Sunny Drake’s new web series reminds us why it’s good to be CHILD-ish

Award-winning theatre maker Sunny Drake thinks the world should be more childish. A couple of years ago, he asked kids (a lot of kids) questions about love, life and the world. Then he put their exact words into the mouths of adult actors in his work CHILD-ish. Instead of pretending to be children, the actors performed as grownups, presenting the kids’ ideas and experiences from an adult perspective. The results were compelling and perspective-altering. 

It was two years ago that CHILD-ish debuted to popular and critical acclaim as a live performance at SummerWorks. Now, CHILD-ish has been re-envisioned as a 4-episode web series that makes its world premiere on June 22, directed by Drake and Peter Riddihough and co-presented by Drake, Soulpepper and Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts. The virtual launch includes all 4 episodes, the chance to meet the people who made them along with special exclusive content hosted by children and teenagers, alongside Drake. What’s better, it is available free of charge for the world to enjoy. 

What has changed in the evolution from play to series? “A lot!” smiles Drake. “We entirely adapted the work to a web series format. The scenes are short and snappy, built for online attention spans. I felt strongly about using video as a medium to its fullest.” That included working with filmmaker Peter Riddihough to reimagine the visual world of CHILD-ish, which led to filming CHILD-ish in Toronto playgrounds. “It was the first time I’d been on a slide in decades!” Another smile. “And my co-stars Jani Lauzon, Maria Ricossa, Raven Dauda and Sam Khalilieh hadn’t been on seesaws and merry-go-rounds in a while either!” 

CHILD-ish the web series has also significantly expanded its thematic scope, with topics ranging from climate change to love to mental health to – yes! – unicorns. Of course, the biggest factor in the intervening 2 years is COVID-19. The pandemic necessitated precise protocols for the cast and creative team. They had to be resourceful about making the maintenance of at least six feet between actors a strong artistic choice, not a grudging compromise. Here, the playground equipment stepped up big time: for example, placing actors on each end of a seesaw creates a dynamic visual, while building in ample physical distancing. 

For Drake, the playground shoot was a “very rejuvenating process”: “We filmed last summer – it was the first time I’d gotten to make something with a team after months of everything having been shut down by the pandemic. Even with all the challenges of filming during a pandemic and the extra protocols needed, getting to create with a team again was such a blessing.”

In addition to navigating the pandemic, the team needed to figure out pathways for participating children on the creative team. All of the verbatim material is drawn from interviews with children aged 5-12, but in addition to CHILD-ish’s larger pool of interviewees, there are children on the creative team itself, who are dramaturgs, collaborators and script editors. At first, this seemed like a challenge: how do you keep space on the team for children, if the project develops over a number of years, during which the children grow into teenagers?  In fact, the “truly intergenerational” nature of the core creative team, which includes children, teenagers and adults, has been a signature strength. “Our youngest team member has been 6 and our oldest 77! I thought that the teens would want to move on to other things eventually, but every year they get more and more committed to the work,” Drake marvels. “Our teens are bringing incredible ideas, influences and relevance to the project, which is ultimately making the work much better.”

It appears that these young people have a long, lively road ahead of them. CHILD-ish will continue its reach as a podcast, a live performance and a web series – with each drawing out a unique aspect of the CHILD-ish universe. Drake contends that each version is a unique adaptation that makes full use of its medium – it’s not a case of filming the play or recording its audio. As an example, the podcast is inspired by a radio talk show. Each episode will begin with adults speaking children’s exact words, but conclude with children interviewing adults, flipping the script on the original process where adults interviewed kids: “We’ll get to experience what a conversation is like when children are framing the questions and leading the conversation.”

Drake is looking forward to how these mediums can bring different audiences into the CHILD-ish universe. He speculated that someone who stumbles upon the web series may then be channeled through to a live theatre experience, or vice-versa. He is also “excited about creating multi-layered experiences for audience members: that each creative offering has the familiarity of the core CHILD-ish concept, yet brings us into a different aspect of the work”.

Working on CHILD-ish has had a profound impact on Drake. He always loved kids, but in the past, could not spend more than an hour at a time with them: “I’m that uncle who drops over and takes the kids for an hour-long neighbourhood adventure or rushes around the house screaming in some wild game.” Indeed, one of his “big lifetime achievements” (and proof of the intensity of these brief visits) is a child’s invention of the game “Silly Sunny” in his honour. To play the game, “one person must be VERY SILLY, and the other person yells ‘Silly Sunny!’.” And that’s the entire point of the game. “I love these interactions. For an hour. Then I collapse in a heap and need a nap. I’ve always been in awe of how parents and teachers have the stamina!” 

One of the reasons he took on the persona of whirling dervish Fun Uncle was because he could see how exhausted the parents were. It seemed like the best role he could play in their children’s lives. But through CHILD-ish, he realized that, by interacting with kids exclusively in that one fun mode, he was missing a whole other side. CHILD-ish revealed to him that children are, in fact, his “dream collaborators”. Unlike the one-sided “Silly Sunny”, kids on the CHILD-ish creative team have the flexibility to “flip effortlessly between being VERY SILLY in one moment to VERY SERIOUS in the next. And this basically sums up MY personality! So now I’m keen to collaborate with children on many other projects too. Not to mention, spend more time in extended, serious conversations with the kids in my life!”

A: “I was trying to start a protest to get Wednesday to be a weekend.”

B: “Oh that’s genius!”

A: “Like, it’s NOT gonna be easy to be a grown-up.”

Amen!  And how delightful, then, that CHILD-ish the web series now lives online and is accessible everywhere: an entertaining, instructive way for “fun adults” to glean CHILD-ish insights and see the world in a different way. 

Free tickets to the series launch event can be reserved here.

(Excerpt from CHILD-ish reprinted with permission)

© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2021