Comedy, TYA 6-17 performers Simple Set Everyone's favorite gumshoe is back with another thrilling adventure! Old Granny Possum is entertaining us with her slightly irregular version of "Snow White and Just the Two Very Tall Dwarves" when she's kidnapped by Bluebeard and his band of scurvy pirates! Thank goodness Nick Tickle has been hired to get her back. Can he outwit the kidnappers and save her or is she gone for good? He'll need any help he can get with this tough case - fortunately, Pu

Granny can't tell her favorite fairy tales because someone really cruel and evil is stealing all the props! Breadcrumbs, magic beans, a basket of goodies, a glass slipper - all missing! The future of fairy tales is at stake, and it's up to the title character to set things right. With detective reasoning and his connections to the fairy tale underworld, plus some dumb luck, Nick Tickle sets out to locate the Mysterious Figure who's been pilfering all the props! He may

Pity poor Streptococcus - it should be a piece of cake for a fairy godmother to tell the story of Snow White but her wand is bent and things aren't going quite as they should. Then, to make things worse, she's interrupted by a couple of English policemen who are hot on the trail of two very devious and dangerous criminals - children who are causing no end of trouble in the forest. Their names? Hansel and Gretel! Streptococcus doesn't believe a word of it and neither do a well-behaved pair of kiddies in the audience who volunteer to help her tell Hansel and Gretel's familiar tale. But before everyone lives happily ever after, the police insist on having their say and the well-behaved kiddies aren't happy about that at all... Since there are lots of parts (10 for girls, 5 for boys, and 10 for either), everyone gets a role and since a single forest set is all that's needed for this 60 minute show, it's easy to produce. This is a great fun twist on the familiar, favorite tale.

The contributors to this volume share the assumption that popular narrative, when viewed with an evolutionary lens, offers an incisive index into human nature. In theory, narrative art could take a near infinity of possible forms. In actual practice, however, particular motifs, plot patterns, stereotypical figures, and artistic devices persistently resurface, indicating specific predilections frequently at odds with our actual living conditions. Our studies explore various media and genres to gauge the impact of our evolutionary inheritance, in interdependence with the respective cultural environments, on our aesthetic appreciation. As they suggest, research into mass culture is not only indispensable for evolutionary criticism but may also contribute to our understanding of prehistoric selection pressures that still influence modern preferences in popular narrative. Contributions by David Andrews, James Carney, Mathias Clasen, Brett Cooke, Tamás Dávid-Barrett, Tom Dolack, Kathryn Duncan, Isabel Behncke Izquierdo, Joe Keener, Alex C. Parrish, Todd K. Platts, Anna Rotkirch, Judith P. Saunders, Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, Dirk Vanderbeke, and Sophia Wege.