RDT’s 20th Anniversary Season of Ring Around the Rose continues with Plan-B in October.

RDT’s Ring Around the Rose is a series of performances for children & families, the second Saturday of every month at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center. Each month, Repertory Dance Theatre presents a different performing arts group in a one hour, wiggle-friendly performance. 

Next month, RDT will welcome back the amazing artists from Plan-B Theatre. Last year, they performed the very fun, “The Edible Complex” that explored the issue of body image. This year, they are tackling another issue that young children face: grief.

Check out the post below from the playwright, Elaine Jarvik.

About RIVER.SWAMP.CAVE.MOUNTAIN.: 

Five-year-old JJ (who has lots of questions) and eight-year-old Izzy (a know-it-all who doesn’t know it all) are siblings who have recently lost their grandmother. They embark on a funny and touching hero’s journey to try to make sense of loss, grief, death and life.

Featuring Ashley Maria Ramos and Benjamin Young. Designed by Aaron Swenson. Directed by Cheryl Cluff.

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From playwright Elaine Jarvik:

I volunteer at The Sharing Place, a support group for children who are grieving the death of someone close to them. Perhaps that makes it sound like I’m the kind of person who can walk into a funeral home and not get weak in the knees. But, in fact, I am still at some level a grown-up version of the child who could barely walkpast the Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedias on our hallway bookshelf because one of the “B” entries was “blood.”

I grew up in a family of fearful people who were adept at skirting painful topics, and that definitely included death and dying. After my grandmother died when I was 7, my parents took a train to Raleigh and left me at home in Maryland with a relative, then came back and, as far as I remember, her death was never mentioned again. What I did understand, though—what I picked up on from what wasn’t said—was that death was scary and feelings shouldn’t be expressed.

So I think I am just the right person to write a play for children that explores death and grief—because I sure wish someone had put on that play for me when I was a kid.

That doesn’t mean, though, that I knew where to begin. Sure, I had written plays about death before, but mostly these have been plays that hid behind gallows humor: a woman afraid of what her survivors might write in her obituary; two sisters at odds over whether to honor their father’s wishes to have his ashes left at his favorite pie restaurant; a couple in some afterlife watching their daughter read from a memoir that reveals too much. This play for children, though—I wanted it to be fanciful and funny but most of all honest, a play that explored the questions kids have, and the questions they don’t even know to ask.

Read more about RIVER.SWAMP.CAVE.MOUNTAIN on the Plan-B Theatre blog. 

Get tickets to the show (only $5!) here>>