May 3, 2007

By Diane Chiddister

If you’re looking for a children’s theater company that produces only original work, you’ll find one in the Bay Area of California, and another in Manhattan. You might find one in a handful of other cities around the country as well — oh, and you’ll find one in Yellow Springs.

Most people in town know about YS Kids Playhouse, the organization that each summer for the past 12 years has performed two productions which star about 40 local children. But many may not know that, in the world of children’s theater, YSKP is considered unusually innovative.

“I know that people appreciate us here,” YSKP Artistic Director John Fleming said in a recent interview. “I’m not sure they know how special we are.”

According to Ohio Arts Council Program Coordinator Kim Turner, YSKP stands out for its use of original plays, which offers children an especially rich theatrical experience.

“Not only do kids get to be involved in the process of production, but they’re also involved in creating the play, seeing it from all angles and from the ground up,” Turner said in an interview this week. “It’s quite unique for a youth organization.”

This summer’s YSKP production will kick off this weekend with open auditions for this year’s first play, Sense and Sensibility. Auditions will take place Saturday, May 5, from noon to 3 p.m. at the Antioch Theater on Corry Street. All interested Miami Valley young people ages 8–18 are invited to audition, regardless of theater background or experience.

For the audition, children should prepare a two-minute song and a two-minute comic monologue from an original story or a play using movement.

Sense and Sensibility is a new multimedia musical about coming of age across cultures, according to Fleming. In a first for YSKP, the young actors in Yellow Springs will interact via video with young people from Chile, who Fleming filmed on a recent visit. The play, an adaptation of the Jane Austen novel, offers, according to Fleming “a fun and fascinating look at flirting, dating and manners on both sides of the border.”

Another first for YSKP this season is that participation for young people is no longer free. The organization will charge a participation fee of $230 for each young person in the show. While most children’s theater groups charge such fees — and most charge much more — YSKP has come to the practice with great reluctance, according to Fleming.

“I feel strongly that culture should not have a price. That’s why we haven’t changed our policy for 13 years,” Fleming said, adding that he repeatedly fought YSKP’s board of directors, which recommended the change. But year after year, YSKP came close to shutting down entirely due to unstable financing, Fleming said, and he finally had to consider that he was risking the viability of the organization in order to be true to his ideal.

“Now that the Center for the Arts looks like it’s going to happen, it seems a shame to have no YSKP,” he said. “We need to take extra measures to sustain the organization.”

YSKP will offer participants who can’t afford the fee partial or full scholarships, according to Fleming.

“We don’t want youth and families to stay away,” he said.

The group has been forced to charge fees due to a combination of fairly high costs and erratic funding sources, according to Fleming and YSKP Company Manager Lisa Hunt. Producing original plays with original music is more costly than staging traditional plays, and fees must be paid to the writers, musicians and artists who collaborate on each production. While these artists all work for far below scale, they do need to be paid something.

With all of the production costs added up, YSKP spends about $1,030 for each child who takes part in a production, according to Hunt, who said YSKP’s total summer budget runs about $50,000. Each child receives about 145 hours of theatrical experience, involving five weeks of rehearsals for about five hours a day.

During that time, the children learn a multitude of skills, including musical theater vocal training, movement and introductory to advanced theater skills. According to Fleming, rehearsal activities cover all five benchmark areas of the State of Ohio benchmark academic fine arts theater standards for grades three–12.

But children who take part in YSKP also gain other benefits as well, Fleming said, including being part of a team, learning problem-solving skills and receiving recognition in the village which enhances a child’s sense of personal pride and confidence.

“The seeds of what we do are far-reaching into the community beyond just doing a show,” Hunt said.

And YSKP seems to have contributed to some local young adults who have chosen theater as a profession, according to Fleming, who listed as examples YSKP veterans Andrew Beal, now a playwright, Martin Bakari, who studies voice at Boston University and Rose Blakelock, who studies theater tech at Boston University.

To keep costs down, YSKP administrators have done their best to run a lean organization, according to Fleming, who said that he and Hunt perform all the administrative roles for YSKP, including fund-raising, marketing, bookkeeping, evaluating and directing productions. Both are paid a part-time wage of about $20,000, he said, although they tend to work full-time, or more than full-time, hours.

YSKP receives about 60 percent of its funding from grants, but most grants require a 1:1 match. The organization’s share of the match must come from ticket sales, individual donations and parent donations, which organizers hoped would provide sufficient income. But those donations sometimes fall short, and the new participation fees would provide a stable funding base and make budgeting more predictable from year to year, Hunt said.

Currently, YSKP receives a small grant yearly from the Yellow Springs Community Council, which provides about 2 percent of the total budget. It does not receive any tax levy support. This year the group has also received an Ohio Arts Council grant of $4,400, or about 3 percent of total funding. It also received, for the second year in a row, a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment from the Arts.

But YSKP can not count on grants, Hunt said, and even if it could, the use of participation fees is considered by some funders to be a sustainable financial practice and would make YSKP more likely to receive outside funding.

Along with the new use of participation fees, YSKP administrators plan to work on long-term sustainable funding with an endowment fund campaign, which will kick off after this season, according to Hunt.

YSKP will present Sense and Sensibility June 28–July 8 at the Antioch Amphitheater. For the first time this year, YSKP will present a production in Springfield during the Springfield Arts Festival. That production, Around the World in 80 Days, will take place July 11–12 and 19–22 at Veteran’s Memorial Park in Springfield.

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com