Theater Education for Disadvantaged Students

Community support for Oregon Children's Theatre helps to fund initiatives that cannot be underwritten by ticket sales or program fees alone. This includes our extensive outreach and education programs as well as our commitment to creating and premiering new works for young audiences. Your support also allows us to give young people access to great, memorable, and inspiring experiences. We believe that the art of theater has the power to change lives.

Our first production of the 2014-2014 season, Ivy + Bean, was a hit with both our school and public audiences and was a fitting start to what we are confident will be a great season.  We are now in rehearsal for our January production, Skippyjon Jones. OCT has co-commissioned this new script with our colleagues at Dallas Children's Theatre, and we've been working with the writers to incorporate Spanish language into the script to make it accessible and relevant to the many students in our audiences whose families speak Spanish at home. 

We are now refining the script and stage design for our world premiere of Timmy Failure: Mistakes were Made. We were delighted to secure the rights to adapt this fun book by Stephan Pastis (the creator of the popular comic strip, Pearls before Swine) -- the story of a clueless, comically self-confident boy who fancies himself to be a world-class detective. To write the script, we commissioned Finegan Kruckemeyer, a young Australian playwright who has been making waves internationally with an innovative approach to storytelling that captivates both young and adult audience members.When an interviewer asked Finegan why it was important to write for children, his response fit OCT’s philosophy perfectly:

“Because they deserve to see work which acknowledges them as astute audience members outside the plays, and worthy subjects within. Because they’re entitled to sit in a theatre and invest and reflect and laugh and challenge and agree and disagree. Because they’re rarely given the opportunity to create work themselves which will be produced, so we have an obligation to either change that or to write works with their interests (artistic, not didactic) at heart. Because it’s a demographic that really appreciates story and makes you better at it.”

Oregon Children's Theatre strives to make its performances and programming accessible to as broad an audience as possible, particularly to students and teachers from economically disadvantaged schools. Last year, 7,863 students and teachers received free tickets and 1,328 received reduced price tickets, enabling field trip opportunities that would not have been possible otherwise. To further our goal of encouraging reading and literacy, we are launching an annual initiative to provide a combination of books and tickets to students in conjunction with at least one production each year. Each $10 gift to this program will provide a ticket to an OCT show and a copy of the book from which the play is adapted to take home.

Our respect for the intelligence and curiosity of young people is also reflected in our vision of producing work that is relevant and challenging for teen audiences. This year, our Young Professionals Company will produce columbinus, a powerful and disturbing play sparked by the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. The play probes the psychological warfare of alienation, hostility and social pressure that goes on in high schools across America. OCT’s Young Professionals (YP) Company is comprised of 60 teens who have been accepted into a year-long mentoring and training program. This was the first season for which we empowered the teens to select their three-show season. The group overwhelmingly voted for columbinus based on the power of its message as well as the artistic challenges of stripped-down, ensemble-based theater. Taking risks with provocative works such as this is a key element of our vision.