Every year, the Illinois High School Theatre Festival reminds me why educational theatre matters—not as an extracurricular add-on, but as a vital space to strengthen critical academic skills and make genuine human connections.
This year, I was fortunate enough to present a workshop for student titled “Once Upon a Minute: Neo-Futurist Fairy Tales,” which asked students to take familiar stories and remake them as one-minute, present-tense plays rooted in honesty and direct address and energized with elements of chaos and chance.
Practically speaking, the workshop was built around chance and collaboration: students worked in small groups and were randomly given three cards—a fairy tale, a Neo-Futurist lens, and a formal constraint—which they had to reconcile in a one-minute, present-tense piece. After a brief period of devising and rehearsal, groups performed their adaptations—with a “final twist” that each piece was scored by a randomly-selected song from a playlist on my phone!
One key takeaway students got from the workshop was overcoming those self-censors that are obsessed with originality. Especially for beginning writers, it can be paralyzing to feel that every idea must be unprecedented. By working with fairy tales—stories everyone already knows by heart—the pressure to invent disappeared, allowing students to shift their attention from invention to execution: how a story is told, what it emphasizes, and why it matters in the present moment. We also explored how, even when adapting the most familiar stories imaginable, writers inevitably bring their own experiences and perspectives to the work, making it new and interesting. In fact, many of the final pieces had transformed so fully that it was impossible to identify which fairy tale they began from!
To deepen that takeaway, we also explored the role of constraints in the creative process. As artists, we are always working within limits—a given cast size, a fixed runtime, incomplete resources, or simply not enough time or energy to write, etc. Especially as we get older, the list of constraints only grows… Yet, rather than treating those constraints as obstacles, we framed them as an inevitability of life as an artist. Learning to work within limits is itself a creative skill. Constraints demand problem-solving, and problem-solving activates the critical-thinking part of the brain—the same muscle students use to make choices, evaluate options, and articulate intent. In that sense, creativity isn’t the absence of boundaries; it’s what happens because of them.
I left the festival energized, a little tired, and deeply grateful. Events like this don’t just celebrate theatre; they reaffirm a belief in young people as artists, thinkers, and collaborators. And that belief, more than any technique or trend, is what keeps this work alive.
