A practical library for the rehearsal room.
The Young Stage is a curated index of resources for directors and educators working with child performers under fourteen. Every link points to the original publisher — the people who actually wrote the games, adapted the scripts, or recorded the warm-ups.
Resources are filtered into three working age bands (5–7, 8–10, 11–13) and seven categories — drama games, improv, short plays, reader's theater, Shakespeare, songs, and voice & movement — so you can find something usable in under a minute.
We don't host third-party content. We don't claim authorship. We just point you to the best of what's out there, the way a thoughtful colleague would.
Open by default.
We believe information about how to teach, rehearse and direct young performers should be open — discoverable, citable, and free at the point of use. Theater education is already under-resourced; the last thing a volunteer director or first-year drama teacher needs is a paywall between them and a warm-up that works.
So this site indexes openly published material and credits its authors clearly. We'd rather send you straight to a teacher's blog or a library's lesson plan than rewrite their work and stamp our name on it.
This will always be free.
Browsing The Young Stage will never cost anything. No accounts to read, no rate limits, no "unlock the full library" nag — the whole index, forever, free.
That's a commitment, not a marketing line. If we ever can't keep that promise, we'll say so plainly and explain why.
Memberships, donations, and (maybe) ads.
Curating, hosting, and growing a library like this still has costs. To cover them — and to fund the work of adding more resources, more languages, and more depth — we're planning a few optional support paths:
- Memberships — a paid tier for educators and programs who want extras like printable lesson packs, curated thematic playlists, and early access to new sections. The free index stays untouched.
- Donations — one-off support from individuals, schools, and theaters who want to keep the project running. Every dollar goes to research, hosting, and paying contributors.
- Ads — under consideration. We're weighing whether tasteful, education-aligned advertising could help keep the site free and independent. If we ever introduce ads, they'll be clearly labeled, never tracked across the web, and never aimed at children.
The bar is simple: any way we make money has to keep the resource itself free, the experience uncluttered, and the trust of the educators using it intact. If something doesn't clear that bar, we won't do it.
Aidan Yates.
Aidan is a B.F.A. candidate in Drama at The New School, with earlier training at Temple University and the University of the Arts in acting, directing, and playwriting. He has spent the past few years working with young performers — mentoring teens through new-musical devising at Yes! And… Collaborative Arts in Philadelphia, and running drama, music, and mindfulness programs as a counselor at Camp Tuku and Camp Chief Ouray — and holds a certificate in Social, Emotional, and Ethical Learning from Emory University. He started The Young Stage because the resources he kept reaching for in rehearsal were scattered, paywalled, or just hard to find.
Tell us what we're missing.
If you're a director, teacher, or publisher with a resource we should know about — or a correction to something we've indexed — we want to hear from you. A contributor portal is in the works; in the meantime, head back to the home page and start exploring.