Riddle Tales / Readers Theater

I'll be doing a Readers Theater workshop in July as part of the MYFest project sponsored by the great people at Equity Unbound, and this will be the fifth year (!) that we are doing readers theater! We started back in 2022 just as an experiment, and we've done it every year since then. You can see some of our scripts here: Scripts.LauraGibbs.net. I hope to be doing a lot of work with readers theater this year, including plays in Latin (that is something new for me)... and the reason I am writing about all this here is because I decided to choose riddle tales as the theme for our readers theater this summer!

I think that will be a great choice, because riddle tales offer a wonderful opportunity for audience involvement, which is the goal of readers theater. Can the audience guess the riddle on their own? Or will they have to wait and see what happens? I really like the idea that the play's narrator can challenge the audience that way in the flow of the events, giving them some time to think and ponder on their own to see what they can figure out. The goal is not to shout out the answer, though, because you don't want to spoil the ending for people who haven't figure it out (yet). Instead, the goal is just to pause and let the audience know that they might be able to guess the answer on their own! And the narrator can even nudge them with clues and hints, the way that riddles can have clues and hints too, not just a "gotcha!" answer.

So, to get ready to do this, I rounded up what books I could find that feature riddle tales. This is what I found: please let me know if you have other suggestions to add to the list! The items in bold are linked to the Internet Archive where they are available for borrowing, and I am pleased to say that all but 2 of the books are available!

1. Abrahams, Roger. Between the Living and the Dead. (A folkloric index of over 400 riddles that tell stories; this is the only book on the list that is not a book for young readers.)
2. Dundas, Marjorie. Riddling Tales from Around the World.
3. Jaffe, Nina and Steve Zeitlin. The Cow of No Color: Riddle Stories and Justice Tales from Around the World.
4. Jaffe, Nina and Steve Zeitlin. While Standing on One Foot: Puzzles Stories and Wisdom Tales from the Jewish Tradition.
5. Mbe, Taffy Thomas. The Riddle in the Tale.
6. Shannon, George. Stories to Solve.
7. Shannon, George. More Stories to Solve.
8. Shannon, George. Still More Stories to Solve. 
9. Shannon, George. True Lies: Tales for You to Judge.
10. Shannon, George. More True Lies.

Here are some of the books with their lovely covers, and I'll be writing up blog posts about each one as I go looking for riddle tales that lend themselves to readers theater!