Tricksters. Folktales on Stage

To finish up this week of trickster mouse-deer stories, I wanted to finish up with some mouse-deer theater, both theater for Western schoolchildren and traditional Javanese puppet theater. 

First, the book for schoolchildren: Folktales on Stage: Children's Plays for Reader's Theater by Aaron Shepard. 

This is a really outstanding book (it was a big part of my inspiration to start writing my own readers theater scripts based on folktales), and the mouse-deer is a special favorite of Aaron Shephard; the play "The Adventures of Mouse Deer" is the first play in the book!

As you can see, Shepard has even written a little song for the mouse-deer to sing. In this play, Shephard has combined a series of mouse-deer adventures: Mouse-Deer and Tiger, Mouse-Deer and Crocodile, and Mouse-Deer and the Farmer.

I was especially excited to see a children's theater script about the mouse-deer because the mouse-deer Kanchil is very much a part of the theatrical tradition in Java, specifically the "wayang" or puppet-theater tradition. You can read more about wayang at Wikipedia, and here's a video recording of Kanchil Wayang, the Mouse-Deer Puppet Theater, that you can watch online. There are even English subtitles! Wayang Kancil [Mousedeer Wayang].

So, that wraps up a week of mouse-deer, and it was exciting to find so many mouse-deer resources at the Internet Archive; I found so many mouse-deer books, in fact, that I'll be sure to do another week of mouse-deer later on. I'll have another trickster to tell you about starting tomorrow... but for now, enjoy the mouse-deer!

Folktales on Stage:
Children's Plays for Reader's Theater

by Aaron Shepard