In Sunny Drake's CHILD-ish, kids' exact words about love, anxiety, and unicorns come to life on stage
Adults speak children’s thoughts on the world in hilarious-yet-impactful premiere from celebrated Canadian playwright
CHILD-ish. Photo by Chelsey Stuyt
Pacific Theatre presents Sunny Drake’s CHILD-ish in collaboration with Eastside Story Guild from February 9 to March 9, with opening night on February 16 at 8 pm
“I DON’T WANT to have kids. I like a lot of rest. Kids make a lot of mess,” says playwright Sunny Drake matter-of-factly to a friend while building a sandcastle. It’s a moment in the first episode of his web series CHILD-ish, titled “You Would Have Some Company.” Drake isn’t just reciting a line he wrote, though—funnily enough, he’s repeating the exact words a young kid once told him.
The concept is the basis for Drake’s new play, also titled CHILD-ish, which is composed entirely of the precise words said by children aged 5 to 12. Drake conducted over 100 interviews with 41 different kids to gain material for the show, and quoted them word-for-word in the production’s script. The resulting show is brutally honest, surprisingly insightful, and downright hilarious.
Drake, who was born in Australia and now splits his time between Toronto and Los Angeles, says the idea for CHILD-ish first arose when he was looking after a friend’s kid in Toronto.
“I arrived at the house, and this seven-year-old was sitting on the sofa sobbing, like bawling her eyes out,” recalls the playwright, speaking to Stir over a Zoom call. “So of course, I ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ And she shares this very epic story of heartbreak and betrayal. I was actually quite worried about her—she was totally crushed that this kid in her class didn’t want to marry her. And I’m watching her just really in her body, going through this heartbreak.
“And then this completely miraculous thing happened,” Drake continues. “Unlike me when I’m heartbroken—it can take me years to get over that, you know—I hold that in my body, and it takes a long time for me to kind of move through stuff. But she started doing somersaults on the sofa. And it took about two minutes of somersaults and handstands, and she’d gone from this utter devastation, to then she’s giggling, to then minutes later, she’s literally over it. And I was just like, ‘Wow, I need a crash course from children, holy!’”
Sunny Drake (left) and Sam Khalilieh in the CHILD-ish web series. Photo courtesy of the artist
The world premiere of CHILD-ish takes place this month at Pacific Theatre, with support from the Eastside Story Guild children’s program. While Drake’s four-episode web series is filmed at Toronto playgrounds, the theatre show directed by Lois Anderson is executed with minimal staging and an interview-like set-up so that audiences can focus on the dialogue. The production features performances by Tasha Faye Evans, Craig Erickson, James Yi, Tom Pickett, Maki Yi, and Sara Vickruck, who are all adults.
“The really fun thing about this piece is it’s a deceptively complex and very juicy task for the audience,” Drake notes. CHILD-ish employs a concept he calls “dual listening”: on the one hand, audiences are remembering that the words coming out of these adult actors’ mouths were actually said by kids, and processing the larger meaning behind that; and on the other hand, they’re unpacking the impact of the lines when they’re said by adults.
The actors perform the lines with full sincerity, says Drake, just as they would any other role. This gives maturity to the words of youngsters, who are often not taken too seriously.
A celebrated theatre artist, Drake won the inaugural Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize in 2019 for his significant impact on Ontario’s performing arts scene. As a proud Queer and transgender person, he creates works that often provide reflections on impactful subject matters. Take the Calgary 2020 premiere of his self-explanatory comedy Men Express Their Feelings, for example, which Zee Zee Theatre remounted in Vancouver in 2022; or his Tom Hendry Award-winning play Every Little Nookie, a high-spirited examination of the relationship between a suburban boomer couple and their Queer millennial daughter, which launched at the 2022 Stratford Festival.
He’s also creator of the 2023 theatrical podcast Climate Change and Other Small Talk, which won three Signal Awards and ranked in Apple Podcast’s top 10 internationally.
Sunny Drake. Photo courtesy of the artist
In preparation for his CHILD-ish interviews, Drake invested time into researching what it would be like to talk to kids. His initial goal of asking questions about love, marriage, and relationships quickly expanded to include a wide scope of topics. Climate anxiety, which he has experience exploring artistically, is one theme that he says is arising among young people in today’s world. But what the theatre artist ended up hearing from kids wasn’t quite what he expected.
“Something that really shocked me was that a theme of suicide was really coming out very strongly in the interviews,” says Drake. “Kids know about suicide. Most kids know of somebody who has died by suicide, whether that’s a friend’s family, or whether that’s several connections away, or something closer to them. And at first when kids started to bring this up, to be honest, I actually freaked out and kind of shut the conversations down. I went away and went, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done? I’ve welcomed kids to talk about anything they want to with me, but is this too far?’”
With the gravity of the topic at hand, Drake began conducting more research into how to appropriately talk about suicide with young folks. When he advised the kids’ parents that they were bringing up themes of suicide, he was met with surprise—but parents also tended to be relieved, says Drake, that someone was having these conversations with their kids rather than sweeping the topic under the rug.
Despite some heavy subject matter at times, CHILD-ish still reflects the comical joy and creativity of being a kid. Drake recalls a climate conversation between interviewees that demonstrates this well: one of them notes that they might have to build a spaceship to get to Mars if climate disaster strikes, to which another replies that the journey would take a whopping 10 years. The first remarks that the Earth might not even have 10 years left. Then, things get silly.
“One kid just in the middle, looks up into whatever other dimension that I don’t have access to, and is like, ‘Unicorn, where are you? We’re waiting for you to tell us what the future is like,'” says Drake. “And these three kids just start having a conversation with the unicorn about the future. And I’m pleased to share with everybody, it turns out that the unicorn is in fact hopeful.”
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