Sometime in early grammar school, a teacher sent me home with a short story I had clumsily printed on a page of lined paper. My memory had always been that the teacher wanted my parents to admire my imaginative flair. But decades later, with my parents dead and my sister and me deciding what to save and what to pitch in the accumulation of 40 years on Rock Spring Road, I came across the story stuffed away in a kitchen cabinet. It fleetingly occurred to me on rereading it that, just maybe, the teacher wanted my parents to see the early signs of a troubled mind. The first sentence was about building a tunnel through my father's head. Unfortunately, that sheet of paper was among the items pitched, and where the tale went after that I have no memory.
Now long lost to the ages and a New Jersey landfill, my little yarn came back into mind as I watched the Story Pirates as part of the Curran Theatre's Under Construction series. The New York-based company visits schools around the country, creating improvised theatricals from the kids' stories. What's on view at the Curran, with both performers and audiences sharing the stage, is a "greatest hits" show culled from thousands of stories collected. Perhaps because of the imagined tunnel I built through my father's head, I was expecting revelations that could be sifted through the theories of Freud, Jung, and Bruno Bettelheim �" at least, if that's where one's peculiar mind wanted to go.
But, and no doubt wisely, the stories chosen by the Story Pirates don't involve anything particularly dark or scary about being a kid. Instead, there are tales of ice cream bandits, a tiny fox who defends a Chuck E. Cheese from a giant bear, and a big-mouthed pig who ruins children's parties. There are a few winks aimed at the accompanying adults in the audience, but nothing like you'd find in a Pixar movie or even Sesame Street .
In an autobiographical story created by a third-grader from Illinois (all stories are credited by name, grade, and hometown), the narrator gets his head stuck in the legs of a barstool because he had seen the dog do it. "Why would you do what your dog did?" sings a chorus, which prompts an aside to the audience: "I hate it when my parents scold me in the opening number." It's unlikely the third-grader wrote that line.
The troupe of a half-dozen performers and a keyboardist are a friendly and engaged group, and easily work with the little ones in the audience. After they performed a sketch about a clown who steals eggs, a story written during their recent workshops at Sunnyside Elementary, they brought the wide-eyed young author to the stage for a bow. "I don't like clowns," she told the audience when asked for her inspiration.
Next came a skit improvised on the spot from audience suggestions about a chandelier named Candle who wants more crystals and must pay the crystal merchant in tacos. As the cast rushed on and off stage, grabbing appropriate wigs and costumes from their stash, the backstage performers could be glimpsed laughing at what their colleagues were creating. That's a good sign that the cast members enjoy their work. The kids seemed to enjoy it, too, even if they never got to hear about my idea for a parental brain tunnel.
The Story Pirates will perform through Dec. 20 at the Curran Theatre. Tickets are $15-$20. Go to sfcurran.com.