Once Upon a Time: The Geffen Playhouse Story Pirates Tell the Tales Kids Write

A story doesn’t necessarily need to be lengthy to be good. One of the Story Pirates’ greatest hits, in fact, has one single, solitary line:

“This is a story about cats flying.”

“It was submitted to us by a first grader from Brooklyn,” says Connor White, who leads the Geffen Playhouse Story Pirates program. “We turned it into a simple but memorable sketch involving a LOT of flying cats and one extremely well dressed first grader.”

Over the past three and a half years, White has heard — and acted out — his fair share of stories. As the Geffen’s Education Associate and Resident Teaching Artist, he participated in the program that began in a low-income Harlem school before spreading to over 100 schools across the country. At the Geffen, White performs, directs and produces six year-long programs in six Title 1 schools (where 75% or more of the students are from families living at or below poverty).

“[We go into] schools that have been stripped of most arts education,” he explains. “And we try to blow their minds.”

Just how the Story Pirates accomplish that sounds like every kid’s dream — “Loud, crazy and in-your-face” figure largely into the equation. The kids, who are primarily third graders, write three stories a year for the Pirates to perform. The Pirates focus first on the basics of narrative storytelling, then on informative storytelling and finally, on hero stories with creative, non-violent solutions. Then, the Pirates perform sans makeup and costume, focusing instead on the element of, “make-believe,” a language in which most kids are fluent.

“If a kid suggests a shark and we have a shark head, we won’t use it,” White says. “We’ll use a gray sheet and our hand.”

One of the coolest aspects of the program is Story Love. The Pirates receive thousands of stories every year, and not all of them are one-liners. White recalls an “epic” one that was thirteen pages single-spaced.

Yet they celebrate every child’s work by writing comments on each story and returning them to the student. On a piece of paper, they write what they loved about their stories referencing at least one specific part of the tale and ask a question designed to prompt the student to add to the story or write another one.

There is a big no-no: moralizing or dumbing down for the kids. “We really try and be funny for a six-year-old and a 60-year-old,” White says. Many of the performers continue on to act on shows like SNL or to write for sitcoms.

For the February 14 Flagship Show, the Story Pirates will perform a story that a class of 30 kids from KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Scholar Academy have written together — and White and his team have no idea what it will be about. Considering what the Story Pirates did with a single line, they should be just fine.