Straight Wharf, below
Main St.
Robert Wilson and Margaret
Fawcett Wilson Barnes
1940 to 1975
Originally housed in a
boathouse on Commercial Wharf (from which the theatre was driven for making
too much noise), the Straight Wharf Theatre secured an old tinsmith shop and
livery stable on Straight Wharf (Bill Barrett’s Tin Shop made chimney
flues and tin mats to place under stoves). The theatre opened in July 1940
with the Fawcett Players under the leadership of Robert Wilson and Margaret
Fawcett Wilson. With room for 110 seats (later supplemented with a balcony
seating 75), the theatre’s first productions were Robert Wilson’s
Keziah Coffin, Margaret Fawcett Wilson’s Maria Mitchell, and a drama
about wartime spies and saboteurs on the island, Night Watch. The theatre
was rented out during the remaining war years (1943–46) to the Repertory
Players. The Fawcett Players returned briefly in 1950, but in 1956 it became
the long-term home of the Nantucket Theatre Workshop, led by the dynamic Mac
Dixon. Nantucketers Reggie Levine, John and Elizabeth Gilbert, and many others
graced its stages over the years in such productions as The Mikado (1957)
and She Stoops to Conquer (1962), continuing a grand theatrical tradition
that had its roots in the ’Sconset Actors Colony at the turn of the century,
the ’Sconset Casino plays of the 1920s and 1930s, and the costume shows
at the Nantucket Yacht Club. The Nantucket Theatre Workshop remains the longest
continuously operating community theatre company in America. The Straight
Wharf Theatre was sold to Sherburne Associates in the 1960s, and, tragically,
burned to the ground on April 19, 1975.
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Elizabeth Gilbert recalls having to plan productions around the steamship blowing its whistle at 9:00 P. M: “We were doing Brigadoon, and the two lovers were sitting on a bench. As one of them said, ‘Listen to the nightingale,’ the steamer whistle blew, sending the whole cast into hysterics. It was the only time Mac had to pull the curtain, and we started all over again.”
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