Acting Up

Memphis plays host to this year's national festival of community theatres.

by DANIEL CONNOLLY

n boxing, the conventional wisdom is that a professional will always beat an amateur. But among the very best amateurs, there are exceptions to the rule.

Likewise, when the very best community theatre companies in the country perform on July 7th through 11th at the national festival of the American Association of Community Theatre (AACT/Fest) at Theatre Memphis, their performances can be expected to rival those of professionals.

"When you get to the national level, the plays are damn good," says Bennett Wood, one of the judges for this year's competition and the director of Theatre Memphis' national winner in 1975. Wood recalls that the renowned playwright Jerome Lawrence began his critique of Wood's play by saying, "I came here to see amateur theatre, but that's one of the most professional productions I've ever seen."

Eleven community theatre troupes are taking part in this year's competition. Ten of these won competitions at the state and regional level, and the 11th, from the U.S. Army base in Vicenza, Italy, won a theatre competition among U.S. military bases in Europe. The "Soldiers' Theatre" will perform Do Not Go Gentle, a play set during the Persian Gulf war. Four soldiers and seven family members make up the show's cast.

AACT/Fest is expected to draw several hundred other theatre types from all over the country who will come to network and learn. Participants will attend workshops on subjects ranging from stage-combat techniques to theatre censorship.

All this learning has a purpose. "Many people who are in community theatre wish to go on to bigger and better things," says Cindy East of the Chino Little Theater in California. For some, this means professional theatre or Broadway. Chris Ellis, a competitor for Circuit Playhouse at the Tennessee state festival in 1975, is now a busy character actor who has appeared in such films as Apollo 13 and Armageddon.

Community theatres constitute the majority of theatres in the U.S., and are defined mostly by their volunteer staffs, says Michael Fortner, executive director of Theatre Memphis. At a large community theatre like Theatre Memphis, for example, a paid staff of professionals runs the business side of things, but the actors and those working behind the scenes are mostly unpaid. Actors are allowed to compete in AACT/Fest as long as they earn less than half their income from performance.

To level the playing field (no pun intended), a number of restrictions are placed on the competing theatre companies. Plays can last for an hour at most, and a scant 10 minutes are allowed between performances for stage setup and breakdown.

Candace Sorensen is executive director of Theatre Charlotte in North Carolina, which is bringing its production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman to AACT/Fest. Since Death of a Salesman is more than an hour long, it would have been ineligible for the festival had Sorensen not heard of a rarely performed short version of the play. She eventually received written permission to use this version from Miller. Despite the time constraints for setup, Sorensen's troupe plans to use "an essential prop," a 1948 refrigerator, which they will haul on and off the stage with a hand cart.

The judging of the competition is swift and open. After a period of deliberation, the adjudicators return to the theatre one at a time and then "before God and everybody," as Fortner puts it, critique the play. The process sounds vicious, but the adjudicators tend to accentuate the positive, says Allen Shankles, managing artistic director of the Amarillo Little Theatre in Amarillo, Texas. "This is supposed to be constructive. They're not there to tear you down."

The stress of evaluation is also reduced by the fact that almost all of the companies at the national competition will be invited to take their productions to international theatre festivals in locations as far-flung as Monaco and Finland.