Columbia County Players' "Pajama Plays" Pays Teens $200 to Perform Free Children's Theater in Hudson

Carol Russoff says the Columbia County Players's new youth program was partially inspired by the picture above of french children watching a puppet show in 1963. The theater veteran atests kids always make the best audiences. The original image taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt for Life.

Columbia County Players founder Carol Rusoff, best known locally for the company's free annual Shakespeare productions in the round barn at Churchtown Dairy, is bringing a children's theater series called Pajama Plays to the stage this fall, in partnership with, and at The Spark of Hudson. Auditions for high school age actors will be held September 29. Cast members will receive $200 for their work. 

After a long accomplished career in the theater, Russoff says there’s nothing better than getting kids excited and involved in theater. For this program kids show up in their pajamas, sit on the floor, and watch a short play performed by the teenage cast. Parents sit in the back. Admission is free, in keeping with what Rusoff calls "our Columbia County Players thing"—the company always pays performers something, yet all performances are free. 

Rusoff pitched the idea to the Spark a few years ago, not long after CC Players became a nonprofit. The inspiration goes back further, to her own childhood in Chicago, where the Goodman Theatre ran regular children's programming—she still remembers their production of The Odyssey. Hudson, she says, doesn't have anything like that for kids right now. She's explicit that Pajama Plays doesn’t talk down to its young audience the way she thinks a lot of children's theater can. "It doesn't insult the children's intelligence," she says. "A lot of children's theater is dumbed down and silly. It's sort of like Disney Junior—not exactly inspiring."

This fall's production, opening the Saturday night of Winter Walk in early December 2, with a matinee the following day, is How Jan Claassen Cured the Sick King, a traditional Dutch folk play that Rusoff has adapted a bit while deliberately keeping it old-fashioned rather than modernizing it. The staging includes a large map showing the Atlantic crossing from Holland to New York, and a pair of comic "Dutch professor" characters who walk the young audience through some actual Dutch history along the way. Rusoff picked the Dutch as a starting point because of their role in the history of the area, but she's already thinking about where the series goes from here: stories drawn from the region's native history, and Hudson’s Bangladeshi and Haitian communities. The goal, over time, is an annual series that works its way through the layered history of who has lived here.

The teenage cast is the other half of the pitch. Rusoff and the Spark are recruiting actors roughly 13 to 18 years old. "In the best of all possible worlds, these kids would become a little ensemble," Rusoff says, "and in theater, the ensemble becomes a family."

Most teen community-service work, she says, ends up feeling like an empty box to check for a graduation requirement. She says this is different: a real opportunity, in her words, "to practice generosity"—a quality she doesn't think teenagers get enough credit for. "They tell it like it is," she says. "They don't have masks. I love them. They're my favorites, to tell you the truth."

The younger audience gets its own kind of freedom. Kids ages 3 to 10 are the target, and they're not expected to sit still. "They're going to wiggle," Rusoff says. "The actors will ask them to."

Auditions for the teen cast are Tuesday, September 29, from 4 to 6pm at The Spark of Hudson. Rehearsals will run two or three afternoons a week after school through the fall, shifting to weekend sessions once November begins, with dress rehearsals picking up closer to the December performances.