Atlanta playwright Topher Payne offers retellings of classic children’s stories

“It was inspired during lockdown from a project done by the Atlanta Artist Relief Fund, where they were doing ‘Story Times’ at 5 o’clock a couple of days a week for kids at home,” said Payne. “I only had a certain number of children’s books in my house, and most of them were books from my own childhood, and one of them was Shel Silverstein’s ‘The Giving Tree.’ It’s a beautiful book, but also, even as a child, was not one of my favorites. I was very much ‘Team Tree,’ and felt like she really got a bum rap in that story…. So I created an alternate ending called ‘The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries.’”

“One of the frustrations that I have specifically about ‘The Giving Tree’ is that it’s often used as an example particularly to young women or girls about the nature of a loving relationship, and the tree ends up completely diminished by the end of that story,” said Payne. “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the original telling; what I’d hoped with the alternate endings… is, use the alternate as an opportunity to expand that discussion with the kid.”

Other takes on childhood classics:

“I did ‘The Rainbow Fish’ by Marcus Pfister, which is the story of a beautiful, glittering fish who gives away all of his beautiful, glittering scales to everyone else, so that they’ll like him. So I have ‘The Rainbow Fish Keeps His Scales,’ and ‘He Learns Not to Diminish Himself for the Comfort of Others.’”

“Then [there’s] ‘Love You Forever,’ which turned out to be, I guess, the official children’s book of Canada, based upon the response,” said Payne. “That one landed me on the national news in Canada defending myself…. The origin story of ‘Love You Forever’ by Robert Munsch is quite, quite sad. And I found that people were standing in defense in support of the book primarily because of the impulse that the author had behind writing it, which I thought was really, really interesting, and was really instructive for me on how people receive art; that it isn’t just what’s on the page…. I tried to just keep reminding people that the original books remain unaltered on your shelf. I haven’t taken anything away.”

Sad endings, happy endings and storytelling with nuance:

“There’s a reason that ‘Old Yeller’ traumatized all of us, and the loss of Bambi’s mother…. That’s the beautiful thing about children’s literature, when you have the relationship between the young person and the reader. When it’s a moment of connection between the two of them, there’s the opportunity to create a safe space to explore dangerous things.”

“This is very much art made in 2020 and 2021. This is taking that desire [for happy endings], that impulse, and just saying ‘You know what, let’s just explore the best possible outcome here. Let’s give ourselves the satisfaction of what the best possible outcome would look like,’ and I think we, culturally and individually, have kind of earned that lately,” said Payne. “That’s an itch that could really use a scratch right now, again, hoping that inspires conversation about the original work.”

“Kids are savvy. They may not know specifically why a story makes them cry, but giving them the alternate ending is an opportunity to allow for nuance to develop in a child’s brain; to understand the repercussions of choices.”

Payne’s “Topher Fixed It” parody children’s stories are available for download at topherpayne.com/fixed-it, with donations benefiting The Atlanta Artist Relief Fund.