Theatre at LA FROM ONE A YEAR TO ONE-ACTS

by Joe Sheppard

Until about a half-century ago, Lawrence Academy’s theatre department followed the model of many of its sister schools: one “big production” a year, in the spring, performed for one night only. These were usually “serious” plays — no musicals; nothing too controversial. A musical revue called the Autumn Frolic, directed by English and music teacher (and, later, Headmaster) Arthur Ferguson, went up, as its title implies, at some point in the fall. The last one was presented in 1958; the picture below, with boys in blazers and “girls” in bobby sox, tells it all.

The late Alan Whipple, who taught at LA from 1955 until his death in 1988, was the last of the school’s old-time theatre directors: a classroom teacher who directed plays on the side. Whipple taught history and French, both of which he loved (he completed the first volume of a history of the Academy before he died), but many of his happiest hours were spent in the theatre. He was a talented director with a strong sense of character and, when he needed it, a gift for comic timing.

Before the Ferguson Building opened during the 1967-’68 school year, shows were produced in the Gray Building, on the cramped stage at the north end of the basketball court — where the music practice rooms are today. (Some older alumni may remember the chain-gang procedure for lifting those steel folding chairs out of the pit where they were stored and setting them up under Norm Grant’s stern supervision.)

That school year was the Academy’s 175th anniversary, and Whipple, together with two colleagues, co-wrote and produced a pageant-type musical show for the occasion, entitled Days of Our Years, to be the first production in the new facility. Narrative continuity was provided by the “marble” busts of brothers Amos and William Lawrence, ably portrayed by classmates and best friends Rob Bradley and Ken Brighton ’68, both of whom could do a wicked Maine accent.

Days of Our Years was the only musical to be performed on LA’s stage until the fall of 1970, when English teacher and playwright David Smith and I decided it would be fun to write a musical comedy. We toiled all fall and winter; the result, a Rip Van Winkle school story called That Osgood Style, premiered and closed on one Saturday night in May. It featured the angelic ghost of a lost boy floating across the stage on a wood-and-cotton cloud. The crowd went wild.

Undeterred, we wrote two more: In 1972, we wrote Three Sheets to the Wind, which was the story of Columbus landing in modern-day America … featuring six-foot dancing hot dogs. Our swan song the following year, The Best of Both Worlds, was doubtless the inspiration for the series Lucifer on Netflix. In the climactic scene, Satan, who has come to earth as Benjamin L. Z. Bubbe (get it?) to run for mayor of a small town in Nebraska, disappeared in a puff of smoke as he was forced to put his hand on the Bible while taking the oath of office. The stage extension we built for that show, to accommodate the trap door to Hell, stayed there until the building was remodeled in 2006. That door was actually the first thing to be demolished for the renovation. During the final performance of Pippin, the last show in the “old” theatre, it was enthusiastically destroyed with a sledgehammer!

The “modern” era of LA theatre started with the hiring of Brian Smiar in the fall of 1972. The school’s first full-time theatre teacher, he mounted three productions per year, one each term. Smiar’s shows were the first to run for several successive nights, Wednesday through Saturday. (The Wednesday performance was dropped after a few years for lack of an audience.) Multiple performances taught the actors the importance of sustaining the energy and focus of a play, something they had never had to think about before, as shows in the old days were literally one-night stands.

Even though Smiar professed to hate musicals, his arrival heralded — or at least coincided with — the start of the big Broadway musical era at LA. Fall productions were usually “straight” plays, and talent shows and the like occupied the winter, but the spring was reserved for the musical. Starting with Little Mary Sunshine in 1975 and Fiddler on the Roof the following year, which starred bearded faculty member Bill Harman as Tevye, these plays were among the biggest events of the year. The LA band, supplemented by a few adult professionals, became the pit orchestra, reading the original, unedited scores. The musicians started working on the show after winter vacation, and it occupied their entire spring. It was hard and exhausting work, but all agreed the experience was worth every minute.

More than once, Winterim courses provided a head start on some aspect of a show. The first one, in 1976, was Fiddler Workshop, in preparation for the spring production of that show. In 1990, a puppet-building Winterim made the “Audrey” plants for Little Shop of Horrors; six years later, in preparation for Forty-Second Street, the cast spent the two weeks of Winterim learning to tap dance their way through the show’s long dance numbers.

The 1992-’93 school year was Lawrence Academy’s bicentennial. In honor of the occasion, just as happened 25 years before, a group of faculty and students created Almost Out of Time, an original musical set in 2043, when all learning is accomplished through virtual-reality goggles. Determined to return the Academy to its traditional, “human” way of doing things, an intrepid group of students sets out to rescue the school’s past, most of which is stored in the Waters House basement, before all is destroyed and virtual learning takes over forever.

Since the story spanned two centuries, the large cast included characters from different periods in the school’s history: The marble busts of the Lawrence brothers, familiar to generations of students, served as commentators, as they had in 1967, while their “living” counterparts appeared in many scenes set in the past.

In 1993, not long after Almost Out of Time, the spring musical was moved to the fall, and then to the winter, where it remains today. As it moved around in the school year, the musical also took on some new and different forms: Joel Sugerman, who directed the theatre program from 2005 to 2021, started his LA career by calling on students to create more original work. His first production was an adaptation, created by the cast during rehearsals, of Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial; his favorite, however, was a production of An Iliad, a play that was written for one actor but performed at LA by 11!

Since the turn of the 21st century, the spring term has brought with it the LA One-Acts, performed in a three-quarter thrust, built on the stage and bringing the audience into close proximity with the actors. These evenings of student-directed plays are the culminating projects of the Honors Theatre Ensemble class. Each student chooses, adapts, writes, or creates a one-act play, which they direct in a fully realized production.

Theatre had entered Lawrence Academy’s regular curriculum by the mid-1970s, with courses such as Introduction to Drama and School in Theatre. The latter was an English course, but students in those years could also earn an academic credit for a major role in the spring musical. Theatre on Tour and a mime course were popular back then, and the Something for Nothing Players delighted young audiences across the Northeast for many years during the two weeks of Winterim.

In the years since, the theatre curriculum has matured into a full menu of courses. Currently, Director of Theatre Dennis Canty teaches Improv, Acting, and the theatre segment of Artistic Expression, the required ninth-grade arts course, as well as the venerable, year-long Honors Theatre Ensemble. Once dark for much of the year, Lawrence’s theatre is now one of the busiest places on campus.