Faerie tales create a splash, a bubble, a breeze in a child's heart. I wrote that on a spring morning in 2013, when we were rehearsing The Princess and the Goblin in my living room and two parents were making goblin masks in a kitchen, and I still think it is the truest thing I know about the work. But a breeze is not always a warm one. And I have never been willing to take the cold out of the stories to make them safer for the children who act them.
People sometimes ask why. Why The Little Match Girl, with children? Why The Snow Queen, with its splinter of ice in the heart? Why goblins at all, with masks and feet, when a princess and a ball would do? Why, a little later, Petruchio and Kate with fourteen-year-olds, and Romeo and Juliet with stage blood for the fight scenes, and Mary Zimmerman's Secret in the Wings, which is nothing but the dark tales, the ones the picture books leave out?
The short answer is that the children already know about the dark. The long answer is this essay.
The town
Picture a tiny town in the Sierra Foothills. Many families have lost their jobs. Some have lost their homes to fire. That is not a line I wrote for effect; it is a description of my cast list. Some of these children have seen their houses burn. Most of them know someone who has. They live in one of the poorest counties in California, in trailer parks and small wooden homes, with parents who work very hard for what there is.
You cannot protect a child like that from darkness by leaving it out of the stories. She has met it already, and she met it without a shape. What a faerie tale gives her is the shape. The forest in the story has an edge and a path through it. The goblin can be faced. The match girl's cold is spoken aloud, in front of neighbors, by a child holding a pretend match, and then the lights come up and everyone eats snacks that the parents brought. That is not a small thing. It may be the largest thing we do.
Believing in what you cannot see
When a friend suggested The Princess and the Goblin to me, it was because of what the book does with fear. George MacDonald's princess has a great-great-grandmother who lives at the top of the house and can only be found by those who are ready to find her, and a thread she cannot see that leads her through the goblin tunnels in the dark. I spent a year turning that novel into a play because I wanted the children to have exactly that: a story that asks them to believe in things they may not be able to see. To trust. To have faith, and to let themselves be led.
You cannot stage that without the tunnels. A version of the story with the goblins taken out is not a gentler version of the same story; it is a different story, and a lesser one, because the trust means nothing without the dark it is trusting through. So we made the goblins as goblin as we could. The masks. The tights and leotards. The goblin feet, which the children were immensely proud of. And the older children took the leading roles with joy. That was the word I used at the time, and it is the right word. Nobody was frightened. They were the ones doing the frightening, and there is no better cure for fear than that.
The risks are real too
There is a section on every fundraising page called "Risks and challenges," and for years I filled it in honestly. Will they memorize their roles? Will one get sick? Will they be able to find the consistency they need in their little hearts to continue up until performance? However chaotic things may seem, the kids always seem to pull it off. When disaster strikes, and there is always something, we all join together, the kids, the parents, and me, and we find our way.
I have come to think that this is the same lesson as the one inside the stories, only lived. The summer our oak dropped its dead limbs onto the chairs during a windstorm, we trimmed the tree and went on. The year the pandemic took our whole season away, we came back masked and called ourselves the Masked Theatre Warriors, and did The Tempest and Into the Woods, which is, of course, a musical about what happens after the happy ending, in the dark part of the forest. The children did not need that explained to them. They had been in the dark part of the forest for a year.
Trusting them with the whole of it
What I am really arguing for is trust. Not trust that a child can handle a hard story (they can, and they do, every day, without us) but trust that a child deserves the whole story, and that a story with its shadows cut out is a form of condescension, however kindly meant.
Shakespeare taught me this before the faerie tales did. You cannot do A Midsummer Night's Dream with ten-year-olds and leave out the part where the lovers wake in the woods, lost and betrayed and furious; the faeries are only magic because the woods are dangerous. You cannot do The Winter's Tale and skip the sixteen years. The children I have worked with for thirty years have never once asked me to make a story smaller. It is always the grown-ups who ask.
So the dark parts stay. The match girl still freezes. The goblins still come up through the floor. The splinter of ice still goes into Kay's eye and heart, and Gerda still walks the whole world to get him back, which she could not do if he had never been lost. Becoming a princess, or a gnome, with one's voice, one's body, one's heart, paves the path for an emotionally healthy life. I believe that. I have watched it happen under the oak, summer after summer, in front of a hillside of parents who came to see something sweet and went home having seen something true.
Faerie tales are older than books. They survive because children keep them alive, and children keep them alive because the tales tell them the truth. I am not going to be the one who stops.
Where this came from
Sources drawn on: Fairy Tales Forever! (2013: The Princess and the Goblin, the goblin masks and feet, the risers, the "splash, a bubble, a breeze" line, and the "believe in things they may not be able to see" line); Kids Do a Rainbow of a Theatre Festival (2016: the full faerie-tale repertoire, Secret in the Wings); Stay Hungry! Stay Foolish! Do Shakespeare! (2018: The Taming of the Shrew); Masked Theatre Warriors (2021: the pandemic season, Into the Woods); Romeo and Juliet (2024: stage blood); Summer Festival of Light (2025: the oak's dead limbs); the "Risks and challenges" passages Mari reused across most campaigns. The Snow Queen and Little Match Girl details come from the stories themselves, not from anything Mari wrote about staging them; she should confirm those productions went the way the essay implies, or cut those sentences.