Interview: Dylan Bailey of Seed Art Share's THE MANY ADVENTURES OF PETER RABBIT

Seed Art Share will be presenting Dylan Bailey's latest Theatre for Youth adaptation, THE MANY ADVENTURES OF PETER RABBIT, from September 11th-25th in community gardens throughout the Triangle area. Barbette Hunter directs this team made up of young actors and local talent who will be performing in 7 outdoor locations followed by a post-show family activity hosted by each garden. Partnering gardens include Garner Grows, The Raleigh City Farm, Joslin Garden, The Well Fed Community Garden, and the Pure Life Theatre Patio. Activities are specific to each garden space. So if you like planting seeds, farm animals, making garden art, cooking with fresh herbs, or outdoor scavenger hunts, you are sure to find one that your family will enjoy. I had the great pleasure of interviewing the playwright behind this particular stage adaptation about all of this and more.

Dylan Bailey is a Raleigh-based theatre artist. He holds a BFA in Theatre for Youth from East Carolina University. As a teaching artist, he's worked with RLT, Applause! Youth Theatre, NCT, Seed Art Share, TAP, and The ArtsCenter. In addition to teaching he's worked professionally as a freelance actor and theatre technician with Seed Art Share, Burning Coal Theatre, Pittsboro Youth Theatre, Theatre in the Park, and Summer Storybook Theatre. In 2018 he spent a summer performing abroad in Polish primary schools and at the Juwenalia Youth Festival in Krosno. Since 2016 he has worked as a teaching artist and facilitator with the Confident Voices program at Camp SAY: A Camp for Young People Who Stutter. When not on a stage or in a classroom, he enjoys writing and adapting new plays for young audiences.

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To start things off, how are things going with this project?
DB: Really well. Each night, we're in a different garden rehearsing so that the cast can get a sense of how each space is different. Last night, we were over in Joslin Garden in Raleigh, and it's a beautiful space. As we were kind of moving throughout, we start each rehearsal with a tour of the space to figure out where we can best tell the story. That's the space where we're going to have the post show activity be a scavenger hunt. We decided where we hope and dream the scavenger hunt is going to be starting because there's this beautiful spot. That's perfect for the Rabbit family to do a photo op with all of the audience members because it looks exactly like a rabbit hole. It looks like what you would imagine Mother Rabbit and all of her children would live in. So it was a really cool discovery that we made last night.

How did the idea of writing your own stage adaptation of Peter Rabbit come about?
DB: I went to school at East Carolina University and I got my degree in theater for youth, which was primarily a performance degree, so performing for youth. I also took classes and writing for youth, directing children, and teaching children. I had written a few Theater for Young Audiences plays. I was looking for a new project and I came upon the Peter Rabbit story when I was looking for my next project. It immediately brought me back to when I was five years old when my grandmother told me the Peter Rabbit story. She never actually read it to me, she always recited it. It was something that she had memorized and came to discover that there are so many other stories about Peter Rabbit and other books that Beatrix Potter wrote that are all kind of happening in the same universe. So I created a school tour adaptation. This was about three years ago and it toured some primary schools in Eastern North Carolina. Then about two years ago, I pitched the idea to Seed Art Share that it would be a wonderful play for perhaps a site-specific in a community garden. So pre-pandemic, we were working in the Welfare Community Garden in rehearsals with a wonderful cast. Some of them are still a part of the production now. But I think after our first rehearsal, that was when COVID really came in full force at the beginning of March of 2020. So we did a Zoom reading in collaboration with the Women's Theater Festival in the summer of 2020. That was kind of a developmental exploration of the script. Since then, we've had a lot of community gardens expressing interest. So we've created this idea of doing a site specific tour. So it's been interesting to see how the project has evolved. It started as a children's tour within the schools. Then it was a site specific production. Now it's a site-specific tour. So it feels like the kind of natural evolution.

As the whole world is slowly coming out of this pandemic, what does it mean to each of you to have this production presented to an in-person audience?
DB: Of course, we all know the moral of the one Peter Rabbit story that we all know is listen to your mother and don't go into the garden. So listening to the parents is a moral that we can take away from that story. But I think more so the kind of theme that transcends all the Beatrix Potter stories that she wrote is community and taking care of your community, looking after them, and being a good neighbor. I think in this year and a half of isolation, tension, and sometimes divisiveness even coming together at what is not the end of the pandemic. We're still at the smack dab in the middle of it, but we're getting more creative in the way that we do theater and how we can do it in person and safely. So I think it's just about the community coming together in community gardens.

Of the outdoor locations Peter Rabbit is going to be performed at, is there one in particular that you're most excited about?
DB: If there's one that I'm most excited about, all of them are special in their own way, it would have to be Garner Grows that we're exploring and performing in on September 11th. I'm super excited about that because Garner Grows Community Garden was displaced by the pandemic. So thanks to the Herculean sort of efforts of a team of volunteers, the gardens still now exist in these satellite locations in people's yards on their own personal properties. This is our second partnership with them in the past year. We hope that we can help them in a small way, get back on their feet so that they can exist in a community garden of their own. So I'm very excited about that and supporting them. On the 18th, we're going to Raleigh City Farm, which is a wonderful urban garden in downtown Raleigh. Jocelyn Garden, which Seed Art Share has performed several productions out in the past and is a wonderful space. Then going back to where it all started about two years ago to the Welfare Garden feels really special. Then on the 25th, I'm extremely excited about the Pure Life Theater Patio performances. There is no garden there yet, but their core leadership and Seed Art Share, we partner very closely. We've been talking about opening our stage with our outdoor patio space, and we are hoping that this will launch those efforts and our after performance activities will be planting seeds in the raised beds on the patio. So putting that idea finally into action with The Many Adventures of Peter Rabbit is what I'm excited about.

Going back to the beginning, how did you first get started in the theatre?
DB: I started acting when I was four years old. It was in a little Christmas pageant at Turner Memorial Baptist Church. It's a church that my great-grandfather was one of the founders of in Garner, North Carolina. I was a shepherd, I sang 'Joy to the World', and that's where it all started. A lot of the way I kept the arts in my life for several years after that was in elementary school music classes. I had a really fabulous elementary school music teacher. Her name was Ms. Bailey (who's no relation to me). She was also the dance instructor. She not only taught us how to play the recorder, but she also taught us all of the songs that we would sing. That was kind of how I kept the arts in my life until middle school when I finally was doing a lot of musical theater. In high school, I was lucky enough to go to Holly Springs High School, where the theater teacher at the time was Jerome Butner. He gave so much of himself to his students. He would direct us in six or seven afterschool productions a year, which is incredible and going above and beyond as a public school teacher. Then of course, I went to East Carolina University and got my degree in theater.

How did you come to be involved with Seed Art Share?
DB: The first experience I had with Seat Art Share was back in 2016. We did a production of A Night at the City of Raleigh Museum, I think three or four summers in a row, they did a summer production out there in downtown Raleigh. I performed as Sir Walter Raleigh in that production. It was a lot of fun. While I had this year and a half long stretch where I was playing a lot of really British, really pompous dudes with big hats, that was one of those performances where I met some really fantastic people. That was my first time doing a site-specific production that moved throughout the space and where the audience was really a huge part of the production and got to participate in all of it. It just felt like family. I had stayed in communication with Renee Wimberly, who is Seed Art Share's founder and executive director. When I graduated about two and a half years ago from ECU, I sent her an email saying that "I'm looking for work. Is there anything I can do to put me to work please?" She gave me some teaching artists opportunities, and from there, it was almost immediately that I suggested Peter Rabbit. I knew that they had done A Midsummer Night's Dream a handful of years earlier in the Rose Garden behind Raleigh Little Theatre and had heard about the production and how special it was. That got me thinking about the Peter Rabbit script that I had and how it could possibly exist in a community garden. She told me when I told her about that, that she had just told the Well Fed Community Garden that we would do Peter Rabbit out there in that community garden. So it was kind of serendipitous and it felt like everything had kind of fallen into place naturally that she had promised that we would do a production of Peter Rabbit. I had the script, so we came together, I've joined the board ,and now I'm Seed Art Share's managing director.

For those who have interest in writing plays themselves, where do you think would be a good place to start?
DB: A good place to start for anyone in theater is just to really pay attention. Whether you're an actor or a writer or any sort of theater artist, you should pay attention to the world around you. Live your life with your eyes wide and your ears wide open. I think theater artists are students of human observation. We come into contact with characters every day. Humans are performing as animals. I think that oftentimes perhaps observing a squirrel or observing a rabbit that comes through your yard, or if you're sitting in a park and observing those animals and how they behave and then personifying them, giving them a human voice and imagining what would that squirrel have to say and how does he behave? Things like that I think is how you start to get into the headspace of writing for young audiences. But ultimately, I think play acting starts when you're four years old and you pick up a blanket and you tie it around your neck and then it's a superhero. I think getting into that head space is a great way to start writing for young audiences. I'm lucky that I get to teach theater. So I'm with brilliant and creative young people almost every day and they keep me creative. They give me ideas all the time.

Dylan, I thank you very much for devoting your time to this interview. It was great getting to you.
DB: Yes, likewise. Thank you so much for making time for me! I hope that everyone will come out to see our production of The Many Adventures of Peter Rabbit.

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