A groundbreaking new collection, Ignite: Illuminating Theatre for Young People gathers three plays for young audiences that feature “messy” and complicated creation processes: The Middle Place by Andrew Kushnir, verbatim theatre created from interview transcripts with shelter youth; And by the way, Miss . . . by URGE with the Ensemble, devised theatre created by women developed through workshops with girls, and made for exclusively girl audiences; and Beneath the Ice by Eva Colmers, a location-specific, cross-cultural piece that was enriched by Southerner and Northerner encounters in Canada. Accompanying each script are stories and voices relevant to the initial spark that led to their creation, including scholarly introductions; timelines of the creative journey; and contextualizing pieces that foreground the voices of playwrights, collaborators, and community stakeholders involved in the development process. All of these plays highlight specific ethical questions relevant to theatre practitioners and scholars for work concerning audiences of any age.

Heather Fitzsimmons Frey is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Some of her core fields of research include childhood, youth, agency, power and identity, young people and audience reception, and representations of childhood in young people’s theatre, among others.

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