The Community in Community Theatre

I know, it's a corny title for a blog post, but I couldn't find anything more appropriate. It really does speak to the point of what I had in mind. I'm referring to the collaborative, supportive, collegial atmosphere amoung people who work in local theatre. At the Kelsey, every one of our shows seems to have a great family atmosphere. Everyone's helping everyone else, they're all part of a team. I think that's one of the reasons my daughter Caroline likes doing theatre. As an only child, she's always been very atuned to "family", and every time she does a show, she feels like she gets to add to her "theatre family". I'm sure it's the same way in other theatre companies. In fact, I can't even say it's unique to the Kelsey Theatre, though that feeling is very strong there.strong there. No, It seems to be pretty wide spread characteristic among people working in the theatre. Theatre people just want to help other theatre people succeed. The suit of armor story is a great example.

As we started pre-production for Emperor, Alycia said early on that she needed a statue or a suit of armor for one of the scenes. It only appears briefly, but it's important to establishing the setting and forwarding the purpose of the scene. She did a lot of research herself looking for a source of the needed stage dressing. But everything she found seemed to cost too much money. There was even discussion of purchasing or making a real suit of armor that we could use in a future production. That way the investment could immediately be spread across multiple shows. But it just wasn't happening. Then I offered to ask the folks at NJACT.

NJACT (New Jersey Association of Community Theatres) is a group of theatres around the state, many non-profit, that produce theatre for their local communities. They are also known as the people who do "the Perry's". The Perry Awards are sort of the Tony Awards of NJ community theatre. I happend to have an email mailing list containing most of the participating theatre companies, so I volunteered to send out a note asking them for help.

When I sent the email, I really didn't expect much response. But I was wrong. I ended up receiving more than 20 emails with ideas, suggestion, and even offers from people willing to loan us their suit of armor for nothing more than a mention in the program -- friendly and free! One of the first to raise her hand was Nancy Russell over at Playful Theatre, another was Jan Topoleski at the Strand Theatre down in Lakewood. Because is worked a little better for the production we ended up using Jan's suit of armor. OnStage does this type of thing itself by loaning props and lighting equipment to other groups who ask. Our starlight curtain has served several groups well since John created it for our production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

My point? It's simple: there seems to be an underlying theme in local theatre, at least between theatre groups -- when one of us succeeds, we all succeed. I find that refeshing.