In the southwestern corner of rural Vermont, within a town of 586 people, Weston Playhouse has spent the last 82 years doing the nearly impossible: establishing a resident professional theater with jam-packed houses throughout its annual summer season.
Weston’s locally produced, professional productions draw Vermonters from throughout the region, many of whom purchase a subscription and drive an hour or more to enjoy the kind of variety featured in the 2017 season: The Music Man, Once, Lost in Yonkers, Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Buyer and Cellar. The theater’s producing artistic director, Steve Stettler, and producing partners Malcolm Ewen and Tim Fort, program what Stettler calls a “rich theatrical diet” that has also featured world premiere productions in years past like Saint Ex, the musical biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery (author of the classic French story The Little Prince); and The Oath, a play based on the true story of Chechen physician Khassan Baiev.
“While we’re on a summer calendar, we’re on a regional theater model,” said Stettler. “We’re not looking to provide light entertainment for tourists. This involves broadening the season beyond what people normally expect in the summer and providing an entry point for audience members with a variety of interests.”
The production of new work interwoven with a season of more popular plays can be tricky, especially when the theater has 300 seats to fill at every performance. “There were many plays that we were passionate to do, but were not well served by a larger proscenium space,” said Stettler. “We wanted a space that provided greater intimacy and greater actor-audience flexibility.”
With this in mind, Weston Playhouse began a program in 2000 called Other Stages, using existing properties around town and converting them into mini-theaters to build an audience for less familiar or more intimate work. A local bar, church and the Weston Rod and Gun Club all became theater venues over the course of a decade.
“By 2008, we had built enough of an audience that our board chair approached nine other friends of the theater and purchased the Walker Farm, a five-acre farmstead at the north end of Weston, to build a permanent second stage,” Stettler said.
The board reached out to Bread Loaf Corporation, architects and builders based in Middlebury, Vermont, to consider the possibilities for converting the farm’s existing buildings into the kind of flexible theater space the producing team had dreamed of for nearly a decade.
Barns? Yes, Barns
“Initially, the client wanted to look at reusing existing dairy barns on the property,” said Jim Pulver, Bread Loaf architect. “They said, ‘Could we put a studio theater in the existing dairy barn and use other buildings on the property for a scene shop and rehearsal space?’ “
With an unapologetic nod to the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland movies of the 1940s — origin of the classic industry cliché, “My uncle’s got a barn, let’s put on a show!” — Pulver and his team looked closely at the barns themselves for their continued durability and the potential for a successful conversion.
“There were two main barns connected together,” he said. “One was a dairy barn with a loft and cow stalls that was originally built probably in the 1950s, and it was a kit barn — back when you could buy a kit from Montgomery Ward and build a whole building.”
The second barn had been relocated to this site at some point in its lifespan. “We think it dated back to the late 1800s,” said Pulver. “That portion was in really bad shape; a lot of the timbers were completely rotted out. We developed a design to take down the 1860s barn and reconstruct it with a slightly larger footprint to house the studio theater space, and then the adjoining 1950s dairy barn would basically accommodate front and back of house spaces. Taking buildings that aren’t meant for human occupancy in a rural setting and bringing them up to code standards proved to be a very expensive undertaking.”
Acts of God and Wall Street
The Playhouse staff and board began the process of raising money for the new space in 2008. “We started a capital campaign and went public,” said Stettler, “just in time for the recession.”
Like thousands of other non-profits organizations facing the realities of the 2008 economy and its aftermath, the company quietly put its campaign on hold, turning instead to leaseholder improvements to its aging 300-seat Mainstage theater, a long-term rental on the Weston village green. “Heating, air conditioning, quality of dressing room spaces, an orchestra pit, general life safety and ADA issues all had to be addressed,” said Pulver. “We set aside the Walker Farm and designed and constructed renovations to the Weston Playhouse.”
These upgrades were completed in the summer of 2011…and in August 2011, Hurricane Irene arrived, only the second tropical cyclone to reach the state in recorded history. Irene dropped 14 inches of rain on Vermont and flooded every creek and river in the state. The West River flows past the Weston Playhouse, with a dam and waterfall located just behind the building — so when the river crested and overflowed, it flooded the playhouse and its new infrastructure.
“So boom, that hit,” said Pulver. “That following winter, there was a reconstruction of what had been built the winter before. It was very sad to see all that happen, but everyone rebounded.”
By the summer of 2012, the staff, architects and contractors had proved their resilience and their ability to pull off a new project — twice. It was time to look again at the Walker Farm site.
In the interim, however, the charm of using the existing barns had dissipated. “The good thing about taking the break was that it gave us time to think about the project, to see this space as something more than the icing on the cake,” said Stettler. “We saw it as an answer to the development of an even greater and broader year-round program in the future and a model for sustainability. We were maxing out on ticket sales and local fundraising. To maintain the quality, add to programs and play a greater role in play development, we need to expand to more national funding, and we need to be an incubator for new work.”
It was time to regroup and reconsider the new space. “The client came back and said, ‘What would we get if we built a new building?’” said Pulver. “So we did a conceptual design for development of a new studio theater behind the existing barn. They decided, ‘Gee, we could get a better building that would work better for us, for less than it would cost to use the old barns.’ “
A New Center for the Arts
Stettler and his team knew that Vermont offered something artists could not get in urban environments like New York City. “The great gift that Weston has is the peaceful beauty of the surrounding area and the tremendous support of our community and our company,” he said. “It’s a huge gift to artists to bring them into that environment and to get really good work out of them. So we have constructed the most flexible studio theater I have ever seen anywhere. It meets every need for a theatrical production.”
The result is the Weston Playhouse at Walker Farm, a 140-seat capacity theater space particularly suited to the production of new theatrical work, as well as to “any other kind of event that we might produce or present or host,” Stettler noted.
Shepherding the project through to completion became the job of the Playhouse former managing director, Lesley Koenig. “It’s a wooden jewel box,” she said, a few days after the building’s grand opening on Sept. 23, 2017. “It’s elegant, it’s classy, but it’s also really, really warm — like being inside a beautiful barn.”
Working with theater consultant Peter Rosenbaum at Fisher Dachs, Koenig and the Playhouse production staff made every decision about the wood-paneled performance space with ultimate flexibility in mind. This would allow the Playhouse to program many different kinds of shows and events in the new space and to rent it out to anyone from wedding couples to television crews.
“We can do everything,” said Koenig. “We have a pipe grid — you can decide that the set is anywhere, all over the place. We have chairs and risers with all sorts of configurations. We have a man-lift — a single person can operate it. You can drive it around and hang lights by yourself. We also bought a very good, high-resolution projector and a screen, so we can show high-quality films. There’s data all over the place for video.”
The original lighting package specified in 2013 went by the wayside as Koenig worked with Travis McHale, one of the theater’s veteran scenic and lighting designers, to specify a twenty-first century lighting inventory. “I gave Travis a contract called, ‘Make us happy in our new theater,’’’ she said. “The original specs were 50 incandescent lights and 25 LEDs. I said ‘No, the world has changed since then.’”
The lighting inventory now contains 36 ETC Source Four Color Source instruments, 20 Source Fours, 12 Source Four PARs and enough enhanced lens tubes to accommodate them all; six Chauvet Rogue moving washes and three Chauvet Maverick MK1 moving spots, all controlled by an ETC Ion XE lighting console.
To accommodate events that might require projection or networking ability, the Playhouse added a Christie D12HD-H, 1920×1080 HD resolution projector and a Draper Evenroll rope and pulley manual screen. A complete Cat 6 network throughout the building permits data transmission, while a fiber optic infrastructure capable of 10-gigabyte scale is ready for television or film production.
“We met with some people in video and film, and they thought it could be an amazing sound studio for commercials,” said Koenig. “Not knowing much about that sort of thing, I realized that we needed to build the theater of the future, not of the present. We took out a wall and added a 208-volt panel in the production office. We have an RV pole outside, to attach a catering truck or a TV truck. Now it can be a sound stage, so it’s a new revenue stream. We tried to make it as forward thinking as possible.”
With the potential uses served by the lighting, projection and data transmission capabilities, Koenig and her team considered another possibility: rentals for meetings, dinners and social and professional gatherings. Such events would almost certainly require natural light, especially if they took place during the day. Was there a way to add windows without negating the space’s usability as a theater?
The Bread Loaf team solved the problem. “The windows that were used in the theater are of manageable size, they are treated with three layers of glazing, including an acoustic layer of glass to address sound transmission and outfitted with light blocking shades,” said Pulver. “From the exterior and interior, they add a lot to the sense of place.”
The end result is a space inviting enough to tempt playwrights, directors and actors out of the crush of urban life and into the hills of southern Vermont, where they can hear themselves think as they bring new work to life.
“We’ll have a New Works festival next summer — one or two weekends in May with the potential to grow; also a fall foliage production next year, during the busiest time in Vermont, “ said Stettler. “The new facility allows us to better serve the depth and breadth of our own programming, while providing a vital space for others.”
