Researching Someone's Theatrical Legacy: What It Actually Looks Like
Susan Babers built a long career working at the intersection of theatre and education. She was among the people who pushed children's theatre from novelty into something with real artistic and pedagogical structure. The work she did, especially with the Children's Theatre Company of San Francisco and related educational initiatives, wasn't widely documented in mainstream sources. That's the kind of gap you run into when you actually try to write about someone like her. The first thing you need to understand is that this kind of research doesn't follow a clean path. There's no central database of theatre-for-youth pioneers. There are scattered archives, oral histories that may or may not have been preserved, program brochures from defunct companies, and people who were there who might still remember things. You go where the records are. Start with the San Francisco Bay Area archives. The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive holds some theatre-related materials from that era. The California History Room at the Stanford Library has fragments of regional theatre documentation. The Theatre Library at UC Berkeley is another starting point, though its holdings on children's theatre specifically are limited. You'll spend more time writing emails and making phone calls than you'll spend browsing shelves.
When I was piecing together information about the Children's Theatre Company of San Francisco's early programming, I hit a wall pretty quickly. The company's own records from the 1960s and 70s weren't organized in any obvious place. What I ended up doing was tracking down performers and crew members who had worked with the company during that period, reading through regional newspaper archives for review snippets, and cross-referencing festival programs from the International children's Theatre Festival that ran in various California cities. It took about three weeks of actual digging before I had enough material to feel confident about writing a coherent account. One thing beginners miss when they start this work: the assumption that a person's legacy lives in published materials. For someone like Susan Babers, most of what matters exists in institutional memory rather than print. The educational workshops she designed, the way she approached casting choices for young audiences, the curriculum materials that circulated through school districts — none of that was necessarily published. It was shared informally within networks of theatre educators who were building this field from scratch. That informal network is the actual archive. Reach out to people connected to National Alliance for Theatre and Education. Contact professors in drama education programs at universities that had ties to the Bay Area theatre scene. The San Francisco State University theatre department, the UC Berkeley drama program, and programs at CalArts all have historians or alumni who might have relevant information. Don't just ask general questions. Ask specific ones: Did they encounter her work? Did they study any particular productions or curricula? Who else might remember?
There's a practical problem with this approach that most people don't anticipate. By the time you're researching someone whose active period was the 1960s through the 1980s, the people who could provide firsthand accounts are now elderly or have passed away. Response rates to cold emails from unknown researchers are low. I've found that joining professional organizations like TYA (Theatre for Young Audience/USA, now part of UNESCO-ASSITEJ network) and posting in their member forums yields significantly better results than individual outreach. People in that community tend to be more willing to help because they understand that this history is disappearing. Another counter-intuitive detail: the most valuable documents often aren't about Susan Babers directly. They're program notes, production histories, and annual reports from the organizations she worked with. These materials contain references to her contributions embedded in routine administrative writing. A season summary from 1974 might mention her workshop design in a single paragraph, but that paragraph can be the only surviving record of how she approached dramaturgy for young audiences at that time. The downside of this kind of research is that you'll spend considerable time hitting dead ends. Some material simply doesn't exist anymore. Theatres from that era didn't preserve programme books with the same consistency they do now. Educational materials were distributed, used, and discarded rather than archived. You should expect to fill maybe 30% of what you need from direct documentation and get the rest from inference, secondhand accounts, and contextual reconstruction. That's just how it works for this period of theatre history.
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If you're writing about her impact, the strongest angle isn't a biography. It's situating her work within the broader movement of theatre for young audiences in California. Her contributions make more sense when you understand what the field looked like before professionalization. Children's theatre was largely amateur, often tied to religious or community organizations, with little attention to artistic quality or educational rigor. The people who started taking it seriously — Babers included — were building something that had no model to follow. That context matters more than any single production or achievement. The practical takeaway is straightforward. Start with institutional archives in the Bay Area. Then move to personal networks through professional organizations. Treat newspapers and program materials as primary sources even when they don't mention your subject directly. And accept that you'll never have everything. The gaps in the record are part of what this kind of work looks like.
