OF MICE AND MEN
"I like to paraphrase a banking term and say we're 'a full-service theatre.'"
It's Tom Humphrey speaking with characteristic excitement and enthusiasm about The Western Stage, the Salinas community theatre he has served as Managing Artistic Director since 1985. And the emphasis, with Humphrey, is clearly on COMMUNITY. "We offer lots of different activities for a wide range of people from this area," he says, "It's a participatory theatre. We aim to excite interest and draw participation from up to 500 or more local individuals - children, seniors, seasoned professionals and brand new people with an interest they'd like to see grow and develop. We want to reach out and get them doing theatre as well as seeing it done well - make it possible for those with existing skills to get better at what they already do - and to learn things they don't yet know how to do."
The Western Stage emerged from a highly successful summer theatre festival that Hartnell drama staff members, Ron Danko and Stan Crane, organized in Toro Park in 1974. Three years later Danko and Crane moved the summer event to the Hartnell Campus on Homestead Avenue in Salinas. In 1985 The Western Stage became a year-round theatre organization, with the college providing a theatre plant and financial support.
That was the same year Humprey succeeded Ron Danko as head of drama at Hartnell and as Western Stage Artistic Director. Humphrey already knew the territory. After finishing graduate work in directing at U.C. San Diego in 1981, he'd accepted a summer directing/teaching job at Hartnell, directing shows as varied in tone and mood as the farcical HOTEL PARADISO and the tragic OF MICE AND MEN. After four years in the Bay Area with the Walnut Creek Civic Arts Repertory Theatre, he returned to Salinas in 1985 to replace Danko.
From the start, The Western Stage has been rooted deep in the soil of Central California, with special emphasis on the work of John Steinbeck. OF MICE AND MEN already existed as a Broadway play script, as did a stage version of THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1999) as created for Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. But Western Stage has also commissioned dramatizations of Steinbeck fiction, memoirs and screenplays, including "Travels With Charley" in 1998 and the forthcoming "Viva Zapata." Its major Steinbeck project - and possibly its most important work ever as an area community theatre - has been Alan Cook's epic three-part, nine-hour dramatization of Steinbeck's "East of Eden," first performed in 1992, then revived in 1994 and again in an acclaimed millennium version this year.
VOICE OF THE PRAIRIE
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SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES |
Other significant productions, according to Tom Humphrey, were the musicals SWEENEY TODD in 1993, VOICE OF THE PRAIRIE in 1992, and JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT, which massed about 100 kids on the Hartnell Main Stage, in 1995. "I'm intrigued by narrative theatre," Humphrey adds, "so I think one of our really interesting Studio Theatre productions was the stage version of Ray Bradbury's SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES in '91. We've done some fine Chekhov in the Studio Theatre too - like our 1993 UNCLE VANYA."
In 1991, the theatre became an independent non-profit, with its own board of directors, centered in Salinas, but with Western Stage performance and training facilities contracted by Hartnell College. The theatre is well equipped but its lighting system has never had a major upgrade or overhaul since the building was erected in 1973. This will happen as soon as the 2000 season ends and before the 2001 season starts.
A continuing piece of community outreach is the Salinas Valley Playwrights Project. This Monday night performance/reading series takes place periodically at the off-campus Cabaret Theatre. It casts Western Stage regulars in scripts written by local writers. The staged readings are organized by Mike Roddy, whose LOOKING FOR WORDS had a full-scale Western Stage Production last year.
"Our mission," says Tom Humphrey, "is to enable people with theatre skills to get better at what they already do - and to help them discover things they don't yet know how to do. We're as much an opportunities center as a repertory theatre."
