By Shelly Randall
KCPT Publicity Director
December 2007
You know the sinking, cheated feeling of not being able to get
tickets to a sold-out show? That happened to Port Townsend
resident Reid Austin with an overly popular Key City Players
production, but instead of whining, he did something about it.
He donated $300,000 to build a bigger theater.
That was in July 2006. Thanks to Austin’s challenge gift, Key
City Players was able to purchase a commercial lot on Lawrence
Street in Port Townsend and start dreaming about “moving
uptown.” The Theatre on the Move! capital campaign was
officially launched this summer, and an architect has been
engaged to design a state-of-the-art theater with 150 seats to
replace the current leased venue with only 46 seats.
“This will put Port Townsend theater on the map,” Austin
declared.
Sadly, Austin passed away in September of last year. At the time
of his donation, he knew he had terminal cancer. But his legacy
will live on in the future Key City Public Theatre, where the
new lobby will be named after his mother, Adelaide Christman
Austin.
Current theater remodel
Key City Players celebrates 50 years in 2008, and in
conjunction with this milestone anniversary, the organization
has a new name to coincide with the new facility it’s planning.
Effective Jan. 1, the community theater group will also be known
as Key City Public Theatre.
“This name change respectfully embraces the long and successful
history of our group while clearly stating what we
do—theater—and who we serve—the public,” says Artistic Director
Denise Winter. “We will retain the use of Key City Players to
describe the participants in our theater company.”
Since the new theater building is likely some years off, the
organization is planning to expand its current theater space
this winter to better accommodate audiences that just keep
growing.
“We have been unable to seat all those who want to see our
shows, and for years our patrons have used the parking lot as a
lobby,” says Board President Ian Keith. “That's about to end.”
The group has leased the space adjacent to what’s known as the
Key City Playhouse on Washington Street, and before the annual
Playwrights’ Festival opens in February, volunteers will build a
new entrance, lobby, concession stand and box office. The
remodel will free up space in the theater itself for 20 more
seats and enhance wheelchair accessibility.
“We are working toward a new building on our property uptown,
but that is a long-term project,” Keith adds. “In the meantime,
this expansion will accommodate our audience more comfortably.”
50-year history
Port Townsend’s oldest community theater group was organized in
1958, and its first play, performed in the spring of the next
year, was “The Reluctant Debutante.” Tickets were $1 each and
the venue was the Port Townsend Golf Course dining room, where
it was standing room only on opening night.
Other early productions were staged at the local Elks Club and
the Erickson Building at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds. In
1964, Key City Players purchased the old Scandinavian Church on
Pierce and Blaine streets (near the high school) and performed
there for 20 years, despite a leaky roof and a severe lack of
storage and backstage space.
For eight years following the sale of the church building, Key
City Players performed in community venues that included the
high school auditorium and Fort Worden State Park’s historic
theater and JFK Building.
The group moved into its current home—a small storefront near
Point Hudson—in 1992, performing “Dial M for Murder” that fall.
Key City Playhouse, as it is known, has only 46 seats and
definitely qualifies as an “intimate theater.”
The backstage is equally intimate, as I can attest to as a
member of recent casts. There is room for only three seats in
front of the make-up mirror, and there is only one dressing room
(the upcoming remodel will correct that, I’m told).
“Yet the group has been able to produce season after season of
plays for supportive audiences despite the limitations,” says
Port Townsend historian Pam McCollum Clise, to whom I am
indebted for her research into these details.
100% growth
Those 46 seats have been filled consistently over the past two
years, with both the 2006 and 2007 seasons of four mainstage
plays selling at—or above!—100% capacity (due to overflow
seating and standing-room tickets).
In fact, Key City Players has documented 100% growth in many key
areas in the 2-1/2 years since bringing on Denise Winter as its
first professional—albeit part-time—artistic director. Winter
has previously served on the artistic staff of six Tony
Award-winning theaters and has toured all lower-48 states with
New York City Opera, The Children’s Theatre Company, American
Repertory Theatre and other companies.
Winter recently did a comparison of the mid-year show that was
underway when she arrived in June 2005 with the mid-year show
she oversaw in 2007 (and in fact directed, as she does one show
per year).
From “A Perfect Ganesh” (2005) to “So Far: The Children of the
Elvi” (2007), total attendance doubled, the number of
behind-the-scenes volunteers doubled, and the number of donors
to the organization tripled.
Interestingly, the number of volunteers credited with more than
one production job in each show (e.g., stage manager, prop
manager, set builder, etc.) dropped from 10 to 3 between the two
shows, a measure of enhanced volunteer management. That can be
attributed to offering, for the first time, a paid contract in
2007 for a volunteer coordinator, as well as a publicity
coordinator and a development director.
In addition to these new part-time staff positions, Winter
announced this fall that she had accepted Key City Players’
offer to make her artistic director position full-time,
effective in 2008. Previously Winter’s contract had run
January-September, and she spent the last three months of the
year touring the U.S. as production stage manager for the Radio
City Christmas Spectacular starring the Rockettes. This year,
she told me, she just didn’t want to leave Port Townsend and the
theater group she has steered to new pinnacles of success.
“This is a tremendous vote of confidence on Denise’s part for
our theater and where it’s going,” says Board President Keith.
“If Denise managed to accomplish all she has in the past two
years working part-time, three-quarters of the year, imagine
what she can help Key City Players to accomplish with her full
energies!”
Capital campaign
Those full energies will be needed for the challenge of managing
a growing theatrical organization while it is undertaking a
major capital campaign.
David Parris, a retired CEO who directed a Key City Players
musical shortly after moving to town in 2005, is heading the
effort to build a theater worthy of “Washington's Victorian
Seaport & Arts Community,” as Port Townsend is known.
Initial plans for Key City Public Theatre show a two-story
building with a footprint of 8,500 square feet. It will contain
a scene shop, costume shop, fly loft, bigger lobby, box office,
larger restrooms, green room, dressing rooms, kitchen area, prop
and furniture storage, administrative offices and rehearsal
space, and be fully ADA-accessible. A preliminary study
estimates the price tag could total as much as $5 million.
Although the number of theater seats expands from 46 to 150
under the new plan, the seating configuration retains the
intimacy found in Key City Playhouse. Three groups of 50 seats
curve gently around a thrust stage; at five rows deep, they are
only one row deeper than the current seating configuration.
Key City Players is working hard now to put on the kind of
productions that will grow its audiences in advance of tripling
its seating capacity. It seems to be succeeding. Winter
regretfully reports that at least 100 people were turned away
from the sold-out shows in the final two weekends of the fall
musical, “The Spitfire Grill.”
Opening the doors at Key City Public Theatre should prevent that
from happening—at least for the next 50 years in the life of
this up-and-coming community theater.
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This is an excerpt from a series of articles on the Olympic
Peninsula’s community theaters that published in the Winter 2007
edition of the magazine Living on the Peninsula. To read
the full series, pick up a free copy of the magazine at the Port
Townsend Leader or the Sequim Gazette.