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An avant-garde spirit in children's theater emerged in the United States in the late 1960s. The innovation lies in the unorthodoxy of the representation of childhood and adulthood by these avant-garde playwrights and the impact new visual mass media addressing the child had on them. Sociological changes in the concept of childhood and adulthood are at the origin of a proliferation of plays with mature themes for children in the early 1960s.1 The concept of audience as a changing sociological entity needs to be addressed when discussing the development of such innovations in the history of American children's theater.
To achieve their sociocritical roles, after World War II, children's playwrights competed with two new visual mass media: the growing children's film industry since the 1920s and children's television programs that had captured young audiences since the 1940s. These two types of media capitalized on children as a new audience and courted them as part of a larger popular audience. Their courting has seriously challenged children's theater to the point of influencing its historical development. The popularization of an avant-garde trend in children's theater in the 1960s closely parallels the changing status of the child audience in Western Europe and in American society, the imagery which that society endorses, and the need for some playwrights to present a new type of theater.
According to social commentator Neil Postman, television viewing and its sociocritical role are intimately related to the needs of the audience and its status. Postman argues that successful children's programs "display what people understand and want or they are canceled."2 According to him, the object of the representation and its success depend on children's need to see themselves reflected in their social reality. In a chapter entitled "The Disappearing Child," Postman criticizes the sociocritical role of these visual media and notices that the shift in child imagery in films has affected the status of the child itself and society's perspectives on childhood. Postman's portrait rests on his argument that since the 1950s television drama and children's films have presented images of children as "adultified" and precocious, while the adult characters have sometimes become "childified" and immature, images that have blurred the distinctions between the child and the adult as two distinct social entities (120-42)....