Cy*Burr // spring 2004

“No talking unless it relates to the dialogue,” Ingram shouts, trying to hush the kids.

“Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue,” one boy quips, rocking back and forth in his chair.

It is the end of an hour-and-a-half long writing session for the next New World Children’s Theater production, and the playwrights are ready to leave. The authors are crawling beneath the table, and no one is concentrating on the work, but it will only take a few more lines to finish the scene.

The children are working on a play about a group of animals who escape from a zoo in search of their natural habitat. The eight members of the group are in charge of everything from the writing to the staging and performing of the play. Only now the penguin has collapsed on the floor in a fit of giggles, and Ingram has to interject to try to quiet the laughing hyenas.

Six-year old Emma Peshek, who is double cast as a jaguar and a dog, says the play will be a riot.

“We like lots of laughter in our play and fun things,” she says. “It’s a cool play.”

The New World Children’s Theater group is composed of children ages 6 to 13. It began in 1993 as a theater group for home-schooled children, but now the theater has grown to include public-schooled children, too. Since then it has produced 18 plays, and the performances have moved from the cramped quarters of the North Water Street Art Gallery to Kent State’s Oscar Ritchie Hall.

But right now the zookeeper has run head first into a tree, and the kids have to think of something funny for him to say. Ingram raises his voice again, trying to get the attention of the writers.

“Keeping them focused is the toughest part,” Ingram says, “but it gets done somehow, some way.”

Twelve years after the gallery’s opening, Ingram is fully recovered from his accident. Though he wasn’t planning on spending his life in Kent, he says he’s glad he ended up here.

“I feel enriched and blessed to have come in contact with so many good artists and become involved in the creative forces of Kent,” he says. “I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”