The Wooden Heart

The last playbill in the cahier belongs to a heart made of wood. The Wooden Heart kept two kinds of evidence in the record: a cast photograph with the production's name on the file, and a video clip of a toy trio, three small figures that belonged to the same theatrical world.

What the sheet keeps

The cast photograph follows the company's habit: the people grouped, the set minimal, the image kept because it documented who was in the room. The toy-trio video is a stranger object, a short Windows Media file that appears to show the production's smaller characters, the kind of clip the site offered alongside its song files so that a school could see what it was booking.

Both files sit in the flat file structure the old site preferred, where every image and clip lived in one directory and the names did all the organising. WH for the heart, MW for the monster, DS for the dragon: the company's filing system was its own shorthand.

The story it was built to tell

A wooden heart is a character lesson waiting for varnish. The title promises the company's favourite move: take a thing that seems hard or unfeeling and find the warmth inside it. For the children in the audience, wooden hearts are everywhere once you start looking, which is the trick all of these plays played on the drive home.

The toy trio in the video extends the cast list downward in size. Small touring productions always need a character smaller than the smallest actor, and toys and puppets do that work. The record shows this company understood its scale: props built for gymnasiums, songs recorded for car rides, stories built for the walk back to the classroom.

The toys in the record

The toy-trio video hints at the production's second cast: the small characters played by objects rather than actors. A wooden heart is a story about things, and the things in it apparently walked and talked, three of them, filmed for the clips page like the humans were.

That is the signature scale of this company, the willingness to let a puppet carry a scene in a gymnasium full of five-year-olds. The record kept the toys in motion and the cast in a still; between the two, the whole production can be imagined.

The heart closes the playbill cahier with the company's signature transformation: the hardest material in the catalogue, plain wood, given the softest job. Across six productions the pattern holds steady, a frightening or cold or rigid thing revealed as warm. The wooden heart is the shortest file in the cahier but the clearest statement of what the company believed theatre for children was for.

The playbill's last line belongs to its material. Wood is what the company's own stagecraft was built from, painted flats and carved props carried in a van, and a play titled for a wooden heart reads like the troupe's quiet self-portrait: handmade, painted to last, and warmer than it looks on the shelf.

What the file names abbreviate, the catalogue completes: WH beside MW and DS and RB, a private alphabet in which the whole repertoire fit on one directory listing. The volume reads those initials as the company's own shorthand for its season, and keeps them unexpanded where the record left them.

How the volume files it

Bound last in Cahier I, closing the playbills. The record kept the heart's cast and its toys; it did not keep the play's reviews or its final performance. The cahier that follows binds what the company recorded for the shelf.

Cahier I · signature 4 of 4