Bill Kinney
The Marietta Kiwanis Club hosted speakers from each at its meeting this Thursday. This columnist had planned to devote this column to what they had to say, but what they said was so interesting that rather than shorten their remarks, we are going to run them at length. This week, by virtue of seniority, we'll feature the remarks of Palmer Wells, co-founder of Theatre on the Square. And next we'll have the thoughts of Earl Reece of the Strand.
"The timing is good here," he began. "The Theatre just last night opened its 29th season, in fact, with a brand new world premiere centering on the Great Locomotive Chase during the Civil War. It's called 'Stealing Dixie' and it's pretty exciting stuff. It deals with James Andrews and the Yankee raiders who pulled off a daring theft of the locomotive The General, that has been made famous in plenty of books and even movies, but never before a stage play. Andrews and his crew actually spent the night just before they stole the general at The Kennesaw House in downtown Marietta, which was then called The Fletcher House, just across the street from where the theater is today."
"But this is not the first time Theatre in the Square has capitalized on events from right in its own back yard, he noted. First was the original play 'Zion!' about the pre-Civil War founding of Zion Baptist Church, one of the first black churches in Cobb. We also staged the play 'The Lynching of Leo Frank' and the play 'Turned Funny,' based on Atlanta newspaper columnist Celestine Sibley's memoir.
"Our annual budget is just under $2 million dollars. We have a staff of 12, two on the artistic side and 10 administrative employees, plus five box office employees, two of whom are part time. We operate under a small professional theatre agreement with actors' equity, the actors union. This means that we must hire a certain percentage of union actors for each production and adhere to the union scale for our category of theatre which is based on capacity and ticket prices. We have 3,500 subscribers. It has been as high as 45 hundred.
"We, of course, are non profit and have a volunteer board of directors with 22 civic and business leaders serving. We are a producing theater - as opposed to a booking theatre - which means we locally produce all our shows, from casting to set, lighting and costume designs. Each production cost runs from $80,000 to $150,000. ...
"Mike Horne and I started Theatre in the Square in 1982 while we were both still working at IBM in writing/editing types of jobs. I had just moved here the previous year from New York and we had bought an old house near the old town square in Marietta. I was smitten with the charm and we shared a desire to become a part of the Square.
"Fortuitously, we came across Bill Swearingen, the owner of The Depot restaurant alongside the tracks. This restaurant had a banquet room that was the old freight storage area of the train depot. It was so small it would be stretching it to call it a theater. ...
"And, luckily, since we only lived a couple of blocks away, our driveway became our workshop for building platforms that would become the stage. And our back patio became the business office where I, as managing director, took care of the business end of things. Before long, we had an 85-seat theater with straight-back chairs thrown in by the restaurant. ...
"There were a couple of things we wanted to do from the outset - do great theater and pay actors and technicians to do it. So what if our pay scale that first season was a whopping $25 a week, we were paying! We also set out to emulate professional theatres in the big cities. We would perform Tuesdays through Sundays, sell reserved seats and so on. We lasted three years in that 85-seat space with its leaky roof, noisy trains nearby and cramped space when we began looking for a larger space and found it just down the alley a block away in the recently vacated Lindsay-Galt furniture showroom. It had the height that would allow us to put in risers to accommodate 11 rows of seats for a capacity of 169. We had our second home that even had a touch of old Atlanta - seats from The Fox Theatre. After we heard the Fox was renovating and replacing the old heavily padded '50s-model seats we leapt at their offer of $5 dollars apiece to come and remove them and haul them away. What we didn't bargain for was removing the years of gunk, chewing gum and sticky goo from them. ...
"And I must say, I'm quite proud of what we've accomplished at Theatre in the Square in our 28 years. I'm especially proud that we've had 26 world premieres - half of those of works that we've commissioned.
"But I still think we were the right theater in the right place at the right time. And, of course, I can't say there's anything more exciting than producing live theatre - regardless of where you're located. But it's especially exciting right here in Marietta.
"Thanks you all again for having us and for supporting the arts."
And thanks to Wells and to the late Mr. Horne for bringing Marietta Theatre in the Square.
Bill Kinney is associate editor of the Marietta Daily Journal.
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