Get wild! Audience part of the show at MTYP opening production By: Conrad Sweatman Posted: 4:50 PM CDT Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024 Last Modified: 12:46 PM CDT Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024 Updates

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This article was published 15/10/2024 (658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While some dramatic adaptations of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are have been criticized for being too scary, Presentation House Theatre’s celebrated travelling production has a workaround: it gives the children and families in the audience masks and asks them to play the role of the Wild Things.

“Everyone becomes their own Wild Thing,” says show director and creator Kim Selody from his hometown of Vancouver. “Although I see the other Wild Things, I’m not afraid because I’m one of them.”

Manitoba Theatre for Young People kicks off its 2024-25 season Friday with Where the Wild Things Are, starring Victor Mariano and Linda A. Carlson.

“Our relationship to children tends to be getting them to do the things we want,” says MTYP artistic director Pablo Felices-Luna. “Within the structure of this guided play experience, there is an opportunity to go wild, something children rarely get to do.”

You know the original story: mischievous Max is sent to bed by his mom, but escapes to an exotic jungle of his imagination’s making. There he encounters teeth-gnashing creatures even wilder than him.

After the rumpus — where he experiences a child’s paradise of tree-climbing, piggybacks and howling to the moon — Max must decide to stay and rule the Wild Things or go home.

As well as troubling some critics for being too spooky for kids, Sendak’s original has been picked over by English profs with just about every theoretical tool (Freudian, post-colonial, etc.) within reach. Sendak’s apparent rebuttal: “Children are honest, brave and want to know the truth. They are perhaps the only sane audience left.”

Today, the layered story — most directly about a child’s struggle to control anger and fear — is one of the most popular children’s books of all time, and has inspired movies, songs, an opera, a Simpsons spoof and, of course, a play.

That play, adapted around 23 years ago by Selody and his colleagues, had Sendak’s personal blessing. It’s also an institution in its own right, boasting a history of around 1,000 performances all over the world.

Selody credits the play’s interactive style — and MTYP’s founder Leslee Silverman’s helping hand — for this success and longevity.

“I would love to say it was my idea, but it wasn’t,” he says.

Carol Heleas of Glasgow’s TAG theatre had experimented with a similar concept in 2000, and gave Selody the OK to expand on it. But the theatre director still needed permission from the famous author to adapt his highly valuable IP. Selody admits it took some convincing.

“Leslee Silverman had a really important role to play in things. Mr. Sendak was a theatre rat, and I think it’s one of the reasons we were able to do it for basically no royalties,” says Selody.

Selody’s adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are had its first production at MTYP, and has since toured the United States, Japan and Canada.

Interestingly, Sendak’s agent asked Selody to suspend performances for a few years while Warner Bros. produced a version of the book for the big screen. According to Selody, Sendak was unhappy with much of the film’s creative development. The US$100-million movie was met with middling reviews, with many critics complaining it was simply too dark for kids.

Selody says that Heleas’s novel idea of having the audience play the Wild Things avoids most of the challenges of bringing live drama’s intensity to a story that already deals with complex emotional issues.

“I think of Marshall McLuhan: the medium is a message. The book’s themes — the deep ideas we long for — are most conducive to theatre, and a certain kind of theatre,” he says.

With the play’s guided structure, the children become actors, rather than passive witnesses, as they help the story’s protagonist Max relive his topsy-turvy year with the Wild Things.

“And it’s not just the scariness. It’s also the awe, the wonder, and the mystery,” Selody says.

And now, let the wild rumpus start!

conrad.sweatman@freepress.mb.ca

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