Children’s theatre takes stage

Now in its 22nd year, the Children’s Summer Theatre Workshop is once again providing local kids with a soup-to-nuts understanding of how to stage a play.

Founded in the 1990s by former Bowlus executive director Susan Raines, the tacit mission of CSTW is to instill in the community’s youngest members a love of the performing arts and the confidence to know that, however miniature their frames — we’re looking at you third-graders — there’s a place for them onstage.

But the group’s first imperative, said John Higginbotham, CSTW’s current creative director, is even simpler than that, although no less essential. “At our big meeting, I told our CSTW workers” — volunteers from the theatrical glitterati at Iola High School — “that our goals involve a couple of things: we hope the kids will fall in love with the arts, but we are really here for them to have fun.”

To judge by the moods on display at a recent rehearsal, the kids — singing kids, dancing kids, miming kids, kids faking British accents, kids in elaborate displays of slow-motion collapse, kids with smiles stretched ear to ear — well, in a word, the kids are definitely having fun.

THE CULMINATION of the two-week workshop is a full-scale, open-to-the-public stage production this Saturday at 9 a.m. in the Bowlus auditorium.

CSTW sessions are divided between elementary-age students and middle schoolers. Each group will stage its own Saturday production based on an original script, which every young member of CSTW had at least a small part in devising.

The youngest actors will stage a play they’re calling “Creatures Special Powers Workshop: An Anesthetic Mystery.” “CSPW” involves a turtle named Myrtle, who finds new and elaborate ways of exacting innocent forms of revenge on her erstwhile tormentors.

The group opted for an “anesthetic mystery” — as opposed to a “murder mystery” — to avoid the grimmer implications of the more traditional sub genre. No character ever fully succumbs in this light-hearted comedy; at most, they only ever drift off for a bit before, eventually, swimming back to the light.

The middle school group is staging an anesthetic mystery of its own, “Kitchen Crossover,” about a reality TV cooking show where at least one of the featured dishes contains an ingredient capable of causing its nosher to vanish.

Higginbotham has added a new category this year, for high schoolers. “CSTW: Improv” is an intensive four-day workshop intended to arm teenage actors with the sprightly theatrical skills necessary for performing off the cuff. The high school improv show will also take the stage Saturday morning.

It would be hard to find a CSTW director more suited to the task than Higginbotham. As the assistant technical director at the Bowlus Center, Higginbotham knows exactly how to rotate the gears — lighting, sound, curtains, props — to bring a stage to life. And as an Iola native with his own lifelong passion for acting, he has a feeling for what it means to stand amid that column of light and look out for the first time on a crowd of waiting faces.

“The first week of CSTW it’s always fun to see these kids come out of their shells,” said Higginbotham. “And then all of a sudden, by that second week, maybe they’re a little nervous still, but now they’re up there, on stage, and you see it getting easier for them all the time.”

Higginbotham, who says he feels like he was “raised in the Bowlus” — and who still recalls the first show he ever saw at the fine arts center, a production of “Oliver!” starring Susan Raines — heaps plenty of credit for CSWT’s success on the heads of the Bowlus’s technical director and facilities manager, Jeff Jordan, and Iola High School drama instructor, Regina Christenson, who Higginbotham calls his “right-hand lady” in this latest endeavor.

NOW IN its sixth decade, the Bowlus Fine Arts Center is entering into a new season of change. The center recently unveiled a gleaming new plaza addition on the building’s east side. Its board is right now contemplating a replacement for former executive director Susan Raines. And the local school district, whose members act as trustees of the Bowlus, decided in March, after 50 years, to stop holding arts classes in the center.

But for more than two decades, the Children’s Summer Theatre Workshop has been chugging along, every summer, with no signs of slowing down, and it’s to do with the people, like Higginbotham and Jordan and Christenson, who organize its myriad details every year, the high schoolers who dedicate a portion of their summers to volunteering, the children who brave stage fright in pursuit of a new experience. And, of course, the community, which every summer makes the decision to support it. To that end, CSTW is inviting the general public to attend the Saturday morning show. It begins at 9 a.m. and won’t last long past 10. And it’s free.