Plays for Moppets

Though public elementary schools produce more plays than the commercial theater, the healthy miming of moppets has only lately been recognized as a field for magazine publishing.

When his eighth-grade nephew came home and announced that his class had produced three plays in one day, a young Boston adman and magazine publisher named A. S. Burack looked into the matter, found that 1) few good plays were written for children, 2) few schools could pay commercial royalties (averaging $5 a performance) for professional plays, 3) consequently most schools had to produce old chestnuts or the amateurish writings of pedagogues.

Burack started a monthly magazine, Plays, in which he undertook to supply subscribers with 150 royalty-free children's plays a year, all for $3. With a 23-year-old Harvard man, S. Emerson Golden, as editor, the magazine was launched last fall and now has a circulation of 8,500. Its plays have an estimated monthly audience of 500,000 moppets.

Written by professional playwrights, the plays deal with history, lessons in courtesy, health, science, heroes, the war. Paying $15 to $25 for a play, Burack has so far attracted a few well-known writers (Paul Green, Gladys Hasty Carroll) who find writing for children fun, and many an obscure playwright who hopes to get attention. Last week one of them clicked: the U.S. Treasury Department was so impressed with a play about defense bonds (You Can Count On Us) by an unknown named Bernard J. Reines that it ordered 50,000 copies, will distribute them to public schools throughout the land.

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