La Comédie des Enfants de Cœur, A Children's Theater Without Borders

Ink drawing: three children singing together, red music notes rising above them.

About

Our name plays on enfants de chœur, the children of the choir, France's altar servers. Change one letter, chœur to cœur, and the choir becomes the heart: enfants de cœur, the children of the heart.

Many voices, each one different, hold a harmony together. Sometimes one voice has to be brave, leave the chord, and sing a note that sounds wrong until the others move to meet it. That is how music grows. We believe it is how communities grow. In our theater, that voice belongs to a child, and to the child in each of us.

La Comédie des Enfants de Cœur was founded by Benjamin Crockett in Paris in 2026. It grows out of an earlier company, Le Théâtre des Éphémères, which worked in Los Angeles from 2014 to 2016.

Ink drawing: three children around a blue book, watching a castle take shape in the air above it.

The Ensemble

We are an ensemble gathered from around the world, trained in Paris, Los Angeles, Moscow, and Boston, and at the center of the ensemble are children. They act, invent, design, and decide alongside the adults, and the stories we tell begin with theirs. Some of us have worked in theaters for decades. Some of us will walk onto a stage for the first time. Both belong.

We make plays for children and for the grown-ups who come in with them, built for the whole room.

Ink drawing: children put on a play in a street, one painting a bright yellow sun on a backdrop.

In Development

Le Pays Retrouvé

Proust's search for lost time, retold as a fairy tale by children far from home. The fairy tales are Hans Christian Andersen's. The memories belong to the children.

The play is being composed from what these children carry with them: memories, fears, and dreams, shared with their families' blessing, shaped into fairy tales and woven through In Search of Lost Time. In Paris, the cast is forming. In Los Angeles, the ensemble is developing the script through staged readings and études, the rehearsal studies of the Moscow Art Theatre tradition, bringing the story slowly to life.

First presentation planned for Paris, December 2026.

Contact

The children of our ensemble appear on our stages, never on our website. That is why this site is drawn.

We will be traveling. Come and see.

La Comédie des Enfants de Cœur

info@comediedesenfantsdecoeur.org

Paris, France