In the office, in what would be the hayloft of the Barn, a window airconditioning unit struggles against the late summer humidity. A graying butterscotch Chihuahua named Bruiser roams the tired maroon carpet. The only young things in the room are the computers and the part-time employees, all fresh-faced and expressive, as freshly minted theater graduates are wont to be. A black-and-white copy of a newspaper clipping clings to a bulletin board. “Barn Dinner Theatre Construction Starts,” says the story, which is paired with a picture of three beauty queens — Miss Guilford County, Miss High Point and Miss Winston-Salem — each with a pump-clad foot perched on the blade of a ground-breaking shovel. They grasp the handle with white-gloved hands. That’s how long the Barn Dinner Theatre has been in Greensboro: going on fifty years. Mid-life for a human, Methuselah-like for a dinner theater. But don’t be fooled by the oak-slab paneling and wagon-wheel chandeliers that have hung in the lobby since September 1964. The heart of Greensboro’s Barn Dinner Theatre — the nation’s oldest continuously running dinner theater — beats young.
ACT I
The idea of fusing dinner and theater has been around for centuries — at least since the madrigal dinners of the Renaissance — but the modern-day version sprouted in 1953, with the opening of the Barksdale Theatre in a historic tavern in Richmond, Virginia. A decade later, Roanoke-based architect, inventor and businessman Howard Wolfe opened the first Barn Dinner Theatre, also in Richmond. Wolfe built the Barn near his first venture into the theater business, the Wedgewood Playhouse, which he installed in an old tomato cannery in Toano, Virginia. Within months of the Richmond Barn’s opening, Wolfe announced a second location, on a rural road called Stage Coach Trail on the western skirt of Greensboro. Wolfe’s daughter Cecilia Carr, who lives in Warrenton, Virginia, says her father located his theatrical Barns in the middle of nowhere, often near cemeteries and airports. “The joke was, he got ’em coming and going,” Carr says. Wolfe’s idea was to bring theater to the masses by making it comfortable and affordable. In a 1970 interview on a Roanoke TV talk show, Wolfe, who entertained clients in New York, bemoaned having to pay $50 for a black market ticket to see Hello, Dolly! on Broadway. “I was in New York last week, and the hotel bill was $42 for one night,” he told the interviewer. “I know what you mean!” the interviewer said. On Sunday nights, the Barn charged $4 for dinner and a show. Wolfe, who’d grown up on a small Virginia farm during the Depression, designed his gambrel-roofed theaters to resemble barns as a nod to his rural upbringing, his daughter says. He dictated that franchises furnish the interiors with farm tools and other rustic touches. Wolfe also patented the Magic Stage, an elevator platform that descended on cables from the Barn’s “loft” into the center of the dining area once the buffet was cleared away, making a theater in the round. In the early days of the Barn, the actors waited tables, then disappeared after dessert to prepare for the night’s show. Wolfe built twenty-seven Barn Dinner Theatres across the South and West, including locations in Raleigh and Charlotte. The Barns were not just a chain, but a circuit. Shows were cast and rehearsed in New York, then rotated from one Barn to another. Local talent supplemented the New York actors, who bunked in bedrooms that Wolfe put on the second floor of his Barns.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Wolfe’s childhood friend Conley Jones and his wife, Anna Jones, owned the Greensboro franchise, and they rode the swell of popularity that dinner theaters enjoyed in the 1960s and ’70s. The shows were good places to catch rising and falling stars. Jayne Mansfield, Mickey Rooney and Jessica Lange played the Greensboro Barn. Robert De Niro also delivered lines from Greensboro’s “Magic Stage,” before he made Taxi Driver in 1976. Barn lore holds that De Niro was booted from the Barn’s stable while in Greensboro. Cecilia Carr remembers hearing that De Niro rebelled against the Barn’s living quarters, waiter’s duties and pay. She adds that her father and Mansfield knew each other through business. Mansfield was a spokeswoman and model for one of Wolfe’s inventions, a tanning lamp. She appeared in advertisements that were shot in front of the stone fireplace at the Greensboro Barn. Wolfe and Mansfield — who were married to others — also had a relationship outside of business, Carr says. “He was human, not Superman,” she says of her father, who died in 1989. “He did a lot of amazing things, and he did a lot of awful things.” For a while, the Barn was one of the amazing things, especially for local actors. “The Barn was the elite opportunity, certainly in terms of getting paid and getting experience,” says James Fisher, head of the theatre department at UNCG. It was 1974, and Fisher was a graduate student at UNCG when he got the lead in Beginner’s Luck, a situation comedy at the Barn. He went on to act in half a dozen shows and direct a handful of others. “It was an extraordinary experience,” says Fisher, who competed with dozens of actors for the two or three roles that each show offered to locals. “It honed our ability to audition. You got to experiment, and grow, and work with the directors, and push to get better if you wanted to.” Then, as now, an emcee greeted the customers after dinner, calling attention to large groups and guests marking special occasions. Couples who were celebrating an anniversary were asked to stand and kiss as they had kissed on their wedding day. If they pecked, the emcee made a joke. If they smooched too long, the emcee made a joke. Then, the Magic Stage lowered and the show began. Between scenes, actors came and left via draped exits at the corners of the dining room. In the lobby, they wiggled in and out of costumes and sprinted around the outside of the building when the director called for them to enter from a different direction. By the time the 1990s rolled around, the public’s appetite for haddock and farce had waned. The Barn Dinner chain had already dissolved — partly because of the diminished demand for dinner theater and partly because of Wolfe’s tendency to lose interest after he launched a project — but the Joneses, who were keen on a dollar, hung onto the Greensboro property and ran it independently until 1996. That’s when the curtain almost fell.
ACT II
Ric Gutierrez, a part-time bartender at the Barn, had been dispensing beer and shots of Crown Royal for not quite a year when one of the Barn’s owners, Conley Jones, died in 1996. A week later, Conley’s widow, Anna, went to Ric with bad news. Here, Gutierrez slips into his best Hungarian accent — think of a cross between Zsa Zsa Gabor and Bela Lugosi — to remember what Anna Jones told him: “Ric, zee Barn must close. I have no munnney. You must take zee employees out and tell zem no jobz.” After a show one night, Ric herded the employees to a downtown restaurant, The Paisley Pineapple, for drinks. As they entered, Ric saw Bill Baldwin, who owned Tijuana Fats, a restaurant where Ric worked part-time as the general manager. “Bill, the Barn is for sale,” Gutierrez whispered as they passed. September 2013
O.Henry 65