Little Theatre

When I was eight years old my mother received a list of children’s activities available through the Parks and Recreation Department and asked what I would like to do.  I signed up for soccer, tumbling and Children’s Theater.  I didn’t take to the tumbling class, though I wish I had because it would have helped me during my days as a performer in musicals.  I kind of liked soccer, but the Children’s Theater class was my new found love, so when my mother said I had to choose between one or the other because she wasn’t going to pay for both, theatre won out.

We met on Wednesday nights for an hour with a delightful teacher by the name of Katherine Hoffman who basically taught us theater games.  The focus was all improvisation and every week Katherine had a new several exercises for us.  This proved to be great training, though we never worked with a text, practiced memorizing lines or rehearsed a proper play.  That first semester we created a long rehearsed improvised play based on a scenario that Katherine created called “Saved by the Rain.”  I played a football coach and there was a first grade boy who had a big scene on a telephone and there was some trouble with an upcoming game because a girl had broken her leg and somehow a rain storm saved the situation and I yelled out the key line in triumph, “Saved by the rain!”  I can’t remember anything else about the plot, but we rehearsed it by Katherine coaching us through the scenario and feeding us the lines.  We improvised around this outline and learned to hit the key points and more or less give the play without ever having read a script.  I had played Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in a kindergarten Christmas show and Santa in a second grade Christmas show, but “Saved By the Rain” was my first play on a stage under lights directed by someone who knew what they were doing in the theatre.  I was hooked.  

The class was held in the Music building of El Dorado High School in a classroom that had been converted into a little theater with a stage at one end and rows of tin cans painted black to serve as the stage lighting.  On the outside of the building was a light up sign that said “Little Theater” and so we called the class by that name rather than its true name, “Children’s Theatre.”  The second semester was more exciting as there was a bigger group of kids and my brother had joined as well.  Katherine decided we would concentrate on a more ambitious production to be staged at the Discovery Playhouse at the fair grounds––a converted metal structure that looked like a small airplane hanger and was generally used by the neighboring American River College (now Cosumnes River College) and what became the home of the local community theater, Theatre El Dorado.  This was a big stage with a proper act curtain and lighting equipment.  We worked extra hard by meeting on Saturdays as well as our usual Wednesdays, sold ads for the program to raise a little extra cash for the production costs and finally opened in “The Point.”

One Saturday we devoted our time to painting a backdrop.  The cloth was laid out on the floor of the log cabin Boy Scout Hall located in the city park.  We all pitched in painting the landscape of a small town.  We didn’t work from a rendering, but just applied our imagination and painted cold right on the backdrop under Katherine’s direction.  I was responsible for adding the church, which I did as an old fashioned one room white church with a steeple and bell just like one I saw often on the road to Coloma.  When the drop was hung and under the lights it looked like kids had done it, but it also had a kind of artistic beauty to it and looked good as a setting for our story.

I kept involved with the group until I was twelve, which was the cut off age.  Every semester there was some new final play, always a rehearsed improvisation, though I don’t remember any of them after “The Point,” except for the semester we focussed on pantomime.  Our final production was made up of a collection of pantomime skits and one was “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” with me as the Grinch.  In the audience of this presentation was Richard Harrison, the theater professor from American River College who was going to put on a big pantomime production featuring Bernard Bang––a noteworthy mime of the Marcel Marceau school.  Marcel Marceau was enjoying a kind of vogue at the time along with the team of Shields and Yarnell, so I suppose this production, titled “Pantomime ‘79,” was part of the general trend of the period.  Mr. Harrison picked out four kids, including me, to be in his production.  We would repeat one of our own skits and be worked into the rest of the show, including another version of “The Point.”

Bernard Bang had several solo spots where he performed ingenious routines including a wonderful bit as a doctor performing an operation, which I performed myself for my fifth grade class.  I was enamored with the art of mime and would have told you at the time that I firmly wanted to go to Paris and study with Marcel Marceau, though I suspect I was convinced by others that being a mime was a limited career choice even though Shields and Yarnell seemed to be all over the TV.  Friend Kim and I recreated the Shields and Yarnell robot sketch for friends at a New Years Day party and my father caught part of it with his movie camera.  Looking at it now, it is kind of amazing how many details from the real sketch I retained when you consider these were the days before home video recording and Youtube.

My last year with Little Theater was minus Katherine Hoffman, who for some inexcusable reason moved away from Placerville and left us with a new teacher, the wife of Richard Harrison.  She knew something about theater, yes, but she treated us like children, which was something Katherine never did.  I didn’t realize this until Mrs. Harrison gave us exercises asking us to pretend to be butterflies and ladybugs.  Ugh!  We were all more advanced than that.  We had skills and shows under our belts.  This was a group of little actors that had been working together as a company for several years at that point and although there were always new kids coming and going, the core members were veterans.  Mrs. Harrison followed Katherine’s rehearsed improv method for a final production and I suppose she realized we were ready for something more potent, for in the second semester she decided we would do a royalty play of “Hansel and Gretle” from Samuel French.  This was something we weren’t prepared for and Mrs. Harrison’s mistake was in assuming two things: that we understood the discipline of memorizing lines and that we could accomplish the play with only meeting once a week on Wednesdays for an hour.  When our final days were approaching and we weren’t nearly ready, the whole thing was canceled and there was no last play.  This was disappointing, but also a relief, for I was not prepared to go on in the play and neither was anyone else.

The next year I entered Edwin Markham Intermediate School and there was a proper drama class under the direction of George Sabato and so I had a daily dose of theater, which for the next two years was great fun.  The Placerville Children’s Theater kept on for another year, but died out after that.  I have no idea what happened, but I suspect that Mrs. Harrison just didn’t have the drive to continue and perhaps with the core group of kids all grown and gone the attendance didn’t warrant keeping it going.  However, I had been with the group from age eight to twelve and it fed my creative inclinations.  I also feel that the strong emphasis on improvisation was instrumental in my development as an actor and my early confidence, both on stage and off.  I never heard from Katherine Hoffman after she moved, but I always think of her as one of my most influential teachers.