Spokane playwright brings life of ‘Winnie the Pooh’ and his Hundred Acre Wood friends to life on Spokane Children’s Theatre stage

Playwright Cynda Weitz didn’t always have plans to write a play inspired by the adventures of Winnie the Pooh and his friends, but that changed in 2022.

After A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh” entered the public domain, Weitz saw a trailer for “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey,” a horror parody featuring the beloved characters. Upset by what she saw, Weitz decided to put pen to paper and bring the characters back to the Hundred Acre Wood as it originally was.

Growing up with a special teddy bear herself, Weitz felt similar to Christopher Robin and his desire to create adventures for his stuffed toys. On the other side, having children nearly finished with high school also reminded Weitz of Milne’s desire to preserve his son’s childhood and imagination through the “Winnie the Pooh” stories.

“I feel like that’s missing in most of the iterations I’ve seen is the power of the imagination and also this parental want to preserve childhood,” she said.

To fill that gap in stories involving Pooh and his friends, Weitz wrote “Winnie the Pooh,” taking inspiration from the 1926 book of the same name as well as 1928’s “The House at Pooh Corner,” which entered the public domain in 2024.

Weitz’s “Winnie the Pooh” opens Friday and runs through Jan. 26 at Spokane Children’s Theatre. The show is written and directed by Weitz and stage managed by Joshua Domrese.

“Winnie the Pooh” stars Lucy Tillery as Pooh, Anna Carr as Piglet, Jude Hood as Christopher Robin, Elizabeth Hoffman as Rabbit, Charlotte Tillery as Eeyore, Stone Thorne as Tigger, Jessica Chavez as Kanga, Quinn Labusohr as Roo, Maile Quisano as Owl and as Kelsey Rushing as the parent.

The ensemble features Adam Chavez, Adrian Cheeseman, Jasmine Romesburg, Hope McNeillis, Dahlia Pham, Theodore Aaron, Madeleine Klingback, Mischa Seim, Aubrey LaBelle, Anastasia Ingoldby, Aevery McMullin, David Bremer, Alister Goldsmith, Ashlianne Mjelde, Clover Murphey and Vera Woods.

Wanting to stay as true as possible to the source material, Weitz took nearly every spoken line from the text. Some elements of the short stories were rearranged for a more cohesive story.

Research into the lives of Milne and Christopher Robin helped inform how to present “Winnie the Pooh” on stage. The role of the parent acts as a narrator, Weitz said, showing that Milne was recreating stories from his son’s imagination.

There’s a desire, she found, often from parent and child, to remember those imaginative bursts of creativity that happen when a child plays.

“There’s a line where (Christopher Robin) says, ‘I mean, I kind of remember, but then it’s just remembering. But when you tell me a story, it’s like it’s real,’ ” Weitz said. “He wanted to rehear these stories that he had told his parent. But we forget. Our parents have kept notes of it, and they remember. ‘Oh, remember when this happened’ and then you go ‘Oh, yeah, that happened.’ It recreates for the audience this dynamic of the parent and the child revisiting the stories of childhood.”

The generational appeal of Winnie the Pooh, the character and the stories, made it a “no-brainer,” according to Spokane Children’s Theatre Executive Director Tanya Brownlee, to include Weitz’s play in this season.

In fact, some of the younger cast members were initially upset with some of Weitz’s choices because she wrote with Milne’s short stories in mind, not the Disney portrayals they were more familiar with.

Even if members of the cast and crew don’t watch “Winnie the Pooh,” they all understand the relationship between Christopher Robin and his treasured friends and have a special stuffed animal of their own.

During an early rehearsal, Weitz brought in her special teddy bear and invited everyone to bring in their favorite stuffed animal and introduce it to the rest of the cast and crew. Before their final dress rehearsal, the cast and crew will bring in those stuffed animals and dedicate the performance to them.

“We’ve all got that stuffie that we love and that to us meant more than just a toy,” Weitz said. “It was more. It was a companion and part of our creativity and part of the stories of our youth.

“For some of these kids, their youth is still happening, and they’re still actively in it. But for the teens, I feel like even when they sometimes act really cool, when I asked them to bring in their stuffies, they all had somebody in mind.”

Heightening the perspective of childhood even more, the set involves forced perspective to make ordinary things, like a tree at center stage, seem larger than life when compared to things like the doors to the characters’ homes.

“Once the curtain opens, everything you’re seeing, you’re seeing through the eyes and through the mind of Christopher Robin,” Weitz said. “When the curtain is closed, you’re seeing everything from an adult perspective.”

The fact that both children and adults can see themselves in these characters goes back to that generational appeal of “Winnie the Pooh” that made Brownlee and the rest of the theater team so eager to produce the show.

Brownlee and Weitz said though “Winnie the Pooh” is a children’s show, it’s not just for children.

“Everyone is going to get something different from it, because it does, throughout the show, show the different eras of life,” Weitz said. “We see Christopher Robin’s perspective. We see A.A. Milne’s perspective, and then we see, sort of as an older person at the very end, how that perspective changes and shifts. I feel like it’s for everybody … Anybody who’s ever been a child or loves a child, so everybody. ‘Winnie the Pooh’ is for everybody.”