Outdoor dramas draw tourists to towns

'The Lost Colony' began the tradition of outdoor dramas.
By DEBRA GASKILL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Call it capitalizing on history.
Each summer across the country, small towns looking to generate tourist dollars come together with professional and amateur actors looking for drama credits to stage family-friendly experiences that are particularly American -- outdoor dramas.
This form of theater under the stars got its start in 1937 in Manteo, N.C., when Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green wrote "The Lost Colony" to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World. Still in production today at the Waterside Theater, "The Lost Colony" started a nationwide trend.
The Institute of Outdoor Drama (IOD), located at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, lists 118 theaters in 36 states that had outdoor productions last year. The three most popular types of plays were historical dramas (43 productions), Shakespeare festivals (64), and religious or Passion plays (11).
California and Texas
In California, theatergoers can learn about Contra Costa resident, author and naturalist John Muir. In Texas, they can learn through song and dance about Jim Bowie's 1820s-era arrival in Menard in search of silver.
California leads the country with 16 outdoor theaters; Texas has 13 and North Carolina, 10. Illinois, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas theater groups put on all three major types of outdoor dramas.
With nearly 2.5 million people attending outdoor drama each year, these theaters have a $500 million economic impact on the national economy, adding much-needed tourism dollars to dozens of small-town communities, according to IOD figures.
For Marion Waggoner, President of the Scioto Society, which produces "Tecumseh!" in Chillicothe, Ohio, that translates locally to nearly 60,000 people who trek to southern Ohio to see the story of the legendary Shawnee leader. Area economic impact can run as high as $7 million annually in money spent at local hotels restaurants and other local attractions, Waggoner said.
"It's a whole quality of life issue," Waggoner said. "(Outdoor dramas) help in a small way to tip the meter for a community. It says there's a certain vibrancy that's going on. 'Tecumseh!' changed attitudes toward sustainable tourism in Chillicothe. Twenty-five years ago, tourism didn't even rank as a priority."
Best-attended
The show, which has been produced since 1973, was the best-attended outdoor drama in the country last year, according to IOD figures.
About 90 minutes west of Chillicothe, in Xenia, Ohio, the outdoor drama "Blue Jacket" brings an average of 40,000 people to a town formerly best known for being destroyed in a 1974 tornado, according to managing director Thomas Nealeigh.
Local surveys have named "Blue Jacket" as the No. 1 attraction in Greene County. It's an American Revolution-era story about a legendary Shawnee chief, Blue Jacket, who with Black Fish, another Shawnee chief, and Caesar, an escaped slave turned Shawnee warrior, defends their homeland from frontiersmen like Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton.
"Our drawing point is that our drama is staged on the land where a lot of the events portrayed actually took place," Nealeigh said.
"It's a very visceral show. There's something about being in the place where every character actually walked."
Professional theater
Waggoner and Nealeigh both stress that this is professional theater. It's "not a drive-in, not local (residents) putting on a show," Nealeigh said. When many traditional theaters worry about how to keep their audiences coming back, Waggoner and Nealeigh both say that their productions have become a tradition, with families returning every few summers, and sometimes each summer.
Both men say epic staging helps attract returning audiences. Both shows include cast members galloping across the stage on bareback, flaming arrows and carefully staged battles.
"Epic drama appeals, just like epic film appeals, like in 'Miss Saigon' when they have a Huey (helicopter) landing on the set. People will come to see that," Waggoner said.
"These days, we're up against the movies, the Internet and pay-per-view movies," Nealeigh said. "'Blue Jacket' is very spectacle-oriented. When you see it, it's not computer-generated effects. It's theater. It's life."
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