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by Sunny Drake, directed by Andrea Donaldson

Tarragon Theatre with the CHILD-ish Collective, Tarragon Theatre Extraspace, Toronto

October 29-November 16, 2025

“Kids are amazing”

Sunny Drake’s CHILD-ish, a performance piece from 2024, is now having its Toronto premiere at the Tarragon. At first glance, its premise seems intriguing. It’s verbatim theatre where adult actors speak only the words of children that Drake has recorded during interviews. The intent may be to celebrate and amplify the voices of children. Oddly enough, the show itself does exactly the opposite. Instead of being a celebration of children, the show feels like a Drake’s celebration of his own ingenuity in conceiving of the show and carrying it out.

The show begins with four actors as themselves – Karl Ang, Janelle Cooper, Monique Mojica and Jordan Pettle – making statements that sound like children’s remarks, such as “Everybody be a chicken!”, after which they all imitate chickens. After this short introduction actor Asher Rose (they/them) steps in and announces that they are playing the role of author Sunny Drake to relate how he created the show. We learn that Drake recorded over 100 interviews with 41 children aged 5-12. What we hear from the cast, he assures us, are the exact words that the children said.

Perhaps they do not intend to but Rose brings out a certain self-congratulatory smarm in Drake’s voice which is instantly off-putting. Drake is so delighted with his great idea of having adults speak the words of children that he seems not to know that adults had exploited the innocence of children’s expressions long before.

The earliest was the “Kids Say the Darndest Things” segment on the Art Linkletter show House Party broadcast on CBS from 1959-67 in which Linkletter would interview children on camera about their views of life to the amusement of a studio audience. The segment was resurrected as separate shows under different hosts from 1998-2021.

In a different genre, Stoo Hemple compiled the bestseller Children's Letters to God in 1966 and a sequel in 1991 in which he quoted and illustrated real letters written by children. The book inspired a television movie on NBC in 1969 in which adult actor Gene Kelly read the children’s letters. Later there was a musical Children's Letters to God, with a book by Hemple. In the musical actors aged 10-15 performed songs and scenes derived directly from letters by real children aged 9-13. As it happens, the world premiere in 2004 was directed by Canadian Stafford Arima.

The Tarragon Theatre’s description of CHILD-ish already points to the contradictions inherent in the show: “Forty whip-smart and brutally honest children are asked about love, life, and the world. From their fresh perspectives four adult actors speak their exact words and make them their own! Using the words of a younger generation, new ideas and experiences come to life through the voices of adults”.

The concept of the show suffers from two insuperable problems. First, Drake’s concept from the start was to have words uttered by children spoken by adult actors on stage. The question is “Why?” Children would have given their answers to Drake’s questions innocently and spontaneously. Adult actors simply cannot recreate such innocence and spontaneity because they speak words they have memorized as part of a script. Besides this, the cast of the present production apparently cannot avoid histrionic gestures when speaking.

The four actors director Andrea Donaldson has assembled achieve childlike innocence to varying degrees but never do so consistently. Pettle comes closest in a very funny exchange in which the boy he is impersonating speaks of wanting to get married to three people – one boy and two girls. When Drake tells him he can only marry one person, he says he would marry the boy because he loves him the most. Pettle succeeds because he does not try to play up key words with inflection of use any gestures for emphasis. We are obviously supposed to be amused at the boy’s naïveté concerning the concept of marriage and his completely nonsexual notion of love.

Cooper and Ang are good at conveying the children’s spontaneity by making their children’s words seem like sudden outbursts, while Mojica is better at conveying innocence through calmness of voice and lack of gestures. Ang seems to have been assigned the words of the smart-alecks interviewed and is quite good at conveying their mischievous attitudes.

The second fundamental problem with Drake’s idea simply has to do with the lack of context concerning what we hear. The first part of this problem is that Drake gives us no idea how he has chosen the children he has interviewed. Are they all children of friends? Has he tried to select a representative sample, and if so, of what – Toronto, Ontario, all of Canada? He doesn’t even tell us the makeup of his group. How many boys, girls and non-binary kids are there? We don’t even know how the “exact words” of the children are assigned. Do the male actors speak only words by boys and the female actors word by girls? Why does a female actor speak the words of the one nonbinary child we hear from?

Besides this, Drake counts everyone in his interview pool of 4-year-olds to 12-year-olds as “children”. Anyone who really knows about children will tell you that 12-year-olds would group themselves with included 4-year-olds. What makes Drake think it is fair to do so? It makes quite a difference whether a 4-year-old or a 12-year-old makes a statement about love and marriage, so Drake should really let us know in the script itself the age of whoever speaks the lines he is quoting.

The second part of this problem has to do with how Drake has compiled his text. He tells us that after his 100 interviews he had over 1000 pages of transcripts. How exactly did he boil this down to a show with only 60 minutes of children speaking? Drake claims, as if promoting his own wisdom, that he chose a group of children to help him edit the text. The scene with the boy who wants to marry three kids is restaged with the three other actors watching and commenting. This suggests that Drake has already edited his material down into scenes and merely is checking whether his children’s committee approves of the scene or not.

The point here is that Drake tries to pass the show off as completely child-approved when, in fact, he has already excised massive amounts of material. Thus, we have no way of knowing what were or were not dominant topics in his interviews. Drake tells us that it was the interviewees who wanted to talk about more serious subjects. After this we hear about the children’s views on suicide and death. We are surprised that four of the children think they know of someone who tried to commit suicide. The discussion of death, however, is never about finality but about what type of continuation will occur, whether afterlife or reincarnation. Why does Drake not ask if the children have ever known anyone who died and what they thought about that concrete fact?

The longer the performance continues, the more we realize that Drake is emphasizing topics of interest to him but not necessarily the topics that most preoccupy the children. We hear from the nonbinary child who is happy when people use their preferred pronouns. We hear from the boy who is a Syrian refugee who is afraid that his family may have to return to Syria. And we hear an unusually large amount about love and marriage. Oddly, Drake makes it appear that all the children believe consent is a good thing. What we don’t know is whether this is representative of the thought of the whole group of 41, or only of a part, since we have no idea how Drake has edited his information.

Strangely, we hear nothing about bullying which we know is a major concern for children. None of his 41 children speak out about being bullied and none of them have ever bullied anyone. Has Drake edited this topic out or has he happened to choose a group of especially lucky and especially virtuous little children?

In one section all the children rage at their parents for being on their phones all the time and never interacting with them. It is great that kids in Drake’s group said this and it would be great if adults in the audience would get this message. But again, we have no idea how representative these remarks from the children really are. Has he simply amplified the statements of a few to make his own point?

More suspicious is that the topics of children’s use of phones or other devices never comes up. You can hardly read the news without coming across an article about how too much screen time affects children. How can Drake show the kids railing against their parents’ screen time without looking at the childrens’?

After this sequence in the show, I began to wonder how many other topics Drake had excluded from his final text because they would fail to generate the feel-good glow he clearly intends the show to do. Only once does Drake include a boy, cutely played Pettle, speaking about being torn between doing something good and something bad. Why did Drake not pursue the general question of moral dilemmas with other kids? Or would this ruin his general “Kids are amazing” theme?

Unless you have been totally caught up in the feel-good vibes Drake has striven so hard to manufacture, you may find the show’s conclusion just to cutesy to be true. Drake announces that we will all speak aloud “The Children’s Manifesto”, the words of which are projected on a screen on the back wall. To what extent do any children aged 5-12 even know what a manifesto is? The whole conclusion smells of ten points that Drake has selected to be what he would like us to believe are rules that children themselves espouse.

Drake could avoid the basic difficulties that make his play of adults speaking the “exact words” of children such a charade. If Drake had filmed all his interviews rather than merely recording the words, he could eliminate the whole unsavoury aspect of adults appropriating children’s language. The problem, I suppose, is that the resulting film would look a lot like a compilation of “Kids Say the Darndest Things”. At least, then, actual children themselves would be at the centre of the show and not their interpreters or self-important editor.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Karl Ang, Jordan Pettle, Janelle Cooper and Monique Mojica; Karl Ang, Asher Rose as Sunny Drake and Monique Mojica; Jordan Pettle, Janelle Cooper, Karl Ang, Asher Rose as Sunny Drake and Monique Mojica. © Jae Yang.

For tickets visit: tarragontheatre.com.