'Two Donuts': An Old-Fashioned Treat

You could hardly have blamed the kids for being antsy. It was, after all, 9am on a Monday of a three-day week, with the Thanksgiving holidays just over the horizon, and here they were being herded into the cafeteria to watch a play. By all rights, they should've been bouncing off the walls. And yet, the 400 or so students at Widen Elementary in Southeast Austin were on their best behavior, sitting in straight lines on the floor, keeping their conversations to a modest roar, and showing considerably more patience than, well, most adults during rush hour on I-35.

And once the play began, they were even better. They watched the stage with rapt attention, following Pepito, a young boy from the barrio, as he's spirited away from his home by a pair of life-sized Guatamalan worry dolls, Ridiculo and Modesto, to the fantastic land of Cuate-Malo, where the oppressive Commandante Boots is determined to stomp out every last flower on the landscape and rid the country of beauty forever. There it's up to Pepito and his newfound companions, Little Girl Footsteps and Tirado, to save the land from ruin. The play, Two Donuts, is the work of José Cruz González, and was being presented to the Widen student body by the UT Department of Theatre & Dance as one of 13 stops on its Fall 2005 Youth Theatre Tour. Children's theatre scholar Coleman Jennings selected the script – it appears in his most recent anthology of plays for children – and deftly directed the cast of 13 UT students, using a blend of human actors, theatrical effects, and puppetry.

The level of magical realism, with its winged television and shark torpedo and beauty-hating boot, may leave some older audience members with echoes of the Beatles saving Pepperland from the Blue Meanies in their ears. Then again, the story could be read as yet one more variation on the Oz stories, in which an innocent youngster from a faraway land discovers how he or she has the power to thwart the most forceful evil. Or maybe it's an older tale still. What never grows old, however, is the rapturous delight on a child's face when he or she is swept away by the enchantment of theatre. And that could be seen again and again in this crowded cafeteria on a November Monday morn.