"The Play's the Thing"

THE PLAY’S THE THING

FEBRUARY 2010

Pregnant nuns was a touchy subject and not something anyone involved in the event wished to publicize. After all, the show had to go on.

It was the late 1950s in entertainment-starved Kenai, and the Homemakers Club was presenting a farce called Seven Nuns at Las Vegas by playwright Natalie E. White. At least two of the homemakers portraying nuns onstage—Clarice Kipp and Rose Navarre—were “in the family way,” a state unbecoming of women of a chaste religious order. Therefore, to keep the audience happy, they kept nuns’ secret a secret.

Such were the tactics undertaken at times to keep the public—and themselves—entertained in a time the performing arts were hard to come by. According to Kipp, even the club’s “passable rendition” of the play was met with great enthusiasm.

In the 1950s, there were a few other attempts at performance art: The Ninilchik Players, according to Jean Brockel, put on at least three plays in such venues as the Ninilchik American Legion Hall, the Clam Gulch Quonset-hut community center, George Denison’s Soldotna Theatre, and at least one location in Homer. Among the melodramas performed were Robert St. Clair’s “Tiger House” and Henry Robert Symonds’ “The Night Owl.”

In the mid-1960s, another south-peninsula group of thespians, the Cohoe Characters, also flared briefly into life, performing two or three plays in 1964-65 before fading away. The stars of these shows included Kasilof’s Charlie and Freda Lewis and Roy Baldwin.

“I can remember going to Clam Gulch (in the ’60s) for a melodrama,” Brockel said. “Roy Baldwin was the sheriff, and it was at the Clam Gulch Center, and they had a big barrel stove at the back. And it’d be hotter’n hell, and as you worked more toward the front seats to sit down for the play, it was colder and colder and colder. You had to be careful of where you sat. You’d either be too hot at the back and you couldn’t see, or you could see just fine, except your feet would freeze off if you got too close to the front.”

Still, the audience was grateful for the show.

“Everybody just hee-hawed and laughed and had a great time,” recalled Brockel. “And afterwards, we had coffee and cookies, and sat down and chatted and visited for however long, and then got in our cars and drove home. That was a whole evening. That was what you did, and there were people from that area that you didn’t otherwise see because they didn’t come to town all that often.”

Other than these occasional performances, most folks back then, Brockel said, settled for the shows put on by their children in area schools. When she first came to Kenai in 1956 to teach music at the Kenai School, she was told in no uncertain terms that she would be putting on a holiday program just prior to the December break.

“I had to do the kids’ Christmas program,” Brockel said. “And that came down from (Principal George) Fabricius: ‘You will--’ That was the word, not ‘Would you try?’ or something like that. ‘You will have a Christmas program. Everyone in town comes to the school.’”

Soldotna Players performers Ted Grainge, Gail Smith and Lance Petersen in Ayn Rand's
Night of January 16th--rehearsal in 1964.

And Fabricius was right. If there was a show, an audience filled the school gymnasium or whatever venue was available.

Many adults, however, craved more mature fare.

Consequently by the mid-1960s, a little more variety began to creep into the diet of the performing-arts consumer. In 1963, Gail Smith (now McDowell), formed the Soldotna Players and directed two stage dramas, one each in 1964 and 1965.

Smith, who had been active in thespians in high school and some play productions in Anchorage, “missed the theater” and decided to bring her vision of the stage to her peninsula home. Her 1964 directorial debut was a production of Ayn Rand’s Night of January 16^th, a courtroom drama starring Smith herself, Charlie Lewis, Don Thomas, Ted Grainge, and Lance Petersen as Flint, the prosecuting attorney.

For each night’s performance, the jury was selected from members of the audience. The jury remained onstage for the entire performance and was allowed to decide the fate of the defendant—Smith, in this case, who played a woman accused of killing her husband.

Smith was pleased that the jury found her “not guilty” each time.

The Soldotna Players’ next performance was John Van Druten’s romantic comedy, Bell, Book and Candle, again starring Smith, this time with Jerry Holly. “These local people did an amazing job,” she said.  Afterward, however, “players got too busy with personal lives” and the Soldotna Players disappeared from the scene.

Fortunately for those who loved a good show, much more was on the horizon, partly because of the skill and energy of the individuals responsible for the creation of the Kenai Fine Arts Festival in 1967, but mostly due to the gifted dance arrangements of Jean McMaster and writing and directing of her talented son, Lance Petersen.

According to McMaster’s entry in Once Upon the Kenai,  she left a thriving dance-instruction business, called Master Dance Studio, in Chicago in 1944 to move with her infant son, Lance, to Anchorage to be near her husband, who was

Jean McMaster in her studio in the early 1980s.

working on a wartime construction project. In 1954, she moved with her mother, Lance, and her new infant son, Kim, to Kenai.

About a year later, she bought the old two-story Kenai Bible Chapel building, moved it just north of town, and created living quarters upstairs and a new Master Dance Studio downstairs. From that moment on, she began to influence the course of performing arts on the Kenai Peninsula, eventually becoming a lynchpin member of the Peninsula Dancers, Kenai Performers and Pier One Theatre.

Brockel offers an allusion to The Book of Genesis to sum up McMaster’s influence: “You kind of have to look at it like the Bible. ‘Before this, there was….’ Before anything, there was Jean McMaster. If you really start analyzing it and figuring out what was going on, that’s what was going on. Before anything else, there was Jean.”

McMaster taught dance classes to individuals of all ages and abilities, and she collaborated with such groups as the Homemakers Club. In the mid-1950s, members of the Homemakers decided to put together a minstrel show and they asked McMaster to teach them a can-can dance for part of the performance.

McMaster also remembered helping with a number called “Love and Marriage,” which she referred to as a big hit. It wasn’t perfect, but the show was such a success, said former Homemaker Peggy Arness, that “it demanded a repeat performance.”

During the show, McMaster’s son, Lance, was supposed to be the record-changer, but as the program began, there was only silence. “We waited for the music—and waited—and waited,” McMaster wrote. “He had changed the record all right, but the cord had become unplugged and nothing was happening.”

Eventually, the problem was solved, and the show went on, just as it had with those pesky pregnant nuns.

The Next Stage, so to Speak

Don Nickel was in the kitchen one evening in 1973, washing dishes and minding his own business, while his wife met with Phyllis Morin and Jean McMaster in a casting session for the new play they hoped to produce for the fledgling Kenai Performers.

His wife wandered into the kitchen while he was still busy at the sink. “She said, ‘We need one more actor to fill all the places for the cast.’ I said, “No, I’m not interested. Thank you.’” Later, she tried again: ‘It’s an easy part. No problem. It’s just a little part.’” And so Nickel relented, despite the fact that his only previous stage experience had been 15 years earlier, in high school.

Until he was handed a script, Nickel didn’t realize he had just accepted the lead role in the Neil Simon play Come Blow Your Horn. “I went through and I counted,” Nickel said. I was onstage for three acts, all except maybe two minutes. I said, ‘Wait a minute! I didn’t sign up for this. There’s more lines here than anybody.’” But they flattered him into keeping the part, he said.

Once he began rehearsals over at the theater in Wildwood, he was hooked. He found that he had a facility for memorizing lines and that he enjoyed acting. “I was pretty good at it, once I got onstage—and was somewhat of a ham, perhaps.”



Come Blow Your Horn, performed in 1973.

Before he knew it, he was involved in one production after another, even directing at times. He played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. He played the city manager in The Ballad of Kenai. He played Moose in West Side Story. He directed two other Neil Simon plays, Chapter Two and Prisoner of Second Avenue.

And as it was for Nickel, so it was for many of the people who joined the Kenai Performers, the Peninsula Dancers, or the Pier One Theatre. One minute they were minding their own business; the next minute they were in show business.

The Peninsula Dancers, an outgrowth of McMaster’s dance studio in Kenai, first performed publicly in a choral reading of the long T.S. Eliot poem, “Ash Wednesday,” in 1967 during the first Kenai Fine Arts Festival. The festival was conceived by McMaster, Morin, Clarice Kipp, and Marion Nelson (then Kempf) as a means to provide entertainment in the late winter months and to expose peninsula residents to the talents of their neighbors in dance, theater, visual arts, and music.

Both the Kenai Performers and Homer’s Pier One Theatre formed in 1973 and have had a symbiotic relationship since they were founded. Few of the big-production musicals done by one group have failed to include members of the other

Prisoner of Second Avenue--mid-1970s

in its cast and crew.

Pier One Theatre opened originally in a warehouse on the Homer City Dock at the end of the Homer Spit. Its first show was Lance Petersen’s revised version of The Drunkard, which was performed 25 times by actors who also helped build and paint the sets, hang the lights, hunt down props, pop popcorn, and sell tickets.

Likewise, the first show for the Kenai Performers was also a homegrown affair. According to Kathleen Knowlton, who had worked in musical theater in Los Angeles for 15 years prior to coming to Alaska in 1970, she and Morin and Hugo Barrios got together initially because they all wanted to do a play.

“We managed to scrape together about $25, and we found a play we could send for,” said Knowlton. They found a three-act comedy by William Roos entitled Fun City, set in Greenwich Village and centered on the difficulties of freelance writer, Harry Warren, and his wife/collaborator, Sally. After the play was cast on Dec. 11, 1972, rehearsals began in the Kenai home of Gail Glad, with the first performance slated for March in the Kenai Central High School Little Theatre.

The cast included Wayne Stanley and Karolee Hansen as the Warrens; Susan Mumma as Linda, Sally’s college-age sister; Marj O’Reilly as Eloise, Sally’s uninhibited friend; Knowlton as Bonnie Miller, a beautiful blonde; and Jim Elson as Titus N. “TNT” Tate, a dynamic executive type.

Except for occasional bickering between co-directors Barrios and Morin, the rehearsals went well—until Stanley’s father died, and he had to leave the state to be with his family. When he returned, he said that the play had been “put on hold” in his mind, and he had too little time to learn all of his lines before the first performance.

As a result, Hansen had to nurse him through most of the third act, feeding him lines or adlibbing in the hopes that the audience wouldn’t notice the difference.

In the audience sat Don Nickel, who said he knew something wasn’t right in the third act. “I thought, ‘Those lines kinda don’t fit,’” Nickel said. “And Wayne was in kind of an embarrassing situation—because this was live theater—but Karolee carried it beautifully.”



Hansen, who sported a borrowed mink coat from Marvene’s Dress Shop for part of the performance, was simply thrilled with the whole experience. “I just had to improvise and make up lines and try to make it,” Hansen said. “But all the while, I was panicking inside. ‘Oh my goodness, what am I going to say?’ But we made it, and I sure enjoyed myself.”



Wayne Stanley and Karolee Hansen in Fun City, 1973.

For Stanley, his acting and improvisational background helped him survive: “I enjoyed the adlibbing and the subtle nuances my character let me portray. At times, I would look at Karolee or some other character, go blank for a while and be on the verge of laughing, and they knew I was to the point of losing it or making up something.”

Despite the troubles and a “terrible script,” according to Knowlton, the play was a hit. “We made so much money on that play that we got to put on Come Blow Your Horn the next time. So we could afford a better play. And we made so much money on that one, we could afford to put on Oliver!”

In one calendar year, the Kenai Performers had gone from the dream of a handful of individuals to a group of entertainers singing and dancing through a Broadway musical in the gymnasium of Kenai Elementary School.

KCHS band director Robert Richardson joined the fold as musical director on Oliver!—gathering peninsula instrumental talents to form an orchestra. Petersen directed the stageplay, while his mother acted as choreographer. It turned out to be the first of many such cooperative productions by three of the early movers and shakers in the theater community.

Brockel, who would later frequently collaborate with this trio, was in the audience for one of the performances of Oliver! She was especially impressed with the set: “Both Lance and Jean had a particular genius for looking at a space and saying, ‘Okay, the sets can go like this.’ And it was pretty amazing to turn a gym into a scene and have it be usable. And of course there’s the fact that it would go up Friday night and come down Sunday afternoon because school had to go on the next day.”

Lance Petersen, directing in 1981.

Over the years, the Kenai Performers have done major musicals, adult comedy, serious drama, musical revue for dinner theater, operetta, summer theater, and banquet entertainment. According to Brockel, who acts as historian for the group, the Kenai Performers “have always prided themselves on their versatility.”

They have also been widely appreciated and supported by peninsula audiences, even when the performances aren’t perfect, said Nickel.

In 1981, when Nickel directed Chapter Two, school principal Dillon Kimple took to the KCHS Little Theatre stage as “Leo Schneider” and delighted the crowd even while dealing with a mistake.

The character played by Kimple, whom Nickel described as “a large, imposing man,” has a tryst with a woman in his apartment, and he has to strip from the waist up, except for a red necktie. When the woman leaves, Kimple comes out of the bedroom with only the tie covering his bare belly, and he has to deliver a half-page soliloquy while putting his shirt back on.

“This is during Saturday night performance,” Nickel recalled. “The place is loaded, and he’s lost his shirt. It had gone over the couch into no man’s land, and he doesn’t know where his shirt is. In the middle of the soliloquy, he kind of looks at the audience and he says, ‘Where’s my shirt?’ And a lady in the front row says, ‘It’s behind the couch.’ He says, ‘Thank you,’ and on he goes with the soliloquy. Didn’t miss a beat! Puts his shirt on! Brought the house down! Absolutely brought the house down! I thought that was marvelous.”

No Business like Show Business

As the stage lights faded to black at the end of the performance, enthusiastic applause filled the civic auditorium. Onstage, the actors excitedly gathered forward and made ready for the lights to flare again so they could take their final bows. Among the actors was Brockel, who believed that the crowd’s reaction was good but couldn’t be sure just how good.

“I was blind at the time,” she said. “I wasn’t wearing my glasses and didn’t have contacts. I just saw a blur of lights.”

In that blur, the audience was rising to give a standing ovation to these performers from the Kenai Peninsula. It was the only standing ovation given during the nine performances in the 1981 National Festival of American Community Theatre, hosted that year by Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Up on stage, Brockel said, performers next to her were ecstatic. “’They’re standing! They’re standing!’ they were saying.” She accepted their description of what she could not see, and then she took her bow along with the rest of the cast.



Jean Brockel, 1985.

Afterward, Brockel, still without her glasses because her character didn’t use them, followed the other cast members backstage, smiling at the acclamation, and hoping that all of her things were right where she’d put them before the start of the show.

The cast had come a long way from the Kenai to Kalamazoo, and the play they had performed—The Ballad of Kenai, by playwright and director Petersen—had come even further.

Now considered by many to be the magnum opus of peninsula performing arts, The Ballad of Kenai was originally conceived by Petersen’s mother as a dance-drama production.  Part of a group of performance pieces at the third annual Kenai Fine Arts Festival in 1969, Ballad was choreographed by McMaster and directed by Petersen, and it was performed largely by members of the Peninsula Dancers in the gymnasium of Kenai Elementary School.

On the stage, according to Petersen, the action coincided with a repeating musical theme, based on the Gene Raskin song, “Those Were the Days.”

And in the audience for that 15-minute performance was Brockel, blissfully unaware of the role she herself would play in a later version of this production.

“McMaster had this in her brain about the history of Kenai, and how oil had disrupted the natural flow of life in Kenai,” Brockel said. “She had guys off the platform—if you can imagine these oil studs with big belt buckles, you know—and she had them out on the dance floor in their hard hats and their boots, strutting around like the big shots they thought they were as part of that dance. That was the part that amazed me most about that dance. How did she ever get those guys in some makeup and out on the floor? It was just an amazing thing. They were playing themselves.”

After the successful debut of McMaster’s basic premise, Petersen and his mother decided to rework her ideas in 1974. With the help of a grant from the Alaska State Council on the Arts, McMaster and Petersen, along with Kenai Central High School band director Richardson and surveyor/songwriter Frank J. Malone, transformed Ballad into a 90-minute,  
two-act theatrical production that made its debut in Kenai in March 1975.

Read-through for The Ballad of Kenai.

The musical, which shifts frequently through time, explores what happens to people as their community changes around them.  Set mainly in Kenai Joe’s Bar, the action begins and ends aboard a space-age rocket shuttle traveling from Lisbon, Portugal, to Kenai. Two of the passengers, Alex and Lisa, begin a voyage of self-discovery, propelling the audience along with them.

In addition to a full-blown script and an array of actors, the performance included plenty of singing and dancing.

According to Petersen, most of the music for the play was the result of effective teamwork. “I would rough out the song and give my version to F.J. Malone, who would then regularize the rhythmic structure and shape it into an appropriate song style,” Petersen said. “Then he’d give it back to me for revision. Sometimes the lyric would bounce back and forth several times before we passed it on to Bob Richardson, who would compose the melody for it.”

Two of the songs, however, were notable exceptions to this process: the ethereal “The Song of the Lonely Man,” the lyrics for which were inspired by a potlatch song by Dena’ina elder, Peter Kalifornsky; and the purposefully bad country-rock song, “I Knew You Were No Good,” concocted by Patrick Malone.

With full-blown musical numbers and dance pieces, the roster of cast and orchestra members blossomed to 72. The stage and set requirements also expanded, and when the play made its debut at the ninth annual Kenai Fine Arts Festival, it was performed in the Kenai Mall, in the space formerly occupied by the Kambe Theatre.

Once again, the Peninsula Dancers-produced show was a hit.

And once again, when the lights dimmed on that performance, The Ballad of Kenai sat on a shelf for several years.

In 1981, it reemerged, transformed into a one-hour, one-act production of the Peninsula Dancers and Pier One Theatre in Homer. The number of dancers, actors and musicians plummeted from 72 to 22.

Petersen and Richardson had decided to revise Ballad for a state theatrical competition in April in Haines, knowing that, if they could win the competition, the Northwest regional competition would also be in Haines—the very next day.



Jean Brockel and Von Phillips in The Ballad of Kenai.

Rules for the competition were strict: The play could last no longer than one hour. Ten minutes to erect the set were given before the performance, and 10 minutes to strike the set were given afterward. Meeting these time restrictions was as crucial as giving a good theatrical performance.

Despite the reduction in cast and crew, however, taking that number of people, as well as the set, costumes and musical instruments all the way to Haines was “an expensive problem,” according to Petersen.

“We found a solution in a Soldotna pilot whose company transported fish in the summer, and he agreed to take us to Haines and back for the fuel cost in his DC2,” Petersen said. “The airplane’s seats had long ago been removed to make it a fish carrier, so we found seats for the airplane in Anchorage, loaned by another air cargo company.”

After winning the state competition on one day and the regional competition the next, the cast and crew of The Ballad of Kenai looked toward the national festival in Kalamazoo, scheduled for mid-June, only seven weeks away.

Winners of the national festival would be invited to the international competition in Monaco, sponsored by Princess Grace.

“I knew that Kalamazoo was not to be reached by DC2, especially in the busy summer fish-hauling season,” said Petersen, who also realized that he would need at least $32,000 to fund the trip. “So we arranged performances in Kenai, Soldotna, Homer and Anchorage to raise money.

“We also solicited donations, and the peninsula was generous in support. What put us over the top was a last-minute check from the State of Alaska, arranged from Gov. Jay Hammond’s executive fund.”

In Kalamazoo, despite the standing ovation from an audience consisting mainly of their peers, the performers in The Ballad of Kenai did not win the national competition. They finished second, but they did not go home hanging their heads.

“It was a big deal,” said Nickel, who played City Manager Smith. “This was a homegrown organization. It wasn’t like we went down there with Fiddler on the Roof, you know, a nationally known play. We went down there with our play.”

It is a play that Alan Boraas, anthropology professor at Kenai Peninsula College, calls “the most important play written and performed in southcentral Alaska and among the most significant in the state. Unlike celebratory local history plays, it delves into the meaning of tradition and change for a place, raising issues without being preachy or transparent.”

“The largest question,” said Petersen, “was whether an intensely local play, based on the history of a small Alaskan town, would, or could, communicate to people from all over the United States. There was no question that Ballad struck chords within the Alaskan audience in Haines, and with the adjudicators and performers from the Pacific Northwest. When the audience stood in Kalamazoo, I knew the cast had been able to tell the Kenai story in such a way that it resonated in the audience from all nine regions of the United States. I felt glad for the cast, musicians and crew, glad that all of our hard work had proven itself.”

 

Kalamazoo-bound cast of The Ballad of Kenai. Out in front in the sweater is music director Bob Richardson. To Richardson's left, in plaid, is Lance
Petersen. In the dark blouse behind Petersen is his mother, Jean McMaster.