January 8, 2003

Theater group to hold giveaway Saturday—

Center Stage plans one last act

For almost 30 years community theater thrived in Yellow Springs, its heart a building on Dayton Street and a group of organizers called Center Stage. But over the past five years dwindling audiences and fewer volunteers led to ever-increasing debt, and in September the group announced it would close its doors.

“It’s difficult,” said Jean Hooper, the Center Stage manager and board president. “But it’s time.”

Having raised the money needed to pay off its debts, the group will now offer the community an opportunity to take home a little piece of Yellow Springs’ cultural history. This Saturday, Jan. 10, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Center Stage will give away all of its remaining items to anyone who wants some.

Villagers will find items large and small, including chairs, tables, lamps, electrical items, trunks, umbrellas, fans, a working refrigerator, a soft drink machine, coffee pots, dishes and cups, a fireplace, toy guns, beds and boxes of neckties and belts. Theater aficionados will also find signs announcing performances from decades ago, among other small and unusual things.

“We have lots of memorabilia, posters and odd items we’ve used over the years,” Hooper said. “Someone might be interested in them. You never know.”

The empty and mostly darkened theater, now cold since the group stopped paying utilities, is a far cry from the warmth and light sparked by the many Center Stage productions over the years. In its heyday in the 1970s and ’80s, the group put on productions, such as The Music Man or Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, in which 50 to 70 villagers participated by acting, building sets, sewing costumes, writing publicity or making music.

“A wide variety of talents are needed in community theater,” said Rebecca Eschliman, a 30-year veteran of Center Stage and member of its board of directors. “There are opportunities for shy people as well as for extroverts.”

Playbills from that era indicate that participation in Center Stage was often a family affair, with both children and adults listed from many local families, including the Mullins, Bernsteins, Damasers, Miers, Battinos, Beverlys, Hills, Champneys, Turoffs, Steinhilbers, Siemers, Overtons, Dallases, Brezines, Hudsons and Logans. Local actors and singers Leon Holster, Flo Lorenz, Bill Chappelle, Victor Ayoub, Ronnie Whitmore, Rebecca Eschliman and Meredith Dallas often had lead roles.

For both the local audience and the cast and crew, Center Stage productions offered an experience that couldn’t be found anywhere else, Eschliman believes.

“Live theater exercises an almost magnetic pull,” she said. “There’s an excitement about it that cannot be duplicated by television or film. And if you’re involved in it, there’s an intensity of community that keeps you coming back.”

Like many good things, Center Stage was born from adversity. For many years before its inception in 1971, community members who loved theater were welcome in the Antioch Area Theater productions, which utilized the talents of students, professional actors and villagers. It was such a production, in the summer of 1948, that drew actress Jean Goff from Dayton. During the show, she struck up a friendship with the technical director, an Antioch College graduate named Bill Hooper, who later became her husband.

Theater opportunities abounded in Yellow Springs during the next decade, when Antioch produced its nationally renowned “Shakespeare Under the Stars” festival. But in the late 1950s the festival declined and not long after, according to Jean Hooper, the college decided to use only student actors in its productions rather than villagers.

That change of policy left village theater lovers adrift. Some who loved acting found different venues for their talents, such as Hooper, who became involved with theater in Trotwood and Springfield.

But in 1971 a group of Yellow Springs theater enthusiasts decided to bring community theater back to the town, and Center Stage began. Some of the founding participants were Al Radin, Bill Duncan, Paul Treichler, Jim Pierce, Dallas and Paul Webb, according to Hooper. A year later, Eschliman joined the organization.

For the first several years, Center Stage housed its productions in the Bryan High School gym, but competition from stray basketballs proved too difficult, and the group sought a new home. When a building on Dayton Street, owned by Bob Baldwin, opened up, members decided to take the plunge and rent their own theater.

“We were really crunched,” Hooper said of that time, since Center Stage occupied only part of the building. Initially, the dressing room was so tiny that actors had to take turns getting dressed, and the stage area so small that, if it rained, the orchestra got wet.

Space was small but enthusiasm was high, and when the Mollador, the previous tenant of the building’s north side, moved out, Center Stage organizers took an even bigger risk and expanded their quarters. The change proved a good one, and for many years Center Stage thrived, putting on five or six plays a year.

What accounts for the organization’s longevity?

“The chemistry of the people involved was correct. It was a wonderful group,” Hooper said. “And when one person left, another one filled the void.”

But times change, and in the late 1990s, people seemed to get busier. Audiences dwindled and, even more devastating to a community theater, villagers who love to take part in plays no longer had the time to keep the theater alive.

“This was always an all-volunteer organization and people don’t volunteer anymore,” Hooper said.

So, Center Stage productions became fewer and farther between. Finally, this September, the group reluctantly decided to give up its home. As of January, Center Stage no longer holds the lease on its Dayton Street building, although it will remain incorporated as a nonprofit group.

While this chapter of Center Stage history has come to a close, Jean Hooper believes that someday in the not too far off future, a new chapter will begin.

“Something will happen,” she said. “Someone else will step up. The theater will continue.”

—Diane Chiddister