The cast of "Lion Tales," with a peppy Greenberg in the front. In the show, she plays the Mouse. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Red Lion looked out across the jungle that had materialized around him, eyes squeezing open and shut and then open again. Already, it had been a rough morning: lunch was nowhere to be found, and he was getting hangry. His siblings, Blue Lion and Yellow Lion, seemed distracted, their minds wandering nearly as much as a little mouse in their midst. Now, he shook his mane back and forth, unable to rid himself of an itch that crawled from one hair to the next. A tortoise looked on in surprise.
“Ah, dios!” the lion cried, his head jerking to one side, then to the other. He worked a paw through his mane. “Fleas?!”
So unfolds Lion Tales, a new work of devised children’s theater from students and professors at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) and staff at the Shubert Theatre in downtown New Haven. Written with New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) students in mind, the show is part of the theater’s mission to expand its educational programming across the city, from library workshops to performances inside elementary schools. In turn, it’s also become a way for college students to think differently about their youngest patrons, from language access to audience engagement.
SCSU’s actors, a troupe that has grown out of a formal practicum in children's theatre called Theater 395, will debut the show next month, in a touring production at Bishop Woods Elementary School, Hill Central School, and Barack H. Obama University Magnet School (BOMUS). It builds on a foundation Shubert staff laid in the fall, when Education Programs Manager Tracy Stratton and Education and Engagement Director Kelly Wuzzardo began with classes inside those three schools designed to introduce students to the performing arts.
Ultimately, educators at the Shubert hope to reach all of New Haven’s schools, over a dozen of which are focused on early childhood and elementary education. The project is part of a $1.2 million gift that the Shubert received last year from the tech company ASML, specifically to grow its footprint beyond student shows at the theater.
“We’re just excited to bring the arts into the schools,” said SCSU senior Dahlia Greenberg, who plays a musically-inclined mouse whose rendition of “Baby Shark,” delivered in a chipper hum, is outmatched only by her sharp wit. “It’s a really good feeling.”
She remembered seeing a student performance years ago, when she was still a student in elementary school. It was the moment she realized that she wanted to do theater. “Now we are that for them.”
Kira Kelly as Dr. Tortoise, Eddie Santiago as the Red Lion and Malachy Jackson as Monkey.
It’s been a labor of love, she and several of her peers added. When the Shubert kicked off the project last year, staff built a bridge between the theater and SCSU, first through Department Chair Mike Skinner and more recently with Professor Stephanie Eiss, who is also the director of education and outreach for Shakespeare on the Sound. This semester, Eiss worked with students to write the play over several weeks, knitting together references that ranged from the popular children’s show “Tinga Tales” to Aesop’s fable of the Lion and the Mouse.
“One of the things we talked about was, ‘What skills exist in the room?’” Eiss remembered of the writing process.
It turned out there were many: senior Kira Kelly, who plays Dr. Tortoise with the poise of a U.N. negotiator, has a younger sister in daycare, and brings some big Ms. Frizzle energy to the role (“I just love making kids happy,” she said with a sweet smile, flexing her feet in a bright, pin-festooned pair of Crocs). Reina McDermott, a junior who plays the Yellow Lion, has worked in child care since she was in high school, and now is majoring in early childhood education.
Dakota Wilette, who stage manages the show, knows American Sign Language (ASL), and began playing with words like “lunch” in the script. Malachy Jackson, who took the lead in writing with a few of his peers, remembered the delight in which he’d watched episodes of “Tinga Tales,” and did some digging into the African folk tales that inspired them. In the finished script, he plays Monkey, who cautiously befriends, cares for, and then outwits the Red Lion.
Stephanie Eiss and Tracy Stratton, who have helped steer this chapter of the Shubert-SCSU collaboration.
When the script was finished, it wove in all of those things—and more, with an eye toward New Haven’s diverse and polyphonic student populations. Edward Santiago Jr., a freshman who grew up in West Haven (he was actually one of Stratton’s theater students in a previous life), noted how important it was to him to fold Spanish into the show. “I really wanted to make sure that with Spanish, it was something kids would hear at home,” he said, nodding to his own Puerto Rican heritage.
As he knitted it into the script, “that effort to make it seem relaxed and not shoehorned in” took time, he added—and was totally worth it. In real time, that language is a kind of invitation: it’s familiar territory for students, many of whom are still very young and not native English speakers (in this first round of programming from the Shubert, students are between kindergarten and second grade).
As the cast stood for a scripted reading earlier this month, all of that hard work came vibrantly to life, one character and storyline at a time. As Wilette read the cast in with the stage directions, a landscape materialized, part-jungle, with lush green trees and a thick canopy below, part countryside, where characters like Lamb (Charitee Cecil) and Mouse (Greenberg) could roam freely for days. It was a meeting of different worlds—just like the New Haven Public Schools seek to be.
At stage left, Red Lion (Santiago) and Dr. Tortoise were locked in a battle of wills. Red Lion, who looked out into the audience with fierce, glimmering eyes, had begun to suffer under the weight of his own hunger. Now there was an itch he couldn’t shake. Tortoise, who never lost her cool, was trying to convince him to work with Monkey (Jackson). Taking a beat, she turned toward him, glasses framing her face in a way that felt particularly erudite. Surely, in some classroom in New Haven, some version of this same exchange was taking place.
“Monkey is a member of our community,” Tortoise pushed gently, and it was easy to see Kelly with her younger sister, mediating arguments that came up over imaginary tea parties and bedtime book choices. As Wilette narrated, Santiago mimed walking out into the audience, which he plans to do at school performances, with a prescription for Monkey to pick out his fleas.
If a listener closed their eyes, it was possible to see the performance unfolding at Bishop Woods or Hill Central or BOMUS, the cafeterias filled with students in crisp blue polos, bright fleece and cotton sweatshirts and pint-sized slacks, these young audiences leaning into this wild world. With Wilette narrating, Red Lion tasked an imaginary member of the audience with taking the script for flea removal and finding Monkey—the kind of participation meant to keep kids engaged, because it makes them feel helpful.
Tay’von Martin as Blue Lion. After a read-through, he said that watching a performance of the Three Little Pigs when he was growing up in Bridgeport was part of his inspiration to do theater.
They were just getting started. As Monkey, Jackson mimed picking invisible fleas from Santiago’s mane, his hands brisk and agile as they sliced through the air. Moments later, Red Lion was trying to trick Monkey and McCaw (Jay Jones) into becoming part of his midday meal, with a jumble of Spanglish that got a few laughs from the audience. “Monkey! McCaw! Donde va?!” he asked. An Hmmm came from the left side of the room. “Ayúdame ahora!”
He paused, locked eyes with the audience, and gave the ASL sign for “lunch.” Because it looks like the sign for “Lesbian,” students later acknowledged, they are considering changing it simply to the sign for “more” or “food,” both of which kids are more likely to recognize.
The scene shifted, and suddenly Red Lion and his sleepy siblings (McDermott as Yellow Lion and Tay’von Martin as Blue Lion) were watching Lamb (Cecil) with bated breath, arguing over whether and how to share her as a lunch course. Cecil, ever the optimist, proposed doing a 50-50 split, aware of the roar-worthy discord bubbling just under the surface.
As the lions began to argue—“Es ti cuerpa que non compartas?!” and then, a beat later, “¡Levantate!”—Cecil-as-Lamb began to tiptoe away in the stage directions. A few more giggles rose from the audience. So too moments later, as Mouse (Greenberg) entered the scene, humming “Baby Shark” with a cheeriness worthy of a fifth birthday party. Minutes later, she would become the day’s hero, saving the lions from a trap with enough time for a bilingual “six-seven” joke before the end of the show.
When students had finished minutes later, the room came alive with applause, hands floating up as Eiss asked for questions and feedback from the audience. Around the actors, the Kendall Drama Lab felt surprisingly bare after performances of Emma Hill’s A Skin of Veils and Sanaz Toosi’s English over the last few months—and yet, never too quiet. Students were world-building all by themselves.
“Why lions by color?” asked Wuzzardo, a veteran educator who has transformed programming at the Shubert during her tenure there.
“We wanted something that was non-gender-conforming,” Wilette explained—in part so the show could outlive its original cast. Greenberg, piping up from behind a music stand at stage right, added that “we wanted things to be accessible enough” for students to understand across languages, and color-coded animals felt like a starting point. Even in a test run, students wore t-shirts affiliated with their character’s color—green for the tortoise, yellow for the Yellow Lion, and so forth.
Wuzzardo came back to the script, in which the lions are furiously hungry, but never get the chance to eat. “Do we need to feed the lions at the end? Maybe we give the lions some Scooby Snacks?”
She took a beat as students soaked it in. “A lot of these kids, food insecurity is a thing.”
“Maybe if each of the animals brought in something that they eat?” Greenberg ventured.
As students wrapped up, many said they are excited to bring the performance into schools, because already they see in these students a version of their baby-faced, doe-eyed younger selves. Martin, who grew up in Bridgeport, remembered seeing a performance of the Three Little Pigs in elementary school when he was a kid, and realizing it was what he wanted to be doing.
“I loved those stories,” he said. “And I love working with kids.”