Theater : Children’s Plays Aren’t Child’s Play : Many well-known playwrights are tackling youth theater for the first time, attracted by the challenge of keeping things simple.

Controversial verbal acrobat Mac Wellman has irked conservatives and the religious right with his political satires, including a 1991 parody of the National Endowment for the Arts pornography vs. art brouhaha. Allan Havis (“Morocco,” “Haut Gout”) once described his own theatrical explorations of the American ethos as “dark, Pinteresque, political and cryptic.” Master wordsmith Eric Overmyer (“On the Verge: The Geography of Yearning”) is acclaimed for his creation of verdant, dense universes of the mind.

Hardly child’s play. Yet all three respected playwrights, and others of note in both adult and youth theater--Tina Howe, Jim Leonard, Len Jenkin, Steven Dietz, Mark Medoff, Constance Congdon, Howard Korder, to name a few--have just that in common.

Each has written work for children, part of a significant trend in children’s theater: a concentrated effort by those in the field to raise the level of critical discourse by commissioning work from playwrights of stature.

In the process, playwrights are challenging an art form that has languished at the bottom rung of respectability in this country for most of its nearly 100 years of existence.

The challenge is not necessarily one-sided.

Overmyer’s first children’s play was produced in 1994 by the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, through a commission funded by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund’s “New Generation Play Project.” He’s not happy with his “novice try,” “Duke Kahanamoku vs. the Surfnappers,” based on the life of a legendary Hawaiian surfer.

Known for his boundary-stretching language, Overmyer muses that he “underestimated” young audiences. “I did hold back . . . maybe the language was too simple and I could have taken more chances with it. I felt constrained, and that was self-imposed.”

Overmyer is now determined to make another attempt--”I’d like to crack the form”--with an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp.” “I think I’ll do it anyway, even if no one solicits it.”

Wellman’s musical play, “tigertigertiger,” a collaboration with composer Michael Roth, came out of Utah’s Sundance Children’s Theatre in 1994, although Wellman said he has viewed children’s theater “with some suspicion.”

“When you work with children, they don’t talk back, so you can do what you want,” he said. “It’s a perfect place for very mainstream, conventional mediocre work that will not be questioned.”

The man who once declared that “theater should be seedy, sexy and discreditable,” doesn’t apply those criteria to children’s theater. However, “the idea of making theater that’s totally determined by high-minded adults” doesn’t interest him, either.

His “tigertigertiger” went from Sundance to the Kennedy Center’s prestigious “New Visions/New Voices” youth play development program in June. Not tame stuff, it’s about tiger hunts in New York City, at White Sands missile base and on the moon, contains a male/female alter ego surprise and makes references to tiger poaching in Southeast Asia.

“I was trying, with Michael Roth, to create something that toddlers could appreciate, with big beautiful animals that roar,” Wellman explained, “and at the upper end have older kids dealing with conceptions of ethics and morality and what happens if you shoot something that’s living.”

It was all too much for one initially interested “little theater,” which rejected the play “because it has guns in it and shooting.”

Wellman believes he has “a lot to learn,” but isn’t sure “there’s a place for me in American children’s theater, since it seems to me even more corporate and high-minded and timid than regular American theater.”

Internationally recognized writer and educator Suzan Zeder, one of the nation’s leading youth theater playwrights, says it takes “courageous theaters” to resist what she calls “the twin tyrannies of time and title: The play must run an hour because that’s convenient for the buses, and the play must be a title everybody has heard of, so parents and sponsors will sign up for it. Those twin tyrannies exert a limiting influence on the field.”

Zeder considers Wellman “a natural for kids.” There are “preconceptions in quote, unquote, adult theater--stylistic elements, uses of time and space, the way you work with language--that suddenly break down when you work with young people. Children love alternative forms and alternative vocabularies of the stage.”

It’s a given that the infusion of new blood in youth theater literature is due partly to the fact that many veterans of the adult theater are now parents of young children. Explains Jim Leonard, playwright, story editor on ABC-TV’s “Marshal” and father of two: “We’re interested in something good for our kids to see.”

Most significant, however, substantial new play development programs are growing nationally, spurred by professional children’s theater’s hunger for quality. That hunger was the hot topic of the “One Theatre World” symposium at Seattle’s International Children’s Theatre Festival in May, hosted by ASSITEJ/USA, part of the venerable International Assn. of Theatre for Children and Young People.

Within the last five years, dozens of new plays have been developed by Sundance, the Kennedy Center, at universities and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and especially the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, the largest private funder of the arts in the U.S., for its “New Generation Play Project” and “New Works for Young Audiences” programs.

With audience development as its primary mission, the Fund began by sponsoring a four-year “New Generation Play Project” in 1990 with a $250,000 grant to a consortium of prominent youth theaters--Honolulu Theatre for Youth, Seattle Children’s Theatre, Louisville Children’s Theatre and the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis--for new work. There was one major stipulation, said Fund program associate Joy-Marie Abulokwe.

“They had to engage an artist of the highest caliber . . . for work that would, hopefully, live beyond that theater.”

That held for the fund’s $2-million “New Works for Young Audiences” pilot program instituted in 1993 for the creation and production of quality work at several regional theaters.

“What the Fund was able to do was not just to attract those who had not previously written for children,” Zeder said, “it elevated the importance of children’s theater for everyone.

“I’ve been writing about young people for over 20 years and now when we’re talking commission fees, we’re talking reasonable figures.” That “giant step toward parity . . . says to actors, designers, directors that this is worthy of the best you can do.

“But I don’t think you’ll get interesting, significant art by throwing money at it,” Zeder stressed. “You will if artists who never thought about this area find that it nourishes their own aesthetic and creative imaginations.”

Steven Dietz (“God’s Country”) found just that when he was commissioned to write “The Rememberer,” based on the memoirs of a Native American woman, for the Seattle Children’s Theatre Company’s 1993-94 season.

“The things that fundamentally keep me writing plays are structure and language,” he said, “and to write for young people forces you to be at the top of your game in both of those things.”

Ready for a second go is Allan Havis, whose first play for Sundance in 1991, an adaptation of a children’s book he wrote in 1979, “Albert the Astronomer,” didn’t make the transition easily and was not further developed.

Writing for children, he said, “evokes different modes of expression. In some ways it can help a serious writer free up from overly intellectualizing or overly structuralizing a complex canvas.”

Jim Leonard’s collaboration with Barry Lopez on an adaptation of Lopez’s acclaimed children’s book, “Crow and Weasel,” at Sundance in 1991, went on to the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis, Indiana Repertory and Arizona State University. It will return to Sundance on Friday to become its first family mainstage show.

Leonard doesn’t entirely agree that the shift in thinking about children’s theater is due to the “inclusion of ‘serious playwrights.’ I think that’s certainly been kind of a swift kick in the pants and something that gets noticed. But there are some really fine writers of children’s theater who have been frustrated by the fact they’ve been relegated to fairy tales for a long time.”

Gary Gisselman, associate artistic director of the esteemed Minneapolis company, welcomes the involvement of writers such as Overmyer, Leonard and Dietz, who have “exactly the kind of mind we would like to see writing for children’s theater,” but hopes the focus remains on creating “subject matter, style and form that is not in any way reductive.

“When you see something that’s truly fascinating, or mysterious,” adults express concern that children won’t understand it, he said. “But I’ve seen plays I have not understood that were incredible experiences for me. . . . Eventually it sifts through you and you take what you take from it.”

In Sundance’s current round of play development, Howard Korder is working on an “extraordinarily dark” collaborative piece with composer David Yazbek about a young boy trying to discover why his parents abandoned him at a roadside sideshow. How does the author of the razor-edged adult drama and recent film “Search and Destroy” approach writing for young audiences?

“You start by assuming there are no limitations. I can’t say I’m thinking about it differently than I’d be thinking about any other work I’d be doing. I don’t see that intrinsically something that falls under the rubric of children’s theater needs to be reduced or sanitized.”

When Thomas Babe (“Great Day in the Morning,” “Demon Wine”) was asked by Sundance artistic director Jerry Patch to write a children’s play, he made a surprise discovery: “I was scared. Adult audiences have seen so much and done so much, they basically want to be pleased by fictions about themselves. With kids it’s wide open.”

Now he finds himself wishing that “grown-ups who go to the theater could be children again. We’ve had this terrible development in theater in this country, where the audience comes with a dark and jaded ‘please me’ attitude, they don’t go to the theater as children do, hoping to be amazed or to encounter something they’ve never seen before.”

“To me,” Dietz said, “the ideal world is when people come to the theater with the same sort of bravado as when they go to a sporting event, no dress codes. You get that with young people without even having to ask.

“Not only is that gratifying, it makes you come up with the goods. If you’ve bored them, you’ve betrayed them, because they came ready to be more deeply engaged.”