1954, the Cheneys, looking to bring some culture and entertainment to the area, turned it into a bowling alley, some parts of which still can be seen today. “The cherry wood floor in the auditorium was the cherry wood floor they put in for the bowling alley,” Garnick says. LIKe conSerVaTIon anD snow sports, theater in the valley has been a steadfast tradition. Environmentalist Mardy Murie was instrumental in creating the Wilderness Act to protect federal land; she also helped create the Jackson Community Theater in the late 1930s/ early 1940s. She was looking to cure cabin fever and give locals something to do in the winter. It was all wonderfully amateur, though. In 1954, New York producer John Stark thought Jackson Hole enough of a destination to establish a summer stock theater in a tent at the base of Snow King Mountain where the baseball diamond is today. Stark’s performances were well received enough that Paula Jeffrey, a producer from Nevada, thought to establish something more permanent and contacted the Cheneys about leasing their bowl-
ing alley as a playhouse. Jeffrey’s Pink Garter Theater opened in 1959 with its first production, an original play called Brother Against Brother or Never Murder Your Father, You’ll Get Shot in the End. “In the beginning of the theater, there were no sets, no costumes, and no lighting effects except on and off,” Jeffrey wrote in a piece published in the June 13, 1963, edition of the Jackson Hole Guide. Actors were college students and beauty queens. Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann Summers on the TV sitcom Gilligan’s Island, performed at the theater one season. By the time the Pink Garter was in its fifth season, it had graduated to intricately designed sets, one hundred additional seats, new company members, and a production of the Johann Baptiste Strauss operetta, Die Fledermaus. In the
Pink Garter Theater actors duel it out in their 1967 production of Tom Jones. The theater later changed the spelling of its name to Pink Garter Theatre.
New styles from
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