Memories from Stan Dart:
Buying the First Playhouse: The Old Presbyterian Church on Avenue A
The decision was guided by David Anderson. At some point in the early 1980s, the Nebraska Legislature passed legislation that permitted the sale of “scratch-off” betting tickets with the proceeds from those sales going to non-profit organizations across the state. Anderson arranged for the tickets to be sold in bars in Kearney—David was familiar with some of them— and the proceeds to go to KCT. The income was better than expected! Based on the income projections, Anderson said it could generate enough money to buy the church. Within a year after the church was purchased, The Legislature repealed or altered the ticket sales program and the funds for nonprofits dried up. Luckily, KCT’s attendance covered the losses.
How Do You Make a Church into a Theater?
In the weeks before KCT offered its first show in the old Trinity Presbyterian church, work crews throughout the building made it into a “theater”—building platforms for dinner theater, adapting the altar area into a stage, working around the discovery of a baptismal immersion tank under where the stage would be. John Haeberle and Stan Dart discovered in the floor a large cold air-return vent, and in it the real discovery: the mummified remains of a large rat buried under a newspaper dating from the 1930s. While other churches may have had a church mouse, Trinity had for years had its own church rat, albeit a dead one. That rat was subsequently cleaned up, set in a glass case, and became the Golden Rat Award, now given each year to KCT’s most dedicated volunteer.
Boys in the Attic
An attic in the church-on-its-way-to-being-a-theater had no flooring, just open wood girders with blown insulation in between. One Christmas season, Stan Dart took on the job of laying a floor of 4×8 sheets of plywood to create a large room for storage. The Theater office was located just under this attic area and its ceiling was covered with fiber ceiling tiles. Working upstairs one day, Dart missed a step and put one foot through the ceiling and into the office, instantaneously followed by the other foot, only avoiding falling through the ceiling into the office by the 2×10 girder he found himself (yes, painfully) straddling. Merilyn Anderson was covering the Office that day and was also instantaneously showered with ceiling tile, followed by insulation, followed by Dart’s legs dangling from the ceiling. Dart was later presented with a trophy – The Stan Dart Memorial Ceiling.
A Character for All Seasons—Early Shows at the Old Theater
One of the early shows in KCT’s first theater was On Borrowed Time. It produced more than enough memories for several shows. In fact, later on, KCT produced it again. But one of the memories from the first production involved the basement, where the dressing room was located, along with a bathroom for the cast. Because the basement was deeper than the sewer line, the toilet was in a small raised room with an old door. In the show, Kevin Butters played the role of “Pud,” Dewey Adams was “Grandpa,” and Stan Dart was the “Doctor.” Somewhere near the start of Act II, Grandpa (Dewey) is talking to Doc Evans (Stan). Pud is supposed to enter the stage at a point in their dialogue—but the conversation reached the point when Pud was to enter . . . and Pud did not appear. Faces got pale, actors began looking around helplessly and improvising some lines and still no Pud. The actors on stage could hear some frantic whispering and movement backstage and soon the sound of bodies running to the basement as the on-stage actors struggled to make small talk. Though the delay may have been only a little more than a minute, it seemed far longer. In short order, Pud — breathless and in panic — appears on stage and the show goes on. Pud had gotten locked into the basement bathroom and there was no one in the basement that could hear him calling for help.
A Call from Inside the Building
(A Memory from Chuck Peek)
Kiss Me Kate graced one of the early seasons of shows in the new KCT theater. I had appeared in community theater in Flagstaff before moving to Kearney in 1977, where I enjoyed many productions but had so far appeared in none. One day, Gail Lowenberg called, saying she had just the part to engage me in KCT. Terry Stadler and I were to be the gangsters who perform “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” In the course of the show, my gangster gets an on-stage phone call—no one of course on the other end of the call but with lines as though there were a conversation going on. I had a devil of a time getting those lines timed right to make it seem I was listening to a voice on the other end. In the final performance, however, someone hooked up the stage phone to the office phone, and Dave Anderson and Stan Dart began feeding me lines that had nothing to do with the show—and I could only hope were not being heard out in the theater. They weren’t, but the laughter in the office was loud enough to be heard even over my valiant attempt to give the lines as written without breaking up.
Not to be beaten out by the Backlot
(A memory from Lois Thalken)
For the 1987 production of Gypsy, three characters offer professional advice on stripping to newbie stripper, the title character Gypsy Rose Lee. One of them was the simply electrifying Miss Electra played by Katie Nickel, alongside Mary Berglund as Miss Mazepa, whose final stinger for her solo was a blow of the trumpet between her legs. Yep. Backside to the audience! The third was Kim Eickoff, as Tessie Turie, who performed a graceful ballet in a lovely flowing gown, a poetic ballet replete with multiple pelvic thrusts!
As stage lighting went low, Katie shimmied those string lights attached to her leotard like nobody’s business, all three of them strutting their stuff during “Ya Gotta Have a Gimmick.”
Katie, always willing and ready to don multiple hats during KCT productions, was also working props backstage, and I believe might have also been stage manager. There is a point in the strip where an agent’s secretary answers an important phone call regarding the future of Mamma Rose’s budding actresses. Dear Phyllis Farenbruch portrayed that secretary who is to answer the phone ringing on the wall. The sound cue occurs in the script, but there is no ring of the phone. The backstage mechanism has failed to function. Without a ring of a phone, poor Phyllis is left with no way to answer and she can’t advance her own line until she can answer the ring of a phone.
In what seemed an eternity in which Phyllis looks increasingly panicked, we finally hear a loud “Brrrrring! Brrrrrring!” It was not exactly the sound of a phone. No, it was Katie. With full voice and body pressed just as close to the backstage wall as possible, she was providing Phyllis with her cue. Now Phyllis is in an entirely new predicament. She glances at the phone and then toward the wall where the voice was pretending to sound like a phone ringing. Back at the phone and again toward the direction of the “brrrrrring,” trying to decide where she should best physically answer the brrrrrringing phone. Finally, she shrugged and settled on picking up the phone itself, much to the relief of us all.
Louise Had a Little Lamb
(A memory from Sandy Janssen)
I think of all the ingenuity and determination and sheer stubbornness that happened behind so many successful productions. Wonder how many remember the gypsy and the baby lamb? Louise, played by Lois Thalken, held the baby lamb in her lap in one scene and sang the sweet melody “Little Lamb.” Part of every production is to find all the needed props, and in this case they were able to find the little lamb. It was so tiny it had to be bottle-fed every four hours. A tiny stall was made in the basement of the old church theater—-props took its duty seriously and the little lamb was fed regularly but it also grew extremely fast! So quickly, that by closing night, the whole cast struggled with corralling it backstage from its rambunctiousness, bleating, and pooping. By the final performance, poor little Louise could barely lift it onto her lap or keep it there. Naturally, the cast fell in love with our lamb—tears flowed when she returned to her farm, assuaged only by the assurances that she would have a long happy life in green pastures.
(A related memory from Lois Thalken)
How quickly and how much a baby lamb can grow in size in what would have been maybe a three-week period of rehearsal and performance! By the end of the run, my backstage joke was that my solo “Little Lamb” had transformed into “Little Ram.” The little fella Rick Marlatt had so graciously procured for the scene was to be cuddled up on my lap, start-to-finish during the entire heart-wrenching solo. Goodness, was I ever so thankful that during my youth, I had been in 4-H for quite a few years, and one of my livestock activities was showing sheep at the county fair.
This is Your Cue!
Do you have stories from this era of Kearney Community Theatre, after it began calling the church on Avenue A home? If so, we would love to collect them. Whether you’d like to write them out and send them to us, or have one of our editors listen to you tell your tale, we are excited to immortalize them here at Kearney Creates!
Lauren Bonk, Editor
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