The Play

Lots of children's theater is various adaptations of popular fairy tales and children's books often shared at home and in the classroom. Dragons Love Tacos is no different in this regard. Something special about our production is that we were able to take some liberties in the way we are sharing this story. Facilitator, Matthew R. Olsen, sat down with me so we could dive a little deeper into the process of bringing this story come to life!

Do you wanna start by speaking about your role and your relationship with that role to that role on this production?

Yeah. My role on this production is the director, or facilitator, of this production. I prefer to use the term facilitator. It’s not really what we see when we look at a poster of a show, but for me it makes more sense. The idea of guiding a process as opposed to determining or dictating a process. It’s more aligned with my work and how I work. What I think for a show like this, a show for kids, it gives me the freedom to facilitate a process that is imaginative, generative, creative, and explores the impulses of each of the people and aids me while I lead them in the way we tell the story.

When you started the process of Dragons Love Tacos, what was your initial impression of this book and the story?

My initial impression was that the book is short. There’s not a lot in the book as far as like what we take from for theater. Like text and complex plot lines; it’s pretty simple, pretty straight forward. And then when I got ahold of the actual script, it certainly expanded things from there, but again I think the script is simple in some ways. The advantage of that of course is that there is lots of flexibility as far as how we tell the story with the humans you have, with the bodies they have, with how they can tell story. And then probably my first impression is I have to find a way in for myself, and my way in was examining joy and imagination.

Building off of that a little bit, from that initial impression and thought where did you go, what first steps did you take? What was your initial concept? Where did that stem from? What did you want the play to centralize around? What is uniting all of these different design elements and actor relationships into one show?

For me this is boy’s world, the character of boy. It’s something that comes out of their experience. So they begin their play, they begin their world with a problem, something to solve, and they get frustrated, and they get stressed, and there’s anxiety in attempting to solve something. And the way in which they end up solving it, they…I think they go deeper into their imagination and they find they have these little attempts at solving it. Like ways of like “how do you take a break?” Personally, that resonates with me as a practitioner of theater and as an artist, and as somebody who has spent so much of my life absorbed in this world. Finding it hard to take breaks and how we step away from something so we can find a new way to look at a problem. That part resonates with me.

Something that came to me when I initially started looking at this: I was… I grew up really… I was really passionate about the muppets, I still am, I love Jim Henson. I was really passionate about Fred Rogers and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. I think that’s where my initial things came from is like this… Fred Rogers created this world where we come into his home and inside his home and go into a land of make belief and that shift is something I talked about with design too. Like how we can use that to shift us from a cold sort of like disciplined world and move into something that’s more expressive, expansive and there’s a lot more color. So we have characters who we see have lots of color, and it pulls from things that kids know. It’s like crayons, like base colors. Colors that we understand. Primary.

How has that initial concept evolved throughout the work that you’ve been doing in the rehearsal room and with the production team in building the world?

One thing that came up as we were talking was, like what makes this particular time in boys life difficult… like what are things that are difficult for young people. Not just school, but we don’t ever see the father figure, and… we were just talking a little bit about what if this world that boy is in right now is a new one. Like if they just moved to a new place, so he’s sort of isolated and his isolation exists, but also he has his best friend. His dog, Leroy… I have a dog, so I really like that… but like “what if that’s the world?” So we have incorporated now a ton of like empty, or full, cardboard boxes into the overall scenic design as a way to really stress what that might be like for a kid. So I think a little bit for us it's like sure there’s a bunch of boxes in the living room so we haven’t unpacked everything yet, but for him it might feel like a tower. Or it might feel like something that’s a little bit overwhelming. And so we wanted to focus on that world just a little bit to make that a part of the play.

I also really like paper. I like texture and this is a children’s book. It is illustrated. It is creative in that way, so using things that make sense in that world. Like the dog house that Leroy has is covered in cardboard as if it were made of cardboard boxes that boy has found a way to utilize all this stuff that’s around. Things that feel like they don’t mean much. like an empty box that can become an entire world if allowed to explore. So some of it was a part of things that came up that we didn’t initially think about, but developed as we went. And I think so too, just breaking this line between fantasy and reality. Just because it’s imagined doesn’t mean it's not real. If it’s real for boy, and it’s real for boy’s experience then it solves something for them.

So you have a background in children’s theater. How has that experience helped or altered the way you have approached this project? Here in a college where the actors you are working with don’t necessarily have that experience.

Most of my work in most of my journey has been serious, dark, complicated. I played villains; that’s been a lot of my experience. I still did some of that, even in children’s theater. That was kind of my trajectory, Shakespeare that’s always been like my passion, and then when the pandemic hit I… the first thing I really started doing outside of it was children’s theater, was stuff for kids. I did a couple of productions of It’s A Wonderful Life and some other shows that were specifically geared to very very young… like theater for the very young.

And I think for myself I needed it. I’m not gonna say more than the kids needed it, but I needed the escape. I needed the joy. I needed the return to imagination, the return to play, the return to clown and silliness and generally speaking, just being me. I needed that space. And the response of a room full of kids, and seeing their response; their joy that I witnessed changed how I was working. It changed how I saw the work, it changed how I saw the value of my own work. And allowed me to make some things that were fun and irreverent and silly and not just because they needed it but because I needed it.

I think the other thing that is probably good is that working with kids you learn a lot about how they process. They’re great audience members. They’ll tell you if they don’t believe you; they know if something feels genuine. I think adult audiences are trained to experience something in a specific way, but kids don’t have that filter, and that filter is sometimes wild and can be intimidating. But they are very smart and they deserve to have stories for them.

In the conversations we have had throughout the process, you’ve talked a lot about wanting or needing it to start from a place of joy and childlike play. Why is that so important in a process like this?

I think actually it’s important in every process. I’m not sure I always thought that, but I think that now. But in this kind of process, we have to be able to step back. Kids, like I said, don’t have a filter in the same way and I think it also means that they lack fear. And I think as actors, we are constantly trying to get back to that space. That space of like “my insecurities aren’t in the way, there’s nothing that can stop me, like I can become anything because I said so, like it just becomes true.”

In this kind of process, I think I have asked everybody to explore that part of themselves. To go back in time a little bit and remember maybe why we started doing this. I think it’s easy to get lost in the artistry. It's easy to get lost in the “what’s next.” And kids are so good at being in the right now. And joy, imagination, absurdity, silliness, being able to laugh at yourself… I think that is essential to this kind of work. If we can put ourselves in their mindset, I think we can tell a story that feels a little bit more like them and their world.

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