God willing, none of the children who will see ‘‘The Yellow Boat’’ during its three-week run at Childsplay's Tempe theater will ever know what it feels like to be 6 years old and facing a disease that is unchartered territory for the medical community, frightening enough to turn usually rational adults into bigots and, ultimately, fatal.

But to be Benjamin Saar, says his father, was to be defined by life and artistry and joy, not death and dying. And that is what David Saar, founder and artistic director of the East Valley's internationally lauded children's theater company that is celebrating its 25th anniversary this season, tried to capture when he began writing the play as an ode to his son back in 1993.

‘‘It is a play about using art to help celebrate living, and that’s a universal joy for kids and adults — at least, it should be,’’ says Saar, 56, a tall, animated man whose book- and memento-filled office overlooks Tempe's ‘‘A’’ Mountain. ‘‘I wish ‘The Yellow Boat’ to be, ultimately, a celebration of living.’’

Benjamin was one more new thing for his father and mother, a fiber artist, in a year of firsts. By the end of 1979, the couple were parents and homeowners and had made the leap from artists with day jobs to artists who depended on their art to sustain them full time.

Childsplay was in its second full year, and the company that had begun as an exit requirement for Saar’s ASU graduate-school program was still a couple of years away from hitting its stride.

‘‘Our first long-term gig was at the Phoenix Zoo,’’ says Saar, the clarity of his pale blue eyes emphasized by the sky-blue frames of his glasses. ‘‘At one point, we shared a dressing room with an alligator. From those early experiences, we began to build.’’

By the time Childsplay had its breakout season in 1981-82 — the year it was selected as a site for a prestigious six-week Kennedy Center program — Benjamin was a toddler as well as a budding artist and less-than-cautious hemophiliac.
Drawing, Saar says, became a language for his son.

‘‘He sort of chronicled his life from the age of 2 or 3, just drawing, drawing, drawing,’’ he says. ‘‘It was often a coping mechanism. He was a very active child, which just doesn’t mix well with hemophilia. When he was in the hospital and couldn’t be out being active, he sort of filled that time with drawing and playing in his imagination.’’

And when at the age of 6 he became one of Arizona’s earliest AIDS cases after a transfusion with tainted blood, drawing became a way for Benjamin to express his fear, his frustration and, most important, says Saar, his creativity, wisdom and joy.

‘‘This was very early in the epidemic; it was the time of Ryan White,’’ Saar says. ‘‘Little was known about AIDS, and an even smaller amount was known about pediatric AIDS. With Benjamin, the doctors were learning along with the patient.
‘‘It was a gift he gave,’’ Saar continues, ‘‘that he was such a spirit that he helped the doctors see the kid and not his illness. Through his spirit and the careful distribution of his drawings, he really pulled together an amazing support team in the last two years of his life.’’

The physical and emotional toll of Benjamin’s illness was compounded by a general lack of understanding — plus a near-panic that mimicked that in communities nationwide — of the disease and the ways it can be transferred from one person to another.

Saar prefers to talk about the positives that came out of that period of his family’s life, but the truth is, there was ugliness along with the beauty. Like Ryan White, Benjamin was forced out of his elementary school by the fear and ignorance of a community that, in retrospect, perhaps can’t be faulted for not understanding a disease that even doctors couldn’t fully comprehend at the time.

But between a hospital stay in mid-1986 and his death in September 1987 at the age of 8, Benjamin had a happy and relatively healthy year at Broadmoor Elementary in Tempe, where he had transferred. After being only the 12th child in the country selected for the earliest pediatric AZT trial and being unable to tolerate the drug, Benjamin, says Saar, began to deteriorate physically.
Still, the boy’s spirits never sagged.

‘‘He helped us so much in understanding and in coming to accept his life and his death,’’ Saar says. ‘‘He showed what seemed like an extraordinary understanding and acceptance. After he died, I thought that there was a play there. I started researching and discovered that many young people in those types of situations demonstrate that maturity. And I thought, why couldn’t we recognize that before? That’s hopefully what the play does — celebrate the maturity that is in many if not all young people.’’

Saar can easily summarize ‘‘The Yellow Boat’’ now. But the version Childsplay is bringing to the stage this week for the first time since 1994 actually represents Saar’s 22nd draft.

He says that the difficulty in writing ‘‘Yellow Boat’’ wasn’t that he was afraid to reveal too much of his son to strangers, or even that he wasn’t done with the grieving process he had begun with a six-month sabbatical and lengthy stay in his wife’s native Norway.

It was just that, understandably, ‘‘The Yellow Boat’’ — named after one of Benjamin’s drawings — was as close to Saar’s heart as anything he had ever written. He wanted to get it right.

‘‘I started writing in the 1991-92 season,’’ Saar recalls. ‘‘We first produced it here in 1993, and since then, Benjamin’s still sailing; it has played in England and Taiwan and all over the United States. But in the beginning, it was a sort of fanciful, metaphorical fable and needed to develop, and then we realized at the preview that it was too sad. (The audience) came out of the theater remembering that Benjamin had died, and I wanted them to remember that he had lived.’’

Though poignant and bittersweet, Benjamin’s story is ultimately triumphant. To have it any other way, Saar says, would not do his son justice.

‘‘It’s sadder for adults than young people,’’ he says, ‘‘and that I kind of love. They are both totally valid responses to the work that are different because the kids identify with Benjamin and the adults with the parents. Those differences hopefully will spark some conversation after the play where kids are an equal part of the conversation.’’

Saar and his wife never had any other children after Benjamin. But it is clear that by bringing his son’s story to children and their families, Saar is, in a way, still parenting.

In a couple of years, Childsplay will be moving to a grand new theater near Tempe Town Lake, where the theater company will, he says, ‘‘need to fill more seats, more times than we currently are.’’ Between now and then, Saar says he knows that a big part of the company’s mission will be to make Childsplay as recognized by locals as it is across the country and the world.

In Saar’s eyes, there is no better way to begin than by introducing a new batch of audiences to ‘‘The Yellow Boat.’’

‘‘I never wanted to see a play again after (Benjamin) died,’’ he says. ‘‘I never wanted to do anything again. But there was a process of working through that and rediscovering the joy of creating, of working together with these people here in renewing the challenge and commitment we have to families.

‘‘I came back to a celebration of living, of art, of a vital part of real life, and that’s what this play is all about and why it had to be a part of our 25th anniversary celebration,’’ he continues. ‘‘I’m hopeful that we’re changing lives, just as Benjamin certainly did.’’

‘The Yellow Boat’
Who: Childsplay
Where: Tempe Performing Arts Center, 132 E. Sixth St., Tempe
When: 2 and 5 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Feb. 9. Ends March 2.
How much: $15
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