"Theater in rural Appalachian Virginia brings regional themes to the stage"

by Jeffrey Brown and Alison Thoet  

[Correspondent Jeffrey Brown and producer Alison Thoet’s report on the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia, and its Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights aired on the PBS NewsHour on 14 March 2023 (Theater in rural Appalachian Virginia brings regional themes to the stage | PBS NewsHour).  Barter is the oldest existing professional theater in the United States.

[The theater is located within the Abingdon Historic District.  Abingdon, the county seat of Washington County, is a tiny town in southwest Virginia, founded in 1778.  It’s 133 miles southwest of Roanoke, 311 miles south-southwest of Richmond, and 363 miles southwest of Washington, D.C.  Nonetheless, regular patrons travel long distances to attend performances.

[The venerable theater’s history, based on its Wikipedia page, is as follows:

[Barter Theatre opened on 10 June 1933, when the United States was in the middle of the Great Depression. Its first production was the 1931 drama After Tomorrow by John Golden (1874-1955).  It played to full houses. 

[Many well-known stars of stage, screen, and television have performed early in their careers at Barter, including Gregory Peck, Ernest Borgnine, Patricia Neal, Ned Beatty, Hume Cronyn, Gary Collins, Frances Fisher, Larry Linville, John Glover, Jim Varney, and Wayne Knight.

[Beginning with “some twenty of his fellow actors,” Robert Porterfield (1905-71), founder of the theater, offered admission by letting the local people pay with food goods, hence the name “Barter.”  The original ticket price for a play was 40 cents, or the equivalent in goods.

[While remaining based in Abingdon, Barter Theatre has presented plays over a broad geographical area.  A September 1939 trip took the group to New York City, performing at the Heckscher Theater in East Harlem.  

[On three nights the troupe presented Lady Baltimore, Everywhere I Roam, and "a mountain version of Romeo and Juliet.”  In 1949, one of its companies produced Hamlet in Elsinore, Denmark.  That same year, it had a touring company that did one-night stands in localities in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina.

[In 1993, the First Light Players were founded, a troupe within the Barter dedicated to theater for young audiences.  Today, they live on as the Barter Players, bringing live theater to young audiences across under-served regions in the South and East coast.

[Today, Barter is one of the last year-round professional resident repertory theaters remaining in the United States.  Each year in June, Barter Theatre celebrates its heritage with Barter Days.  For these performances, patrons are invited to barter for admission by bringing the equivalent amount of canned food.  All food is donated to a local charity.

[In 1946, Barter was designated as the State Theatre of Virginia and two years later, it won the Tony Regional Theatre Award.  The theater won the Business of the Year Award for the Tri-Cities, Virginia/Tennessee region in 2006 and in 2008, Barter was named Overall State Winner for Small Companies for The Torchbearer Award by the Virginia Chamber of Commerce.

[The AFPP was launched in 2000.  Six new Appalachian plays are chosen each year from the submissions to be given public readings by Barter’s company.  Plays must be written by an Appalachian playwright (currently living in a state that contains the Appalachian Mountain Range).  OR: The plays must be set in the Appalachian region. 

[Plays must be full length and must be unpublished and must not have had a full professional production.  The deadline for submission for the next (i.e., 2024) AFPP (dates to be determined) is 1 May 2023.  Send play and a brief synopsis to: apfestival@bartertheatre.com.  (A word to playwrights from a former dramaturg/literary manager: please follow Barter’s submission requirements and restrictions carefully.)]

Barter Theatre, which opened during the Great Depression and is thriving 90 years later, is known for bringing regional themes to its rural Appalachian stage. Jeffrey Brown visited Abingdon, Virginia, to show the changing face of the area for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Geoff Bennett: Barter Theatre, born out of the Depression, is thriving 90 years later, now known for bringing regional themes to its rural Appalachian stage.

Jeffrey Brown visited Abingdon, Virginia, to show the changing face of the area for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Actress [in a scene on stage]: And I said, isn’t it tragic, Carla? He fell over on that big side.

Jeffrey Brown: A rehearsal of a new play about a group of women in a small factory town.

Actress: What’s so wrong with me, mama?

Jeffrey Brown: Experiencing loss and grief, friendship and family ties.

Audrey Cefaly, Playwright: Her volume and intensity there is just kind of way off the charts.

Jeffrey Brown: Playwright Audrey Cefaly.

Audrey Cefaly: What I am trying to do is to articulate without condescension the interior worlds of working-class people of this region.

There are a lot of preconceptions and myths and stereotypes out there. And I’m trying to dispel what I can with truthful characters from an honest perspective.

Jeffrey Brown: Cefaly’s play “Trouble (at the Vista View Mobile Home Estates)” was one of six featured this year at Barter Theatre’s annual Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights [23-26 February 2023], which offers regional writers a chance to work with actors and directors to fine-tune their plays.

Actress: There’s no water here, because that’s fun. It’s so fun.

(LAUGHTER)

Jeffrey Brown: And to see how audiences respond during a staged reading here in one of Barter’s two theaters.

Audrey Cefaly: There’s something very singular about being among writers who are all focused and devoted to the same goal, which is to elevate voices in the region from whence they came.

Nick Piper, Associate Artistic Director, Barter Theatre: I think what it really is, is about our audience, to develop these plays for our audience, plays that reflect their lives, that reflect their values, or challenge those and explore them.

It is so good to see you all back here in person.

Jeffrey Brown: Barter’s associate artistic director, Nick Piper, is also director of the 23-year-old festival, an opportunity for local audiences to hear new stories and for regional writers to develop new work.

At least one of these plays will eventually receive a full production at Barter.

Nick Piper: That has the possibility of changing a playwright’s career and life.

Once it’s gotten to production at, like, a regional theater, a professional regional theater, other theaters throughout the country are looking at — we look at each other’s seasons and see what other theaters are choosing and what their audiences are interested in. And . . .

Jeffrey Brown: This is the ecosystem of theater in the U.S.

Nick Piper: This is it. It’s — that’s right.

Jeffrey Brown: Barter is located in Abingdon, a town of about 8,000 in the westernmost tip of Virginia, wedged between West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina.

The theater has a special role in this region, according to Henry and Flora (phonetically) Joy, longtime supporters who drove an hour from home in Johnson City, Tennessee, to see the festival.

Henry Joy, Barter Theatre Patron: It’s not just an artistic magnet, but it’s an economic engine for not only Abingdon, in particular, but for the entire Southwest Virginia, East Tennessee region. It is the place to go.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s also filled with history, 90 years of it. Barter is one of the longest-running professional theaters in the U.S., founded during the Great Depression, when the price of a ticket was 40 cents, or a bartered equivalent in farm products, trading ham for “Hamlet.”

Founder Robert Porterfield managed to salvage equipment and furnishings, including these balcony seats, from a New York theater going out of business, in order to build his own gorgeous theater. He also brought in actors from New York and elsewhere. Which the theater still does.

And legends like Gregory Peck, Ernest Borgnine, and Patricia Neal have performed here as they were starting out. Today, the theater fuels the local economy through tourism, but also by employing actors, stagehands and craftspeople, all part of the local community.

Ketch Secor, Playwright: I have come to the greatest theater in the world, if you ask me.

Jeffrey Brown: And it’s continued to fuel the dreams of people like Ketch Secor, who grew up three hours away in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

“Hooten Holler,” the fable of a boy who saves country music, is Secor’s debut as a playwright. It’s a departure from his normal full-time gig as front man and fiddler of the Grammy Award-winning band Old Crow Medicine Show, and a chance to do a different kind of storytelling.

Ketch Secor: It’s the only way I can scratch the musical theater itch is by doing it, by writing it. I wanted to talk about the authenticity of the originators of country music.

You know, these hills, like, they’re alive with song. This landscape is a soulful place. So, it’s no surprise that so much of the music that has become country and rock ‘n’ roll comes from this place.

Jeffrey Brown: Barter, a historically white theater in a mostly white town, has also made a commitment to telling stories of Black Appalachia and promoting Black playwrights.

Actor: How did I, Henry Brown, escape the savagery of slavery?

Jeffrey Brown: “The Transported Man” was part of this year’s Appalachian Festival, written by Russell Nichols, who joined remotely, as actors gathered for their first rehearsal of the play.

Woman: Donovan (phonetically) and Gio (phonetically) are going to enter from house right.

Jeffrey Brown: It tells the story of Henry Box Brown, who shipped himself from slavery in Virginia to freedom in Pennsylvania.

Terrance Jackson, a longtime Barter actor who lives in the community, now oversees the theater’s Black Stories Black Voices initiative begun in 2022. He says things were different when he first came here 10 years ago from his native Florida.

Terrance Jackson, Director of Outreach, Barter Black Stories Black Voices: It was definitely difficult at first to try to find my place, you know, especially back when I first started. It was not a lot of people who looked like me were about in the community, and especially at the theater.

Jeffrey Brown: Jackson and others here are trying to change that through full-length plays, including at least one in the Appalachian Playwrights Festival, monologue nights, and community events focusing on Black stories.

Terrance Jackson: My dream for us at the theater is that no one will ever be shocked to see a Black person in the audience. No one will ever be shocked, including other Black people.

I want to be able to create a space where people feel comfortable at all times, whether they’re white, Black, anybody. I think it’s important because we need representation and we need our stories told.

Jeffrey Brown: For playwright Audrey Cefaly, the festival gave her a chance to represent the working-class people she grew up around in Northern Alabama.

Audrey Cefaly: Every writer that I know of that writes stories in this region is dying to have a space here. So, I feel very, very lucky to be here.

Jeffrey Brown: For his part, Ketch Secor adds this:

Ketch Secor: This is a big stop on the tour of what makes our country unique.

Actress: How do we feel about bourbon as a verb?

(LAUGHTER)

Jeffrey Brown: For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia.

[In his more than 30-year career with the PBS NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists. 

[Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with The New York Times.

[Alison Thoet is a writer and a CANVAS associate producer and national affairs associate producer at NewsHour.]