Kyle Becker (at right, in case you couldn’t tell) with’Wizard of Oz’ castmembers. Photos courtesy of TKTC Photographers.
Theatre was salvation for Kyle Becker, a salvation from which he strayed, only to have it find him again while he tended bar at a country club, which led to his founding The Kids Theatre Company, which is making that sweet salvation available to the next generation.
“I had zero purpose in life prior to theatre, so the idea that I could do that for another child was mind-blowing,” he says. “[…] I see a light that goes on when a kid figures something out.”
But we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning.
***
Young Kyle Becker never fit in. His childhood memories are not good ones. That is, until he started doing kids’ theatre at age 9.
“I was bullied as a kid—picked on, teased, beaten up, whatever,” he recalls. “You know, I played baseball, I loved baseball, but I was terrible at it. It wasn’t until I got into theatre [that I] found this positive outlet, found my niche and really felt that team atmosphere.”
By 15 he was a student director for the Young People’s Theatre Company of San Jose. Within two years he was a full-blown partner in the company, which was funded by the City of San Jose. Eventually he was running the ship, which he piloted until he left for Los Angeles in 2000.
But something funny happened on the way to his career as a theatre mentor for kids: he got sidetracked by pragmatic concerns and impractical dreams.
“I came to L.A. to go to college and Long Beach State ’cause I wanted to get my degree,” he remembers. “[…] I took theatre classes, but I chickened out and majored in communications. […] But I wanted to be an actor, I wanted to do stand-up, I wanted to do that whole thing. And then someone asked me a question: ‘Do you want to act, or do you want to be famous?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I’ve been chasing the wrong dream here.’ I don’t think I wanted to act—I think I just wanted some fame. You know, I was young, immature. But then something clicked.”
The prelude to that “click” came while working as a bar manager at the Virginia Country Club. On Friday nights the bar would be slow due to a weekly bistro event out on the patio, so Kyle would entertain members’ kids in the bar by playing various games with them. He was so good with them that when parents would come to fetch their kids, they would be reluctant to leave. After a couple of Fridays like this, one family asked him: “What are you doing with my kids?”
“It came up while talking with one of the members that I used to run a kids’ theatre company in the Bay Area,” Kyle says. “[…] Some members [of the country club] said they thought it might be fun to have something like that there.”
A meeting with the country club’s owner led to a small workshop that led to about a dozen kids performance scenes from Alice in Wonderland in the country club’s foyer. “It was a foyer full of members laughing and having cocktails,” Kyle laughs. “They loved it.
A 30-kid performance of The Wizard of Oz came next. “Then we did Peter Pan,” Kyle says, “and 30 kids became 50 kids. And at this point we had, like, little kids running through the ladies’ locker room. It just got too distracting [for the membership].”
Kyle regards outgrowing the country club as a blessing in disguise.
“I always had in the back of his mind that this would grow beyond country club,” he says. “I didn’t like the idea that this was going to be available only to the members’ kids. I wanted everybody to be exposed to this. […] The community needed something like this.”
Many of the parents of kids with whom Kyle had worked urged Kyle to carry on.
“There were probably about 40 families, [including] members of the country club and some local private schools, who were really excited about it and said, ‘If you’re not going to be at the club, what’s next?'” he says. “And they helped me find these theatres. […] We were at the Liberty Theatre for a minute, at the Scottish Rite for a minute [until] they got kind of pricy. And then Los Cerritos Elementary School stepped up.”
It went like that for a while, and word got around. Kyle was then asked whether he could something exclusively for Lowell Elementary School. He did, and the response was huge.
“I did a workshop there, and there were a hundred kids,” he laughs. “I had to bring extra staff in. It was insane.”
The Kids Theatre Company was beginning to bloom, but the lack of a dedicated space was a hindrance.
“Really the hard thing was the rehearsals,” he says. “You could find any theatre to rent for the weekend to rehearse, but for kids it was very difficult, because they need stability. They need to know, ‘I enter from this side of the building, then I come to this part of the stage.’ It’s very hard to get them to understand that this taped-off carpet in the rehearsal hall [represents] the stage, you know? So it was very difficult to make it work. But we stayed afloat. And then I met Blair.”
He’s talking about Blair Cohn, of course, executive director of the Bixby Knolls Business Improvement Association. A meeting was set up through mutual friends. It was a rainy night, Kyle says. His car was broken, so took train down from L.A., then walked to meet Blair at Hof’s Hut.
“We had this great conversation where I told him what I did, and he told me what his vision for the EXPO was, and they totally jibed,” Kyle says.
The BKBIA was active in programming at the EXPO, and Cohn thought a kids’ theatre company would be a great fit.
“We had the Long Beach Shakespeare Company in the EXPO building, plus the two art galleries,” Cohn recalls. “I thought a kids’ theater company would be a ‘good story to tell’ to the City about how we were using the space.”
“We started rehearsing there in 2009, and I stored all my scenery there, but I never saw us performing there because the building was so naked at the time,” Kyle says. “There weren’t even any walls at that point. But we started performing there in January 2010, and that was when everything kind of started blowing up.”
As TKTC grew, so did Kyle’s ambition, in the form of producing original work.
“I got a wild hair two or three years ago,” he recounts. “I said, ‘I’m sick of doing Cinderella, I’m sick of doing The Wizard of Oz, sick of doing Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. [Then] my buddy told me, ‘I work at this school on the East Coast, and we did Star Wars.’ I said, ‘Really, as a play?’ He was it was really fun. […] I got to thinking that maybe I could do these, like, mash-ups. And the kids are crazy about it. I mean, this Muppets/Avengers show [The Muppets & Avengers Save the World, TKTC’s April production] is so fun, it is so fun to direct.”
Kyle says his scripts are tailor-made for his castmembers, and that every kid who wants to tries out gets a part.
“There are two things about me,” he says: “I have a huge, difficult time saying ‘no’; and I never want to hurt anyone’s feelings. So I’ll never cut anybody. […] Everything I do with the kids is completely built for them. I write the scripts after the auditions, [because] I write the part for the kid. […] I try to make every character as exciting as every other. […] Even though [what we’re doing is] a play, I really run this company like it’s a kind of team. There’s no one star, there’s nothing built around one person—it’s all of us. We’re all working for the common good.”
An important part of that common good is for the kids to feel valued and that they are in a safe environment—an aspect of the experience that’s extra important to him, in light of the bullying he experienced as a child.
“We’re huge into anti-bullying,” he emphasizes. “There’s a whole thing in our literature about how TKTC is a safe place. […] I just loved the gift [theatre] gave me—that sense of belonging, the purpose, the confidence, the self-esteem, the communication skills, the ability to be creative.”
As a result of his efforts, Kyle says he’s gotten “countless e-mails” from parents of children with autism, ADHD, etc., who found a sort of salvation in TKTC.
Sandy McFadyen says her son Stephan, a 14-year-old with autism, is a case in point.
“When Stephan started with Kyle, he had problems focusing and following direction,” McFadyen says. “He also had some speech problems. His growth in these areas just amazes me and I credit TKTC for helping him in these areas. He also was bullied in school. He developed close friendships in TKTC and feels he can be himself without judgment and threats from other kids.”
{loadposition latestlife}”A common thread that I hear from parents is, ‘We tried this and this and this and this, and none of it worked,’ Kyle relates. “‘They didn’t like any of it. They were teased, they felt like they didn’t have anywhere to go. My kid had no passion about anything until he found this.’ And that’s awesome. […] Seeing that come to fruition is incredibly rewarding.”
Kyle’s “cast everyone/always say ‘yes'” leads to consistently big casts and an equally consistently busy schedule. Kyle says that all told he may work with as many as 250 kids on a given day and stages 12 to 15 shows per year (plus the comedy troupe); and that 30 to 35 kids is a small, with 65 kids (the number in his most recent production) being typical.
“A day off for me is just a day I don’t have to drive to Long Beach,” he says. “But I’m still working even then, you know?”
But he wouldn’t have it any other way, as the man who not so long ago believed he would never get back into theatre reluctantly invokes the B-word to describe his life.
“We are truly, like, a blessed theatre company,” he says. “I hate using that word, but when one bad thing happened or when I thought something was being taken away from us, five other awesome doors opened. […] This thing started […] and it was really a dream come true. It allowed me to have a life beyond my wildest dreams that I never really knew I wanted.”
Lucky for Kyle; lucky for his kids.
For more info on The Kids Theatre Company, including upcoming performances—including this weekend’s The Muppets & Avengers Save the World—visit tktcbuzz.com.
Photos: Right – TKTC production of ‘The Wizard of Oz’. Left – TKTC production ‘The Addams Family’s Monster Mash!’