The Return of PLAY IN A DAY, Thursday, Dec. 27 at Neverending Books

We did 15 of these in a year’s span, then took a few months off. Now that it’s school vacation, it’s time to bring back Play in a Day, my singular children’s theater project.

I began doing Play in a Day at the behest of my daughters Mabel and Sally, with the strong and constant encouragement of Neverending Books stalwarts Roger Uihlein, Shula Weinstein and their son Avi.

The intention was to have fun and actually produce plays and not do all the warm-ups and memorizing and production-quality stuff which can bog down the process.

Here’s how it works:

Kids show up. (It’s been any number from three to over 20, with eight or ten the average.)

I size them up and decide which great dramatic work from the annals of classic world theater we might be able to pull off in an afternoon. I explain the play to them, then we quickly brainstorm our way through it and assign the roles.

Less than three hours later, we have a five- or ten-minute approximation of the play. When the parents turn up to pick up their kids, they see the play. (Parents are also welcome to stay and help, but we don’t insist.)

We’ve staged variations on works by Aristophanes, Chekhov, Gogol, Calderon and many others. There’s a designated Play in a Day page on this site, featuring videos of most of our productions, here.

Above is a couple of minutes of rehearsal from the January presentation of Augustin Daly’s famous melodrama Under the Gaslight.

As you can tell, the point is to have fun above all else, and let the kids be kids.

Play in a Day

Thursday, Dec. 27 from 2 to 5:15 p.m.

at Neverending Books, 810 State St., New Haven.

Fee for the whole afternoon is $5 per child.

For details, contact Christopher Arnott at chris@scribblers.us