 
|
||||
              
|
Sunday, May 16, 1999 By Barbara Cloud, Post-Gazette Columnist
Mountain Playhouse in Jennerstown will begin its 60th season on June 5. Now that's staying power.
What joy, what pride, what heart, what memories, what talent have moved in and out of the doors of the theater, the nearby Green Gables restaurant and, at one time, the White Star Hotel at the top of the hill.
Much has changed and yet much has remained the same from the early years.
Many of the trees surrounding the theater and restaurant were planted during the first season in 1939.
I go back to 1949. That was the year a friend and talented Pittsburgh performer, Norma Milazzo, was unable to accept a role with the company, and she gave the Stoughtons my name.
Jimmy Stoughton and Louise Maust, his sister, have guided all the seasons at Jennerstown.
I was 19 at the time. I wore my mother's long gray dinner gown for the character in "Dangerous Corner." It was very Joan Crawford, with padded shoulders.
But that was the beginning. For three summers, I would return to Jennerstown when Westminster College classes ended. And at the end of my run, I felt I was prepared to hit New York clutching my Actors Equity union card. Ahhh, naïve youth.
Here I come, Broadway! Well, there I went, and here I am.
My weeks with the Mountain Playhouse companies were some of the happiest of my life. Naturally, I wasn't earning a living. I was an apprentice, but in addition to painting sets, I managed to get roles in several plays, and I was appearing with talented New York professionals. I marveled at their abilities to learn lines from "sides" (not full scripts but just your lines and the cue line before your lines) and to be rehearsing a serious role by day while perhaps playing a comedy role each night.
Most of us stayed at the White Star on the hill, on one floor. We would bounce from room to room at night, and I would be wide-eyed with the tales these experienced actors would tell. We shared our meals at a large table in the corner of the dining room. It was great fun.
A wealthy family with a summer home near Ligonier used to invite the cast for lunch and to swim in their pool on days off. The late Charles Shaw and his wife from McKeesport, major supporters of the theater, were always there opening night, and he often brought flowers for the ladies. Evelyn Gardner, a Pittsburgh radio personality, and her husband, a musical conductor, spent opening-night weekends at the White Star, and she would interview the actors for her program. It was exciting.
But if you were there then, your memories must include Jimmy and Louise. He was the dreamer. She had the head for business.
They brought magic to the mountain.
There was no Stoughton Lake in 1949. But I was there the day they dug the hole for the man-made lake orchestrated by another Stoughton, brother Bob.
Years later, as a reporter in 1971, I visited Jimmy and Louise. He was very ill, and he passed away soon after our day together. At the time, the normally effervescent man could not talk, but he sat with us while Louise reminisced about their successful venture. Every so often, he would scribble something on a pad to add his own thought.
Green Gables predates the theater by a decade, and you don't think of one without the other. In the winter of '38, a grist mill was moved, log by log, from near Berlin, Pa., to become the Playhouse, and it was linked to the restaurant forever.
"Jimmy fell in love with that mill long before that, and it never left his mind," said Louise that day.
The first show was Maxwell Anderson's "High Tor." Louise recalled that it rained, and there was no driveway.
Their mother, Edith Belle, also had her hand in the dream. She created the first gold curtain used on the stage.
Jimmy later married Terry Mullane, a talented architect, and many new buildings would begin to dot the landscape to accommodate weddings and also living quarters for actors. They would have two daughters. The day I visited in 1971, Mary Louise was 4 and Teresa was 5.
When Jimmy died, Louise and her children kept the theater running, but later Jimmy's widow and their children became a producing team. Louise died in 1988, and Terry passed away a few years ago.
Today, Jimmy and Terry's daughter Teresa runs the show, and sister Mary Louise is on the board.
On June 4, they hope to have a reunion of actors who have appeared on the Playhouse stage the past 60 years.
We'll all be upstaging each other.
In my three summers, I played a WAC, an Irish housekeeper, a '20s movie star, a Cajun woman, a Gypsy fortune-teller, an author and a flapper.
Where else could you get that kind of career experience?
At the Mountain Playhouse, that's where. And at other theaters, too, but 50 years ago, for me, this was the place to be.
|
|||
