THEATRE REVIEW
FEBRUARY 2024 | Volume 236
Maki Yi, Craig Erickson, James Yi, Tom Pickett. Photo credit Chelsey Stuyt.
CHILD-ish
by Sunny Drake
Pacific Theatre, 1440 W. 12th Ave.
Feb. 9-Mar. 9
$15-$40
www.pacifictheatre.org or 604-731-5518
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The premise of this show, getting its premiere at Pacific Theatre, is that kids have an innocent native intelligence that, when left uncensored and relatively unstructured by adults, delivers language and behaviour, in the words of playwright Sunny Drake, “joyous and profound.”
Drake interviewed dozens of children, ages five to twelve, and at a certain point in the process allowed the children to interview him. He then recruited seven of the kids as collaborators, giving them some authorial responsibility for deciding what questions to ask, and some editorial responsibility for deciding what answers to include in the script.
CHILD-ish replicates these processes using adult actors. Sara Vickruck plays Drake and explains to the audience the dynamic of each section. Multiple children are played by A-list actors Craig Erickson, Tasha Faye Evans, Tom Pickett, James Yi, and Maki Yi. Lois Anderson directs.
The actors were instructed not to try to act like kids but to speak the dialogue in their own adult voices. And for the first half-hour or so of this 75-minute show, the lines are often funny and offbeat, in the ways you might expect kids’-eye views of the world to reflect. We know that Kids Say the Darndest Things. In fact, since 1959 there have been TV shows of that title that do pretty much what CHILD-ish does.
Where this play differs is in its issues-oriented attempt to be progressive, if not profound. Although the kids talk a lot about unicorns, they also take on racism and sexism, grandparents in nursing homes, consent, suicide, and climate change. They have, at least in the edited version that is the script, intelligent and often delightful discussions of these topics. The actors are all very fine, letting the kids’ voices come through unfiltered, with excellent timing and deadpan comic delivery.
The audience involvement segments fall very flat, and the conclusion, a kind of kids’ manifesto if they ruled the world, feels like a late 1960s love-in. Except that the audience is more or less compelled to accept and literally speak the kids’ words. “Why don’t adults play more” is one of their themes, so hey, we better all do the chicken dance.
This show is, of course, a critics’ trap. Who wants to be the only adult in the room, churlish and cynical, when you can be childish. Guess I have to raise my hand here. Despite some lovely moments, without a plot or characters and not much in the way of original ideas, CHILD-ish doesn’t add up to a fully satisfying evening of theatre.
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