Community Theater Series

APPROACHING COMMUNITY THEATER FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE PROSCENIUM ARCH: The West Bay Community Theater, North Kingstown, RI

This is the seventh in a series about community theaters located throughout and adjacent to Rhode Island. The West Bay Community Theater, North Kingstown, RI “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t do or teach, criticize.” So said disgruntled fantasy fiction author Marsha Hinds, riffing on the famous quote by George […]

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STAGING CHALLENGING SCRIPTS: Written by and about marginalized people at the Head Trick Theatre, PVD

This is the sixth article in a series about community theaters located throughout and adjacent to Rhode Island. With its 2024 production of The Lucky Chance — a 17th-century comic farce about the perils of arranged marriage, written by the first professional female playwright in England – Providence’s Head Trick Theatre “showcases what it does […]

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The Little Theatre’s Old Quequechan No.1 Firehouse: A legacy of lighting fires under audiences after a history of putting them out 

By Bob Abelman  This is the fifth article in a series about community theaters located throughout and bordering on Rhode Island.  One of the defining features of community theaters – what with their grassroots operations, limited budgets, and non-profit status – is that they typically perform out of nondescript found spaces such as church basements, […]

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A Legacy of Longevity, Resilience, and Found Spaces

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 […]

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How About it Kids? Lets Put on A Show: The Contemporary Theater Company in Wakefield

This is the third article in a series about community theaters located throughout Rhode Island. “Our folks are up against it, and up against it good,” says actor Mickey Rooney as Mickey Moran, in the 1939 film Babes in Arms. He’s the teenaged son of vaudevillian performers whose careers have tanked after the advent of […]

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Down, But Not Out: The ongoing saga of the Bristol Theatre Company

This is the second article in a series about community theaters located throughout RI. According to the American Theater Association, it has always been difficult to get an accurate count of community theaters in operation in the United States and its territories – currently guesstimated to be over 6,000 venues. This is because of their […]

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Profiling Rhode Island’s Community Theaters: The stories behind our neighborhood storytellers

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream may not have been the first play to parody amateur theater, but his depiction of the exceptionally incompetent Mechanicals certainly created the mold for more modern-day, like-minded British comedies like Noises Off and The Play That Goes Wrong. Christopher Guest’s now-iconic Waiting for Guffman – a mockumentary about the aspirations […]

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