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McIntyre Does One-Woman Children’s Show for Senior Thesis

The children at Cobber Kids laughed and wanted to see their friends' reactions to the story.

When Kayli McIntyre ’19 dances out in front of her audience, the children are immediately swept away to another land of talking animals and unlikely friends. McIntyre, a communication studies and theatre art major, begins her one-woman show of “The Biggest Little House in the Forest” as the narrator. Her vocal quality and appearance are a mix of Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz” and Tinkerbell the fairy.

The children are mesmerized.  

But she doesn’t remain a mere human for long. She quickly picks up her puppet friends and we are off into the forest where she becomes a butterfly named Bernice who finds a lovely house to live in. The children can clearly see McIntyre holding the papier mache butterfly and creating a voice for the lovely winged creature – but their reaction is as if we see talking butterflies every day.

“Kids are so used to play,” McIntyre says. “The tabletop puppets harkens to someone playing with toys. The children know when they are holding the toys and doing their voices that they can make it come alive.”

McIntyre selected a children’s production as her senior thesis because she wants to give children a taste of theatre at a young age. Bitten by the theatre bug early in life, McIntyre was in her first professional production at the age of 10 with the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis as the character Cindy Lou Who in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” She did four more productions with the company and it set her on a journey to make theatre a constant part of her life.

Back in the show, Bernice the butterfly is soon joined by a mouse who wants to move in. Next arrives a frog, a rooster and a rabbit being chased by a fox – in a car. McIntyre built all the puppets herself.

“I’ve done primarily acting, so creating the props and the puppets – the construction of it – was hard. I had to do research on how to make puppets,” McIntyre says.

Each of the puppets also needed to be its own character with its own voice. McIntyre says creating and keeping each one in character was one of the challenges. As the story continues, one last character stops by the house. It was a large bear and the house is too small. So Bernice must say no, he can’t live with them. As the bear rests on the butterfly house chimney thinking of his next move, he crushes the home. This forces the friends to build something new together, large enough for the bear to join them – because it is a show about kindness after all.

 Children at Bethesda All Stars Childcare become the new house in the play. 

The children in the audience rejoiced as they ended the production dancing with the puppets.

The next stage for McIntyre is more children’s performances of this show and after graduation she hopes to take her theatre skills on the road working with children.