Missoula News

Missoula Children's Theatre Documentary

Showing Kids an Open Road on “The Little Red Truck”

By Jessica Mayrer, 2-13-08

Click the image above to view the trailer for The Little Red Truck.

“Nobody likes me because I smell like feet,” young, boisterous actors shout out one after the other. The director then tells them to holler like a scary monster that lives in the closet. So begins the documentary about the Missoula Children’s Theatre The Little Red Truck by Missoula filmmakers Pam Voth and Rob Whitehair, set to be released at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

MCT has taken its show on the road for more than 30 years, empowering kids in communities around the world. They pull their red trucks into towns, hold auditions, rehearse tirelessly, and after six days a cast of little actors hits the stage in front of family and friends—and they’re all a little different than they were just six days before.

The Little Red Truck follows the tour through five communities as kids rehearse and struggle with a range of challenges from reading difficulties to shyness and overcome them, and their courage and new sense of limitlessness is deftly captured.

This is a unique experience, Whitehair says, because funds for the arts are becoming scarcer and scarcer. “This is the only art they get for the whole year…they just eat it up.”

Much of MCT’s mission rests upon the idea that the arts, and especially the performing arts, teach commitment and teamwork. As tour actor/director Corey Roberts says in the film, “We’re teaching them life skills through theatre.”

“I grew up with access to just about every type of art that I wanted,” Whitehair says. “It really formulated who I am today in most of what I do and who I am…some kids have to travel for 50-100 miles just for the one experience.”

The film documents MCT’s journeys across North America, from Americus, Georgia to an Inuit village in Northern Canada. “We wanted a slice of Americana,” Whitehair says. “If you were to open this as a book, you would turn the pages and say, ‘Hey this is America.’”

And it’s through the eyes of children.

Austin, 13, learned skills through MCT that helped him navigate out of the gang life that had already entrapped him. “I don’t want to live on the streets,” he says.

In Canada, 12-year-old Alex, legally blind, holds a well-worn script close to her face. She learns the lines so well—to her parents’ surprise—she whispers them to forgetful stage mates.

“For that one time, that kid gets an equal chance, a chance to succeed,” Whitehair says. Children say, “‘Wow I can actually do something.’ It’s pretty remarkable.”

Chances are an adult told to memorize a 50-page script in the allotted time would laugh, believing it impossible, Whitehair says. But children don’t see those parameters, and because they are less constrained by expectations, they learn the script quickly.

“At what point do we lose that ability to do that?” Whitehair asks, “To say, ‘Oh, anything is possible.’”

Two years ago MCT development director Cate Sundeen presented Voth and Whitehair with the idea of filming MCT’s tour. “We had no idea what those little red trucks”—the ones so ubiquitous in Missoula—“actually do,” Whitehair says. “And when she told us, my jaw dropped.”

“It just seemed like such an immense story. I was just so enamored with doing this.”

Three hundred hours of footage, shot over the course of a year and a half, were condensed into a 98-minute film, and Whitehair’s greatest heartache was to have to cut anything at all.

MCT asked the filmmakers to portray the tour experience with “warts and all,” and it’s those warts that make the end result—the performance on Day Six (and the film itself)—that much more powerful.

MCT helped raise funds to produce the film, and its proceeds will be split between the filmmakers and the theater. Missoula musicians Tom Catmull and the Clerics recorded a song for the film, and much of the soundtrack is performed by Whitehair.

Missoulians often don’t realize what a great resource they have in their backyard, and many don’t know the scope of MCT’s work, the filmmakers say.

“It’s been fabulous, the feedback,” Voth says. “So many people are surprised with how immense the MCT is.”

The filmmakers are thrilled to be telling the MCT’s story to Missoulians and people across the country. 

“It’s just one week out of (a kid’s) life, but the thing that they get out of that is something they can take with them for the rest of their lives.” Whitehair said.

The first screening of The Little Red Truck will be Saturday, February 16 at 2:30 at The Wilma during the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

For more information, and to view the trailer, visit www.thelittleredtruck.com.

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