The show is aimed at children from pre-kindergarten to fourth grade, but Clark promises enough humor to amuse any grown-ups who come along. There are four public matinees the next two weekends, sandwiched around 10 weekday performances for school groups.
“Calvin’s Monster’’ is based on “Fairy Tale Moments (Who Is Your Giant?),’’ a 2009 “storybook play’’ by Marcia Trimble. (The book’s credited co-author, Sonnet Phelps, is Trimble’s granddaughter, to whom she first told the story.) Kate Snodgrass, artistic director of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and a professor of playwriting at Boston University, passed the book along to her friend Clark, noting that Trimble, who lives in San Francisco, is a BU graduate.
“I was really struck with the charm of the book, the originality of it, using classic fairy tale characters, but in an updated fashion where they all carry cellphones and send text messages to one another,’’ Clark says. “I just really like the idea of the theme of facing our fears, which is something I think people struggle with for their entire lifetime.’’
Thinking it would make a nice first offering for the theater as it launched a new-works program, he built it out to an hourlong piece. He focused the story on Calvin, instead of a group of kids as in the book, and added such fillips as Mrs. Knowley’s penchant for quoting literary figures Edith Sitwell and Sir Francis Bacon.
The musical score includes styles from 1930s jazz to rap. The seven songs were written by Jesse Soursourian, a veteran composer and musician, and Austin Davy, who is a freshman piano student at the Hartt School in Hartford and a graduate of the BCT’s educational program. Aside from Boston actress Shana Dirik as Mrs. Knowley, the cast is made up entirely of area teenagers.
