Paper Bag players celebrate 65 years of magic from the ordinary

What fun can you have with plain brown grocery bags and empty cardboard boxes?

Preschoolers know how to have fun with these objects (just like any curious cat). But perhaps the best way to appreciate their magical potential is to view the Paper bag playersa New York City children’s theater company that thrives on turning the ordinary into the unexpected.

Families can experience that transformative power Sunday, when the nonprofit presents “It’s a wonderful world of paper bags!” at the Kaye Playhouse in Manhattan. (They will also perform in April at the Jewish Museum And SUNY Orange in Middletown, NY) The production consists of 13 musical sketches tailored for audiences ages 3 to 9, and celebrates a milestone any performing arts organization would envy: the company’s 65th season, making it one of the longest-running children’s theater groups is in the nation.

“The core of our theater is the imaginative use of materials,” Johannes Steensaid the players’ executive director, composer and music director during a group interview with company executives.

The company’s dedication to paper and cardboard, from which sets, props and towering characters were devised, dates back to its earliest days. In 1958, the founders, including dancers Judith Martin and Remy Charlip, began experimenting with simple objects. Over the years, the raw materials have expanded to include foam board, Tyvek and household tools such as mop heads.

“We get our inspiration from them,” Stone said of children. “Then we make our own things with them in mind, or with their type of play in mind. And that gives it back to the children. And it is an upward spiral of inspiration.”

However, the Obie Award-winning company’s distinctive character extends beyond the components on stage. (Jonathan Peck designed the sets for years; Florencia Escudero is the current stage artist.) From the beginning, the players have avoided adapting fairy tales or popular classics.

“Everything is original,” he says Kevin Richard Woodall, the company’s director, choreographer and longtime cast member. Among children’s companies, he added, “we’re really one of the only ones doing that.”

For decades, Martin, the company’s original artistic director, created many of the sketches with composer Donald Ashwander; Woodall and Stone have been writing material since 2009. The sketches often introduce fantastical elements into real-life environments: a subway car, a park bench, a kitchen with a leak (water drains from the plumber), or even a Paper Bag performance-within-the-show. If someone were to make a “Saturday Night Live” for kids, it would look like these shows.

Most seasons combine new skits with some of the players’ classics. The current production includes “Lost in the Mall,” a 1991 play starring what Stone calls “tube people” — Woodall and his fellow actors Ceili Fitzpatrick, Claire Lundin and Erika Mesa, all wrapped in cardboard — who keep hitting each other lose sight of.

In the audience, “the kids are just going crazy,” Stone said, as they see that in the family on stage, “this kid isn’t finding his parents, and the parents aren’t finding their kid again and again.” It won’t be long before little theatergoers are “ready to jump out of their seats and help,” he said.

Jumping out of chairs is a given at a Paper Bag show, for which Stone often writes sing-along and dance songs. Drawing on diverse influences such as ragtime, klezmer and Gilbert and Sullivan, he plays all the music himself, sitting on stage behind an electric keyboard.

He also provides sound effects, which can be playfully clunky for a character like the six-foot-tall Bob the Slob, a fan favorite who eats constantly and noisily. In the new sketch ‘I Won’, Bob uses bingo prize money for a ticket to the players’ show. When he is asked to fill in a number number, hilarity ensues.

Not all skits are boisterous. Each show features soft, lyrical pieces that land with the pure silence of snow. This year, the players revived one of their oldest: “Big Red Day” (1960), in which they guide the sun, clouds, a mountain and a house through changes, including variable weather. Night arrives when a player turns over a cardboard cloud to reveal a starry sky.

Ariane Anthony, director of the company, recalled that Martin compared such works to poetry. “Kids don’t have enough poetry in their lives,” Anthony said. “And they love poetry.”

Adolescents also admire it. In a telephone interview, Hannah Heijink, 16, a high school sophomore in Accord, N.Y., called the players’ work “a stress reliever, and not just for little kids.”

“As a teenager, I still love them,” said Heijink, whose parents know Stone and who grew up watching the shows.

The group’s directors attribute the company’s longevity to a commitment not to talk down to the public. “We want to enjoy ourselves,” Stone said. And while the players have struggled financially in recent years — the coronavirus pandemic, which halted all live performances, was a major hardship — they hope to return to an expanded schedule of public shows and touring. The majority of their current performances are for schools, which are a accompanying study guide.

But while children can learn from a Paper Bag production, its themes are less academic than social.

“In almost every show we have a piece that is about becoming friends, or getting to know someone who is very different from you,” Anthony said. “It’s a Marvelous Paper Bag World” includes “Volcano” (2011), which wryly subverts traditional tropes by featuring a dragon that is far from ferocious.

When kids attend a show, “I don’t care if they walk out and learn something,” Woodall said, “because I just want them to forget school for 55 minutes, forget everything.” Just come with us to Paper Bag World.”