Center Stage Theater Crowd Sources Animal Farm

Later this spring, a group of Boulder County kids will create their own version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm play. This is a project of Center Stage, which is a local children’s theater organization.

The process will be split up into three phases, the first of which being a series of ten workshops over the course of ten thursdays at the Louisville Center Stage facility, starting April 18. For two hours each day, the children will be developing their characters as well as the central plot-line, with a focus being placed on the children using their own past experiences to shape the play. Once the script is done, rehearsals will begin.

While based on Animal Farm, the play most likely won’t mirror the original work very closely, only keeping the key themes and underlying messages and allowing the kids free reign on all other subjects.

Mathew Klickstein with Center Stage will be working with the kids directly, and he believes that the political themes and messages of Animal Farm won’t be challenging for the children to understand.

“For one, I know that our children now are much more aware of what’s going on in society, they are much more locked in to what’s going on in the media, and I think that they have a much better understanding of happening in the political spectrum just because it’s so ubiquitous now, they can’t help it. While they’re playing their video games and their phones or whatever it might be there are ads coming in and notifications and what not, so I think children now are much more aware than they might have been in earlier generations, so I think they will very easily understand some of the concepts that we will be talking about and discussing.”

Performances of the play will happen throughout Boulder in September. More information, including applications to get into the play, can be found on the Center Stage Theater Company website.

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