For many years, children’s theater was seen as a teaching tool to hammer home messages about how good little children should live their lives.
For quite some time now, however, playwrights have been creating plays for young audiences that touch their spirit, rather than using heavy-handed tactics to strengthen their moral fiber.
So it’s surprising that the young, creative members of Emanon Theatre would dust off Aesop’s fables, which may still make good classroom lessons, but not necessarily dynamic theater.
It turns out, though, that director Lisa Bany doesn’t really have any grandiose ulterior educational motives in mind.
The point here is to tickle the funnybone, and the fables are mainly a pretext to create some funny, farcical comedy sketches.
The four actors, dressed in jeans and bright-colored tops, play the roles of children pretending to be characters in the fables.
They manage to capture the kind of off-the-wall spontaneity and ingenuity of kids putting on a play in their own back yard.
Since these are contemporary kids, they, of course, include references to the world they know in their versions of the fables.
The show begins with the fable “The Three Bulls,” which immediately creates a misunderstanding. The actors who are supposed to play the animals assume this is a story about a well-known basketball team.
Not to worry, though. They eventually get it right and get the laughs they were looking for.
Members of the audience are called upon regularly to make appropriate noises to add to the goofiness, and they do so with gusto.
The staging of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is the most frantic of the seven fables presented in the show, since some of the actors play both the sheep and the townspeople who work at an imaginary Rube Goldberg-type chocolate-making machine.
After the actors take their bows, members of the audience get to come up on stage and re-enact the story of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” and play some other theater games.
The moral of the show seems to be that sometimes kids-and adults-just like to have silly fun.
`AESOP’S FABLES’
An original version developed by the Emanon Theatre Company and directed by Lisa Bany. At the Halsted Theatre Center, 2700 N. Halsted St., at 12:30 p.m. Saturdays through April 24. For all ages. Running time: Tickets are $8 for adults and $5 for children. Phone: 312-348-0110.
