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Established in 1965, the Children's Theatre Company (CTC) of Minneapolis earned its reputation as the flagship theater for young people in this country by staging plays that both entertained and challenged children and their families. Around the age of twelve, however, young people tended to stop coming to CTC, perceiving that they had outgrown what the theater could offer them.In an effort to reach out to and engage these young people, the CTC began to commission and produce plays aimed at a twelve- to eighteen-year-old audience, focusing on the complexities, idiosyncrasies, and epic dilemmas in the lives of young people. Fierce and True collects four of these critically acclaimed plays: Anon(ymous) by Naomi Iizuka, The Lost Boys of Sudan by Lonnie Carter, Five Fingers of Funk by Will Power, and Prom by Whit MacLaughlin and New Paradise Laboratories.Professional, full-length works not about teens so much as they are written for them. Ambitious, surprising, and complex, these plays speak directly to teens without pandering to them; they engage, challenge, and respect teenage minds. Diverse and utterly unique, these playwrights are bound together by the excellence of their craft and the power of their storytelling. Fierce and True both redefines the field of theater for young people and provides an invaluable resource for theater professionals, educators, and the teens they serve.

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The world of young people in the United States today is exhilaratingly global, enriched by the influences of many various cultures. With that, however, comes the need for children to retain confidence in their own heritage while empathizing with people who might seem very different from them. The protagonists of these four plays—written for the world-renowned Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis—strive to achieve that balance with determination, love, and humor. The richness and relevance of these plays lie in their complex portraits of diversity and cultural collision. In Snapshot Silhouette, Somali-born Najma and African American Tay C share the same skin color but struggle to understand each other. The heroine of Brooklyn Bridge must forge new connections with her Puerto Rican and West Indian neighbors while maintaining her connection to her Russian mother. In Esperanza Rising, Mexican immigrant farmworkers navigate complicated relationships with other Mexicans who are in the United States illegally. And in Average Family, the character who knows the most about the Dakota way of life is not a Native American but the daughter of a white family. A culturally plural society can separate people by perceived chasms of unfamiliarity and difference. But as the characters in these plays learn, there can also be bridges built to span those chasms and connect the two sides. The plays in The Face of America will serve as cultural bridges for young people everywhere.

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Young children love to explore their world through drama—characters, dialogue, story arcs, and props are all standard elements of a child’s play. It is no surprise then that professional theatre has long been regarded as a way to support children’s social-emotional, cognitive, and creative development. Increasingly, there is an international interest in theatre for very young audiences, and the Wall Street Journal reported on a “baby boom” in American theatre, with a marked upswing in the number of stage plays being written and produced for toddlers and preschoolers. Fueled by ongoing research into developmental psychology and theatre arts, the Children’s Theatre Company (CTC) of Minneapolis presents in this book four of its newly commissioned plays for preschoolers. CTC is widely recognized as the leading theatre for young people and families in North America; it received the 2003 Tony award for regional theatre, and Time magazine rated it the number one children’s theatre in the United States. These four plays encompass a broad range of styles and subjects: Bert and Ernie, Goodnight! is a musical about Bert and Ernie’s unlikely but true friendship, written by Barry Kornhauser and based on the original songs and scripts from Sesame Street. The Biggest Little House in the Forest is a toy-theatre play about a group of diverse animals trying to share a very tiny home, adapted by Rosanna Staffa from the book by Djemma Bider. The Cat’s Journey is a dazzling shadow-puppet play with a little girl who rides on a friendly cat, written by Fabrizio Montecchi. And Victoria Stewart’s Mercy Watson to the Rescue!, adapted from the Kate DiCamillo Mercy Watson series, is a comic romp featuring the inadvertent heroics of everyone’s favorite porcine wonder. While these plays are as different as they could be, they all help young children to develop a moral compass and critical-thinking skills—while also showing them the power of the theatre to amaze, delight, and inspire.

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