Professional theaters gain a foothold in rural areas

Small-town theaters face several challenges as they establish themselves.

WEST LIBERTY, Ohio (AP) — The professional theater company in this village has performed plays in tents, grange halls, a fire station, a one-room schoolhouse and — coming soon — in barns.

“We really survived because we take our plays to where people are. We don’t expect them to come to us,” said Jeff Hooper, founder and playwright for Mad River Theater Works. “The idea of having a professional theater in a county with 45,000 people is kind of an unlikely possibility.”

Attendance and budgets have grown at small-town theaters, which also have benefited from efforts by arts groups to spread their financial support beyond the urban areas.

Arts organizations in big cities get a majority of funding from the National Endowment for the Arts as part of the agency’s traditional grant program because metropolitan areas have more arts groups and projects. But in the past five years, the NEA has increased by 14 percent its support of touring and outreach arts that include rural and other underserved areas.

“Our funding comes from taxpayers in every corner of the country. It’s just appropriate for us to consider the cultural health of every American,” said Bill O’Brien, director of theater and musical theater for the NEA. “But it has to be good. It has to be access to excellent art, not access to mediocre art.”

In 2007, the NEA awarded $875,000 to 35 theater companies to produce Shakespeare plays as part of its touring and outreach program.

Mary Margaret Schoenfeld is community development manager for Americans for the Arts, a Washington D.C.-based group that works to make arts programs available in communities. She said challenges to establishing small-town theaters include finding organizers with enough time, finding money to operate and cultivating an audience that can be reluctant to travel rural roads at night and in adverse weather.

Company of Fools got its start in the 6,200-person town of Hailey, Idaho, by opening in a renovated movie theater. During the run of its first plays, members of the audience arrived with sacks of groceries from a supermarket across the street so they could eat dinner while watching the show.

Roadside Theater performs at a 170-seat theater in Whitesburg, Ky. But it also takes its plays — which reflect Appalachian history and culture — to schools and churches throughout the region. The actors always play to full houses, said Donna Porterfield, managing director.

Even with government support, the theaters still need to sell tickets.

Annual attendance at the Barter Theatre in Abington, Va., has grown from 47,000 in 1992 to 160,000 in 2006, an all-time high. Sixty percent of its audience lives within a 2.5-hour drive of the theater, which is in rural southwest Virginia.

“We’re drawing from a very small demographic,” said Richard Rose, producing artistic director.

A total of 30 people paid $5 apiece to attend Company of Fools’ first play in Hailey in 1997 — “Diary of a Madman” by Nikolai Gogol — which had two performances. (A ticket to a Broadway play can cost between $200 and $300.)

Today, ticket prices range from $15 to $25 and the plays draw between 1,200 and 2,000 people over three-week runs.

Theater budgets also have grown, from $40,000 to $300,000 for Mad River.

Rose believes rural theater is becoming more popular, in part, because uncertainty and fear generated by the war in Iraq has made people more introspective and more interested in family, home and what their own lives are about.

Play themes often mirror the theater’s home region.

The Barter Theatre has been doing more plays with Southern and Appalachian themes in recent years. Among this season’s productions are “Pow’r in the Blood,” about a woman who returns to Georgia and discovers that reconnecting with her Southern roots is difficult.

Hooper finds material for Mad River’s plays by collecting stories and picking the memories of older residents.

Local stories that have inspired plays in West Liberty, a western Ohio village of 1,800, included a Chicago boy who was placed in an orphanage and was put to work and then raised by a farm family who later sent him to college.