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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 55, no. 3 (Summer 2006), p. 8-12

Curtains Rising: The First Fifty Years of the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket
by Jennifer M. Ahlborn

Take an island thirty miles at sea, make of it a growing summer getaway, throw in some vacationing New York actors, and the stage is set—so to speak—for the organization of a local theatre.

This dramatic spirit, alive on Nantucket, found an outlet in actress Margaret Fawcett Wilson, who moved to the island to care for her father, George Fawcett, the well-known Broadway actor-manager. Having lived in the artist’s colony in Siasconset, which occasionally presented plays at the ’Sconset Casino, Mrs. Wilson recognized an opportunity to establish a theatre on Nantucket. After a year of performances in a boathouse on Commercial Wharf, she purchased a warehouse on Straight Wharf and converted it into a theatre to house the Fawcett Players, her new summer repertory theatre company. The Straight Wharf Theatre opened in 1940.

Mrs. Wilson was far from alone in her endeavor. She enjoyed the support of many community members who helped her raise funds and who participated in the predominantly professional Fawcett Players. By the time the company ceased productions in 1950, Nantucket had developed a “theatre crowd” loath to see dramatic activity die out on the island. These individuals formed the Nantucket Community Players to stage winter productions; however, they lacked a definitive leader and were disjointed, existing as much as a social center as a theatrical group. Members interested in developing their avocation sought advice from a lately come, talented young actor and director: Mac Dixon.

Joseph M. “Mac” Dixon, an Equity actor since the 1930s, had met Jane Wallach, a prominent patroness of the arts in New York, when she sought a dog-walker. A true friendship grew between the two, and Mac was soon—and evermore—regarded as one of the family. Mac had trained with the American Lab Theatre, performed on Broadway, and taught acting and directing at Bennington College. Upon his return from the Second World War, he planned to resume teaching, but the needs of his adoptive family, with the illness of Miss Wallach’s relative, sidelined a new position at Bard College. Mac was hired to care for Mr. Barger, and when the family elected to move to their house on Nantucket, formerly their summer retreat, Mac moved with them.

On Nantucket, Mac’s theatrical background became known, and the Community Players seized the opportunity for professional advice and input into their fledgling desire to establish a formal community theatre. Following Mac’s address to the group, they invited him to spearhead the organization of winter theatre activity to complement the professional troupes performing in the summer.

Mac expected to be on the island for a year, so this proposal was feasible. Jane Wallach encouraged him immediately, seeing it as an improvement in this isolated community’s culture. Moreover, she persuaded New York associates to donate a total of $2,000 toward the formulation of the new Theatre Workshop of Nantucket (TWN). Mac was named artistic director, and others were appointed technical director (the only one to receive a small stipend), stage manager, designer, and costumer. Simultaneously, Mac and Miss Wallach established a board of directors from community leaders with an interest in theatre; Mac began his first acting and movement classes, and rehearsals commenced for TWN’s first production, Heaven Can Wait.

The board’s petition for a charter, “to promote the welfare, culture, education, and entertainment of the Town of Nantucket,” was granted by the Commonwealth on July 12, 1957. TWN had not been idle in the interim, producing three more shows that first winter, each running three nights only. All shows were cast from, staffed, and supported by members of the community.

Mac, buoyed by the excitement of this new venture, decided to continue as TWN’s unpaid artistic director. The new corporation embarked on an ambitious season for 1957, presenting an operetta, The Mikado, and three plays, but by 1959, the organization realized all would benefit from Mac pursuing additional study off-island. He spent the winter of 1960 at New York’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Theatre Arts, and he returned energized and determined to build on the “workshop” mission of TWN. The community responded, and by 1967, nearly 150 people had participated in TWN’s classes.

Mac and the board focused on making the Straight Wharf Theatre a center for cultural and arts education, and before long, it became a year-round enterprise. The theatre had housed a succession of summer professional groups until October 1966, when Margaret Fawcett Wilson sold the building to Sherburne Associates. Wanting the community theatre to continue, she stipulated that TWN be allowed to use the theatre, year-round and rent-free, for a period of ten years. TWN’s first summer season, in 1967, presented an opportunity to prove the organization a viable summer entertainer as well as winter, and a Summer Operating Board was organized.

The difficulty of the summer proposal was that then, as now, most Nantucketers worked especially hard during the season to compensate for the leaner off-season. With artistic director Mac Dixon, the playfully nicknamed “SOB” therefore elected to make the summer venture a professional repertory. However, TWN decided to husband resources by reviving winter productions, and actors in the off-season were given the right of first refusal for their roles in the summer. Summer salaries were small and were frequently turned back to the organization by the performers; but even so, TWN had lost the income from leasing the theatre to outside groups in the summer, and the new venture was not profitable. Nonetheless, TWN remained determined to provide Nantucket theatre year-round.

In 1968, TWN began regular meetings, each presenting a lecture on an aspect of theatre. The lecturers, frequently friends of Mac and leading professionals, addressed such topics as world theatre and professional theatre careers. Three years later, a formal program, featuring such instructors as island artist Reggie Levine, was organized to train students in performance, technical theatre, and design. The laboratory classes began to present scenes at the established monthly meetings, which became known as the Wednesday Showcases. From 1972 to 1974, TWN earned grants from the Arts and Humanities Commission of Massachusetts toward the showcases, and new classes addressed such topics as diction, play reading, theatre history, tap and modern dance, and playwriting.

Constantly working to connect with the community, TWN adapted its 1972 winter program to involve island academics. The vocational Coffin School assisted in set construction, and TWN worked with the local schools to plan productions and study the plays. Business community members underwrote student tickets, and off-island groups were invited to share their skills with island students.

TWN adjusted its approach to the 1973 summer season as well, due in large part to the presence of a new Equity theatre group: the Nantucket Stage Company, directed by John Wulp and housed in the Cyrus Peirce School. Facing this level of competition, TWN negotiated with Actors Equity Association to convert to an Equity house for the summer season. This approach proved prohibitively expensive and was discontinued.

Equity expenses added significantly to an already substantial debt: by the end of the winter of 1973, TWN owed various businesses more than $20,000. The organization’s history of fund-raising to date had been a combination of such on-island efforts as the 1960s summer concerts by the island musical society born out of TWN’s 1957 production of An Italian Straw Hat, and off-island benefits held by TWN members in their own communities, such as a presentation from one of Margaret Fawcett Wilson’s Nantucket historical plays at the Harvard Club in Boston. To combat the sizable debt, fund-raising efforts were stepped up. Excess props and costumes were auctioned off, and one resolute company member solicited island merchants door-to-door, convincing most to cancel interest charges and even full balances. The community’s efforts cleared the debt completely by February 1975.

TWN’s new summer competition, though, had established itself as one of six four-star Equity summer stock companies on the east coast. For Nantucket Stage Company, Cape Cod’s Edward Gorey designed sets for Dracula, which went on to win him a Tony Award on Broadway, and Nantucket summer resident Frank Conroy chose NSC to try out two new plays. Hoping to establish a pre-Broadway training facility on Nantucket, NSC entered negotiations with Sherburne Associates and signed a contract to utilize the Straight Wharf Theatre from May through September, starting in 1975. TWN was to retain winter rights to the performance space, but the loss of the theatre for the summers was a blow. The board was unable to find a replacement space for the 1975 summer season and canceled those plans. The sole silver lining was that NSC planned to repair and renovate the theatre’s interior, and TWN benefited from these improvements during the winter.

In preparation for the renovations, TWN cleared from the building most of its possessions, from costumes and lights to the very seats in the house, and handed over the keys on the morning of April 19, 1975. That evening, at 8:30, passersby sighted a fire in the building and alerted the Nantucket Fire Department; five fire trucks, forty-five volunteer firefighters, 138,000 gallons of water, and eleven hours later, all that was left of the Straight Wharf Theatre was smoldering debris. Despite the suspicious timing and the general feeling that the fire had been set deliberately, the culprit was never identified, and the cause of the fire was officially labeled “undetermined.”

With its home of thirty-six years destroyed, the Nantucket theatre community was in shock. Theatre people, however, are accustomed to new beginnings, and Nantucketers have their own natural resilience, born of the vagaries of fortune throughout the island’s history. The Theatre Workshop’s board held an emergency meeting and agreed unanimously to continue operations. A fund drive was started and open community forums held, and by June these outreaches yielded a donation of a piece of land by a private individual.

Rehearsals were relocated first to a Pleasant Street cellar, and then an interim home was found in the Twin Street Barn, which sufficed for rehearsal and class space. For the planned autumn production of Ten Little Indians, performances were scheduled at Bennett Hall, the gymnasium next to the First Congregational Church that had been constructed and dedicated to community under the direction of the Reverend Fred Bennett. Experienced carpenters and theatre professionals, such as John Gilbert and Eric Schultz, worked together to design a way to convert the open gymnasium temporarily into a functional theatre. Mac Dixon maintained his usual, levelheaded leadership in a time of emotional turmoil, reminding the community, “. . . theatre is not a building; it is the people who make it a theatre. Anyplace can be a theatre if you have the dedicated people to make it happen, and the Theatre Workshop certainly has that.”

Although TWN purchased the Twin Street Barn in 1976, securing a new permanent physical address, freedom to use the space at will, and much-needed storage space, this naturally added to the financial burden on a theatre organization without its own performance space. Hindering that ultimate goal, the land that had been donated for construction of a new theatre was deemed by authorities to be unacceptable; it was marshy and lacked adequate access.

Perhaps hardest of all for the TWN community, five years after the fire but twenty-five years after first dedicating his attention, and ultimately his devotion, to community theatre on Nantucket, Mac Dixon retired as TWN’s artistic director in 1980. To help TWN move into its next phase, Mac selected his own replacement: Richard Montfort Cary, a theatre professional who had become a familiar presence in TWN productions.

A new, long-term lease was signed with the First Congregational Church, and Dick Cary headed the refurbishment of Bennett Hall into a permanent theatre space in 1980, happily ending the practice of having to assemble and then dismantle the theatre seats for each production. Furthermore, in return for undertaking and financing the renovation, TWN received exclusive lease rights and the right of first refusal should the church ever decide to sell the property. Once again possessed of a year-round performance space, TWN reintroduced a volunteer summer theatre program in 1983.

In 1982, TWN created the Armchair Theatre program to introduce community members to new plays and to interest them in becoming involved with community theatre. Continuing today, each monthly Armchair Theatre evening features an organized reading of a play by nominally rehearsed volunteer actors at a community member’s home, combined with a potluck supper.

With attentions diverted to finding a new home and reestablishing the community theatre, fund-raising practices had ceased. In 1982, however, TWN assumed responsibility for an established annual antiques show. Sponsorship and direction of this trailblazing antiques show proved fruitful, providing one-third of Theatre Workshop’s operating budget for five years. In 1986, TWN lost the show venue and was unable to secure a replacement location before the event was resumed by the Friends of the Nantucket Public Schools a year later.

Dick served for one year as a volunteer but subsequently requested, and was granted, a salary. He was TWN’s only full-time, paid employee; however, he was director, technical director, and designer for all TWN productions during his term. Nevertheless, his salary, combined with accumulated debt from the aftermath of the fire, resulted in financial difficulties in the early 1980s. Tensions were compounded by artistic differences, and in 1984, Dick resigned.

Island artist S. Warren Krebs was appointed TWN’s third artistic director the following year. While Warren served as program coordinator and troubleshooter, public relations head, conduit between board and company, and occasional production director, he continued to pursue his career as a painter, and others were frequently hired to direct TWN productions, a practice that has continued since.

Before long, Warren reinstituted classes, garnering a grant from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. Large-scale musicals and dance programs were eventually returned to the TWN schedule, as well.

Warren was partway through his thirteenth season as Artistic Director when family concerns precipitated his resignation. Although Warren, like Mac, turned back any fees he received for his position, debt was an ongoing problem, and with the prospect of finding another volunteer artistic director quite dim, the board elected in 1997 to operate without an artistic director. Ginger Andrews, who had served as resident lighting designer and coordinator during Warren’s tenure, remained as staff technical director and lighting designer. That year, she also recruited and managed the “Star Series” that constituted the bulk of the 1997 summer season.

By this time, the Twin Street Barn was showing its age. The board faced the choice of amassing considerable debt by repairing the structure or disposing of the downtown property in a profitable real estate market. Despite the complications of losing its only “home” property, the board sold the barn but restricted the proceeds to the establishment of a permanent home for TWN.

Although dedicated to the continuance of TWN, realistically the members of the board—employed full-time elsewhere—were unable to devote the effort necessary to advance the organization’s mission. Ultimately, it became clear that the Theatre Workshop would stagnate without a visible and dynamic leader. With a substantial donation earmarked for an artistic director’s salary, in 2000 the board conducted a nationally advertised search for a new leader. >From hundreds of applicants, the board selected Nantucketer Kate Stout, a former board member and a produced playwright. Joanne Marcoux was appointed production manager to oversee day-to-day production business.

Kate immediately developed the 2001 summer season and formed a liaison committee with the landlord, First Congregational Church. Within the next two years, she also teamed with long-time TWN performer Bee Gonnella to write and present the island’s first murder mystery dinner theatre, Pushing Up Lilies at the Point Breeze, and established an underwritten free performance of every TWN play for island students and seniors.

Unfortunately, those innovative programs developed as TWN’s occupancy of Bennett Hall was ending. The church, expanding its own programs but lacking another activity space, negotiated successively foreshortened seasons for TWN until—ironically, given the group’s original purpose—Theatre Workshop had access only in summer. Kate and the board spread the word that TWN needed a new home, but with the ever-increasing costs of land and property on Nantucket, nothing emerged that was both workable and affordable, even with the equity of the Twin Street Barn proceeds. With reduced income and an uncertain future, the board ultimately was forced to let Kate go in early 2004.

TWN was not the only Nantucket theatre company facing difficulties. Actors Theatre of Nantucket, the professional company founded by Richard Cary after his departure from TWN, was battling the same declining audiences, and despite celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2004, Dick announced that Actors Theatre would close at the end of that summer. In a microcosm of the eternal death-and-rebirth of theatre, however, the lamentable departure of a respected theatre group from the island created an interesting possibility for TWN. Actors Theatre had performed for years out of Nantucket’s United Methodist Church, and it seemed that the space might become available. In order to enjoy greater freedom in scheduling, as well as return to year-round programming and the possibility of hosting classes once again, TWN’s board of directors made another wrenching decision: to move from twenty-four-year residency in the self-designed Bennett Hall theatre to the physically constrained pair of spaces at the Methodist Church.

Because the recent search for a permanent home had proved fruitless and the prognosis for a long-term tenancy at the Methodist Church was very good, the board determined that the situation was as close as TWN was going to come to a permanent home for the foreseeable future. The decision was made to dip into the Twin Street Barn proceeds to fund necessary renovations and upgrades—including air conditioning—to the Methodist Church stages. Facing a vastly different production style, given the small size of both stages, and a different theatre business climate on the island, given the closing of ATN, the board forecast the affordability of a new artistic director and deemed it prudent to hire Jane Karakula, who had served as Richard Cary’s right hand at Actors Theatre and was intimate with both the Nantucket theatre community and the performance spaces at the Methodist Church. This move had the benefit of creating something of a merger between the overlapping families of ATN and TWN.

Jane helped oversee the renovations, and TWN unveiled its new space with free performances of Strindberg’s The Stranger, played during Christmas Stroll in December 2004 to packed houses. Now, in the summer of 2006, TWN has embarked on its second summer season at 2 Centre Street, but it has also enjoyed resuming winter productions and classes for both adults and children. Theatre Workshop is recultivating children’s theatre, and staple offerings from the ATN line-up have continued on with TWN, such as the Comedy Improv and Kevin Flynn’s Comedy Nights. Even Bennett Hall has proved an accessible alternative for larger shows, and TWN’s revival production of A Christmas Carol was mounted there in November 2005. In addition, long-time TWN designer Eric Schultz was rehired in 2005 as technical director. An entity born of and sustained by an intrinsic need, the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket has once again landed on its feet and faces an ever-brighter and inspiring future.

Ultimately, Theatre Workshop has been about more than theatre on Nantucket: much as Jane Wallach hoped, it has changed the island’s culture. To fill a void, Nantucketers conceived of a community theatre and worked to realize it, and Nantucketers have ensured that it survived for half a century. “I still think there is a need for theatre,” said Mac Dixon in 1991, “and as long as there is a need for it, we will go on.” Forever may you feel that need, Nantucket, and long live the Theatre Workshop to slake it.

JENNIFER M. AHLBORN earned a degree in English and Theatre Arts from Mount Holyoke College before moving to Nantucket to put them to use. She has stage managed, designed costumes, and otherwise assisted a number of island productions, most of them with the Theatre Workshop, and served nine years on the TWN Board of Directors, three of them as president.