in particular that many children in the audience “don’t quite get a lot of the time”.  Due to the abstract nature of the stage movements, many of the audience members “laugh when he [was] dragged off [stage]. In the way that scene like this is portrayed toward children, the thematic elements musn’t be so abstract that the audience misses the mark, but also cannot be so blatant to where it oversteps the boundaries of propriety. Teresa Love, a professor at BYU who “for seventeen years was the artistic director of Imagine Company, a touring theatre of adult professional actors performed specifically for children" shares that thematic elements must be portrayed in a very specific way. “If something is staged well,” she claims, “then the layers of understanding will be unwrapped for a child by him or herself.”  On the other hand, she adds that thematic portrayal must be “[Careful, responsible, and artful].  And never take the place of a parent.” All in all, for the child to gain the morals and messages of the play, clarity must be involved.