This is a talk that Ann Kopf gave to a Chapel audience in the fall of 1961. (The College of Wooster required Chapel attendance on weekdays during the school year.)
You know, I have a pet peeve. It has only come about this fall and I'll tell you what it is. It's the question, "What did you do this summer?" Now I appreciate the sincerity and interest with which a question like this is asked, and it's not the question that bothers me. But what can you say? Well, because it frustrated me so much to answer it in one word or one sentence, this morning I'm going to tell you what thirteen Wooster students and I did this summer.
Basically, it is this. We initiated the newest kind of Wooster Service Project. We've got Wooster-in-India, Wooster-in-Fiske, Wooster-in-Washington, Wooster in Vienna, and now, the newest and most challenging of all, Wooster in Wooster. The Scot Calendar listed this program as Arena Fair. Well, my name is Anne Kopf, and Arena Fair is the name we gave to the summer theater we established here in Wooster this summer. Arena refers to a type of staging, theater in the round, in which the acting area is in the center, and the audience sits on all four sides. The fair part comes from our location in the Grange Building on the Wooster Fairgrounds, a sixteen sided building used for the display of canned fruits at the Wayne County Fair.
All of us were looking forward to this occasion in the hopes of showing you some scenes from our productions this summer. That's really the only way to give you a clear picture of what we actually did. But there are such things as copyright laws, which say you can't do any cuttings from a play without paying your money. We thought it might be stretching an already delicate subject if we charged admission to Chapel, so I'll try to give you as much of the picture as I can just by telling you about it.
Before I go any further I want to make clear the big difference between our project and the others I mentioned. Although the thirteen members of the company were all either students at or recent graduate of Wooster, we were not sponsored by the College, and the College was not technically responsible for either the success or the failure of the venture. But in fact, whether we liked it or not, in the eyes of many of the townspeople and faculty we were students, and were really representing, if not the college as a whole, at least the Little Theatre. May I say that with a few exceptions, everything any of us knew about theater we learned here. The simple fact that we were able to make it without adult supervision is proof that we've gotten a basic fund of theatrical knowledge working in productions here during the school year, and were it not for this knowledge and encouragement we've received, we could never have done it at all.
You wonder how these things begin. Well, all it takes to do something like this is a couple of screwballs to get the idea, and some more screwballs to stand behind them and help them do it. You might as well know it: such screwballs are actually enrolled in this college.
Last March Barb Cernik and I saw an ad in Theater Arts for a summer theater for sale on Cape Cod. To most people this would just be another ad, and they might glance at it and turn the page. But right here you can see the difference between us and other people. We actually believed that we could get the $4,500 down payment, get a company together, and go there and put on plays. This just goes to show that if you haven't got any common sense when you come here, that's one thing Wooster won't teach you.
Well, we wrote and asked about the theater, and while waiting for an answer we stirred up some interest in a summer theater among our friends. When we received a letter saying that we were one of the four groups they had heard from that sounded like a reliable organization, we began to think there was something fishy about the whole thing. We also hadn't gotten together $4,500. But by this time the thing had begun to snowball, and we began to look around for another location.
Now it was May. No money, no building. So we decided on Wooster for several reasons. First, we could start working on the project before school was out: second, we could rent badly needed equipment from the Little Theater, and third, we felt there were enough people in town who had shown interest in productions during the winter that we'd have some audience to begin with.
We saw this building down at the Fairgrounds, and to all of us it looked like just what we wanted, so we rented it from Walter Bates, Dodge Dealer, who moved his cars out for us, [we] paid our $35.00 a month, and it was ours. Those members of the company who could swing it pitched in money, and $500 backing came from a hopeful, faithful friend.
School was out, and we were on our way. We moved into two houses on College Avenue. Mr. Flattery, our landlord, is 91, and seemed pretty well satisfied with us. In an article in the Daily Record he called us, "A fine bunch of kids, a little noisy, but well-behaved and polite." Now I can't go into detail about our living conditions this morning (f you want to know more about it ask me later). But may I say that living together as we did this summer, with a common objective, and learning to work together on what was often a "24 hour basis", was for many of us the greatest education experience of our lives. Now don't misunderstand me. I have very few complaints about life at Wooster, but we all know you can't learn all about life at college. We just saw another side of life, where men and women were forced to look beyond the individual achievements of high grades; where the end product, the play, was the goal towards which all personal efforts were directed. Actors painted the floor; floor painters made costumes and so on.
In case I don't get all their names worked in later, I'd just like you to know who the members of the group were: Liz Lutz and Louise Tate, who graduated in June - Bill Thompson, Bill Skelton, Bill Tanner, Chuck Livermore, Judy French, Barb Cernik, Jeanne Robinson, Barb LaSalle, Cathy McElroy, Brooke Creswell and me.
As soon as we had moved into our residences, the big push toward June 29, OPENING NIGHT, of our first show, was on. During those three weeks we constructed platforming for the seats, masked the seating area off with burlap, set up two dressing rooms, put down a ground cloth, built a set, sold tickets, advertised, got ads for the programs, and rehearsed Auntie Mame.
The three directors, Bill Thompson, Bill Skelton and myself held tryouts for townspeople for parts we couldn't fill. Bit by bit things began to take shape. A thousand and one things we had never thought of had to be dealt with: insurance, Federal income tax, getting seating plans okayed in Columbus, tickets to be printed, a concession stand, and so on.
It is June 28, almost midnight of the day before we open, and we have begun to paint the set. The thing about theater-in-the-round is that you can't do a halfway job. People all around the stage notice detail. That night, from 12 to 3am I painted little Pennsylvania Dutch designs on two bar stools. At about 5:30am we began painting the floor, and what a floor it was. Chuck Livermore, who designed it, was on everybody's black list that day, for it was squares: black and white two foot square squares, all over the floor. But we all had to admit, once it was done, that it made the set, gave it class and made the acting area seem much larger.
When we finished we had a theater which seated 189 people, and we opened that night to a full house. Judy French, our Auntie Mame, was cool and calm, and accomplished her many costume changes in a matter of seconds. The people laughed, they applauded, and we went home that night, a tired but happy group.
We ran our shows from Thursday through Monday night, at $1.25 Thursday, Sunday and Monday, and $1.50 Friday and Saturday. We generally rehearsed the show for the next week mornings and afternoons, and gave the current show in the evenings. Then on Tuesday and Wednesday nights we'd dress rehearse the show opening on Thursday. On the Fourth of July we thought we'd really pull in the holiday crowds, but we forgot about Wooster Tradition. There are about 12,000 people in Wooster. Well 11,980 went to the fireworks show up here at the Stadium, and 20 came to see us. The other six members of the audience were parents of people in the cast. 26 was our lowest attendance figure for the season.
The week after Auntie Mame, we opened The Mousetrap, a thriller by Agatha Christie, in which, by the way, our own Dr. Gore played Major Metcalf. In order that no one might guess who the real killer was, we disguised our business manager, Bill Tanner, to sneak out during the blackout to do the deed. This was his debut on the stage, and, he insists his finale.
The favorite show for many of us was Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday, in which John Weckesser did a fine job as Harry Brock. The orange, brown and gold plaid floor we had for that one is Barb Cernik's claim to fame. We were very fortunate to get furniture for that show and for Bell, Book and Candle from Maibaugh's Furniture Company in Sterling, Ohio. Born Yesterday is also remembered by us for being the first BIG KISS show.
During rehearsals, Brooke Creswell and I would go into our clinch near the end of the first act, and in order to get it just right, Bill Skelton, our director would say: "Good, now hold, one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, okay break." We had seven second ones, three second ones, oh, any old number. It was mighty hard not to break up right in the middle of one of them.
After Born Yesterday we were forced to take a week of and recover. We were afraid this change might hurt us, but as it turned out, the next show, Charley's Aunt, led the season in attendance figures, with the first two performances sold out to service clubs - Lion's Club - Roar lions, Roar!. Bill Skelton, Director of Auntie Mame, Born Yesterday and Bell, Book and Candle carried off the role of Lorn Fancourt Babberley to the delight of reviewers, cast and audiences.
Speaking of audiences, you know they really are fascinating. I'd known before that they're different every night, but when you're in theater-in-the-round you really become acutely aware of it. You can't put anything over on anybody. In Born Yesterday there's a scene between Harry and Billie, which John Weckesser and I did, in which we played gin: gin rummy that is, and we couldn't stack the deck. I'd try to sort of keep my hand hidden so the guy in back of me couldn't see it, but invariably I'd turn my head and there'd be somebody quietly snickering as I yelled "gin". I'm just glad nobody reached out to sip our drinks to see if they were real. They would have been disappointed, just iced tea.
Bell, Book and Candle, which followed Charley's Aunt, was quite a change of pace for us. We got a very nice Siamese cat to play Pyewacket, but he didn't like being on stage too much, and as soon as I got him offstage opening night he jumped out of my arms and was gone for the rest of the show. Little did the audience realize how funny the line in the third act was that night when Bill Thompson asked me where Pyewacet was and I answered, "Oh, he ran away". After the show we found him peacefully sitting under the stands.
We finished off the season with Our Town, in which Jeannie Robinson played Emily and Brooke Creswell played George, with John Weckesser as the Stage Manager. Despite its simplicity, Our Town is a challenging and rewarding classic, and was well adapted to theater-in-the-round by Bill Thompson's direction and Chuck Livermore's set. When the lights dimmed for the last time on August 17 there was hardly a dry eye in the dressing rooms afterward. We tore the place apart in three days, stored our lumber under the stands at the fairgrounds, had a farewell party, and went our separate ways.
But the actual productions we put on are only part of the story. The life we led was unique, nothing will probably ever be the same. At the beginning of the summer we got up at 7:30 but this gradually got later as the summer progressed. We had three cars to transport us back and forth to the fairgrounds: Liz Lutz's 1960 Impala, Weckesser's Renault, and the Bomb. The Bomb is the affectionate nickname we gave to a '51 Chevy we bought at the beginning of the summer from Carl Braden down on Liberty Street for $65.00. $65.00 may sound like a steal, but it's just a good thing it's downhill all the way to the fairgrounds or we'd never have been able to jump-start it every morning.
Mealtimes were quite hectic. Breakfast was segregated, the men downstairs, the girls upstairs, and lunch and dinner were prepared by our guardian angel Cathy McElroy who performed miracles on $60.00 a week. We all ate in a room 8 feet by 12 feet in size, on the floor or on the ceiling or wherever you could, everybody shoveling it down and jabbering nervously before showtime.
Then there were those other mealtimes, when faculty members and townspeople invited the whole company over for dinner. These people really deserve some kind of medals, because we'd come about 5:30 in our grubby work clothes and have to leave at 6:30 for the theater. I hope Dick Noble will forgive me for advertising this fact, but his family has a swimming pool in his back yard and invited us out for a dip whenever we could come. It was breaks like that, which helped us keep our sanity.
Another person to whom we owe a great deal is Grace Hanzel of Durstein's Beauty Salon. We must have had $250-300 worth of work done there, and let me tell you it works. I had a variety of colors; Judy French had, for example, blond, brown, pink and gray; Brooke Creswell had a haircut and Bill Thompson had a permanent. Robert Critchfield donated his law services to us, others loaned us clothes and properties, and told their friends about us. We couldn't have done it without the help of numerous people, and we all came to feel that Wooster is a pretty nice town with a lot of warm, interested, and interesting people in it.
As I look back on the summer I see many things we did well, and many things we could have done differently. We knew before we started that generally a new theater doesn't make money; however we took in $6,000 at the box office, and with the help of our backing and a gift from one of Wooster's citizens, we were able to pay all our bills and have a tidy sum in the bank besides.
Right now we're planning for next summer. Bill Tanner is tentatively signed up as managing director for next year, and committees are busy on season ticket sales, choice of plays, choosing the company, and publicity. Anybody interested, see me or any member of the company and please, if you live within 100 miles of here, come see a play next summer.
Its pretty difficult for me to tell you just what we got out of last summer, for it meant different things to different people. For some, it meant a decision to make theater a career, for others, a decision not to. But I spoke earlier of a common objective, a group working together toward doing something worthwhile. For that reason I speak today not for myself, but for thirteen students who found working together this summer a creative experience they will always remember. Thank you.