This is the fourth article in a series about community theaters located throughout Rhode Island.
The Community Players’ first performance was the 1921 staging of Milestones, a three-act melodrama that followed an upper-middle-class English family over the span of 52 years. It appeared on the Old Star Theatre stage – a former Masonic Temple on Pawtucket’s Main Street. The Pawtucket Times, which started operation just the year before, noted that the production “proved conclusively the value of the amateur theatrical organization in the social life of our community.” That show turned out to be a milestone in its own right, for The Community Players went on to produce nearly 400 plays over the next 103 years, and counting. It even outlived the Pawtucket Times. The company has found a place in the heart of the community and has significantly contributed to the cultural base of Pawtucket and the Blackstone Valley area. And yet, The Community Players has been hard-pressed to find a consistent and affordable place to operate – a common problem for nonprofit organizations in general and community theaters in particular.
After the Old Star Theatre, The Community Players found itself in the old Bijou Theatre on Broad Street, the Grand Army Hall on Exchange Street, the Pawtucket Senior High School buildings, and the Oak Hill Tennis Club. For 12 years, starting in 1968, the theater company moved into the upper floor of the Slater Park boathouse until a fire destroyed the interior. The Pawtucket Congregational Church and St. Martin’s Church loaned The Community Players their auditoriums until 1982, when the company moved into its current space in the Jenks Middle School auditorium. Despite facing many challenging times throughout its long history – including the Great Depression and a world war – the company never failed to offer a season of programming. That is, until the theater was shuttered in 2020, along with all others in the country, during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a sobering report from Theatre Communications Group, the theater industry’s post-pandemic recovery has been precarious at best, with revenue from ticket sales and subscriptions 55% lower than what it was prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Community and professional theaters across the country found themselves struggling to attract patrons who had stopped attending live shows and grew accustomed to controlling what they see and when they see it from the comfort of their homes.
“We are living in an extraordinary moment of contraction,” said the report, where smaller audiences are leading to theater closures, staff layoffs, and production cancellations. “How to regain theatergoer investment and institutional loyalty after such a long hiatus has been the looming question.” There have been significant community theater closures across RI. Fortunately, layoffs have not been an issue since community theater staff, cast, and leadership are mostly volunteers. And theatergoer investment and institutional loyalty has not been a problem for The Community Players, not when your company has been a part of the local community ecosystem for over a hundred years. Although subscription sales are still down, individual ticket sales are not.
“When you’ve been operating in the same community for so long, loyalty has never been an issue,” says Christopher Margadonna, the board president for The Community Players. “Members of the community have always supported us. There’s a multigenerational history of belonging, commitment, and resilience on both sides of the proscenium arch.” “If COVID-19 was an earthquake,” noted The Boston Globe’s Don Aucoin in a recent feature piece about the arts across New England, “What theaters are now trying to cope with is an ongoing series of nerve-wracking aftershocks.” “What’s really nerve-wracking about running a legacy community theater,” notes Margadonna, “Is that, after 103 years, I just don’t want to be that guy who breaks it.” •
Bob Abelman is an award-winning theater critic who also writes for The Boston Globe. Connect with him on Facebook.
