|
Our Story So Far
Beginnings
Town & Gown Players, Inc., was established in 1953 to promote theater as a community art, provide entertainment for residents of Athens, and furnish an outlet for people with talent and skills in performance, design and directing. The two dozen founders included Mrs. W.A. Mathis and Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Keane.
Fittingly, the first production was an American comedy: The Philadelphia Story by Philip Barry, with a cast of twelve directed by Oliver Land and featuring Kathryn Dozier and Fred Griffith. (Tickets cost $1.50.)
Playhouses
The Philadelphia Story (March-April 1954) went up in the Ritz Theatre on East Broad Street. The program revealed that Town & Gown already had its eye on another venue, the Seney-Stovall Chapel on Milledge, which proved to be one of the few sites where the company did not perform.
The company spent its first five years on the move, putting up shows at the Ritz, the Moina Michael Auditorium, the Athens Country Club, Athens High School, the Navy School and other locations, and finally settling into and heavily remodeling a cannery building at Satula and Boulevard. The old-timers tell of water-related problems—both rising and falling water—in the old cannery. Town & Gown stayed there for a decade nevertheless, until the county took over the property.
A theater company with no permanent home is not so unusual, but this one did find a place to light in 1969 when Mr. and Mrs. W.A. Mathis gave the Athens Community Theater building to the city for the use of Town & Gown. The new house opened with a commemorative revival of The Philadelphia Story. The Players have stayed put ever since, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the playhouse a season ago.
The auditorium offers 126 permanent seats in an intimate seven-row configuration. The stage is big enough for a large cast or a lot of scenery but not both. Dressing rooms are located backstage, with a loft and two sheds as storage space. The most recent phase of renovation, funded by the Players with money raised in part by the Guild's efforts, added two wheelchair stations and handicapped-accessible restrooms. Town & Gown now occupies the playhouse under a fifteen-year lease from Athens–Clarke County.
The 1999-2000 calendar shows the building committed to T&G use on some 350 days.
Program
Town & Gown has always tried to strike a balance between audience appeal (classics, musicals, recent Broadway hits) and works posing a challenge to artists and theatergoers (contemporary dramas, tragedies, original and experimental works). High points of years past include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Private Lives, The Zoo Story, Picnic, Vanities, premieres of new work by Catherine Grimmell Mew and John Vance, and many one-act plays such as Burning Patience and Graceland.
In the 1990s the company moved to a dual season, with big-appeal "mainstream" shows produced for $2500 to $5000 in the Mainstage series and shows classed as experimental, controversial, or out-of-the-way produced for a couple of hundred dollars under Second Stage auspices. Both series have found audiences and attracted a flood of talent to T&G. The 1999-2000 season will see six Mainstage and six Second Stage productions mounted—a demanding and ambitious program for a community theater.
Stars
We have always lived on the interface between the university and the nonacademic community, drawing some of the best from both sides. Town & Gown's first seasons featured students, University of Georgia faculty, and business people and their families—and so has every one of the 46 seasons since.
Indeed, hundreds and hundreds of people have appeared in our shows. Over 200 productions with an average of about eight in the cast, allowing for repeaters, means conservatively 800 to 1000 people onstage, and a similar number of directors, designers and techies. Just the present membership includes a couple of dozen people who've directed one or more shows—and two or three who have written them. We can mention only a few names here, but every Town & Gowner can list many others.
Jean (Mrs. W.A.) Mathis not only helped found the company but was one of its most active directors in the early years. Chan Sieg served as principal director
for several years at the cannery. Designer extraordinaire Mike Brown created sets for dozens of shows in the eighties. Lailah Feldman was a star onstage but also a trusted advisor and an active supporter for three decades. Harriet Timm Anderson became the "Member of the Decade" for the 1980s by directing and costuming a long series of productions. Toby and Kris Vinson helped shape Town & Gown's face through the same period, Toby often literally hanging from the rafters to install lighting equipment. John Vance began his T&G career in The Importance of Being Earnest and later directed the premiere of his own The East-West Relation. Archie Howell acted in several shows and appointed himself custodian of the playhouse. A few Town & Gowners have made careers in theater; Calvin Smith, Stacy Schwartz, Mike Davidson, Sam Word, and Matthew Wages are among those in recent years.
Renewal
Any organization in a city like Athens needn't worry about getting renewed: It happens every four years. Town & Gown has a few long-time members, but the turnover is distracting. We have trouble making anyone hold still long enough to create an "institutional memory." Some of what our members think is new may really be history revisited.
What today's members are doing that won't expire in four years is a major overhaul of the physical plant. The aim is to create a safer, more welcoming, and more comfortable place for people to watch shows or to create them.
|
