And so, on our thirtieth anniversary, CLT moved into the building it has occupied ever since.

The agreed purchase price was $95,000 - more than the group had planned to spend, but a bargain considering that it included a functioning auditorium, stage, and electrical system. All three had to be modified, of course, to fit CLT's needs. The stage was built forward, new seats installed, and the proscenium extended. The auditorium was redecorated in the damask it still displays. Smack in the middle of the pit there was an enormous theatre organ. The board decided that the best thing would be to sell it for whatever it would bring.

It was not one of CLT's happier decisions. The announcement that the organ was for sale brought howls of protest from music and theatre lovers all over eastern Pennsylvania. Theatre organs are an endangered species, a special type of instrument designed not for purity of tone but for imitative and novelty sounds. Organ aficionados considered the three manual seven-rank Moller of the Nineteenth Street Theatre a particularly splendid survivor of the breed. Explaining that they had not known they owned an heirloom, CLT hastily conceded to public pressure and preserved the organ. They did move the console from dead center to front right of the auditorium, where it is still in use, entertaining our patrons during play intermissions.

After three seasons of makeshift electrical arrangements, CLT installed an ultramodern electronically controlled system of stage lighting. The trunk cables that served the movie projectors allowed the new stage system to be controlled by a pushbutton console in the movie projection booth, with clear sight lights to the stage. At the time, the relay circuitry and control panel, designed by Bell Labs engineers, was equal or superior to anything then installed in Broadway theatres.

The ultramodern light board of seventeen years ago is antiquated now. (Note #3) The new seats grew old, and were replaced by newer seats in 1972. The roof has been repaired and will be repaired again, and eventually will have to be replaced. The entire 1974-75 season was played without hot water in the dressing rooms, because nobody knew the heater hadn't been turned on, and our Spartan actors never complained. The box office was burglarized two seasons ago. The basement warrens and the lofts in the wings where we store scenery get so full from time to time that nobody can find anything any more, and then they are cleaned out wholesale and the accumulating starts all over again. The heating system was just overhauled. The upstairs rehearsal rooms just got a coat of paint, badly needed. The building, like a great many other things, is twenty years older than it was when CLT celebrated its new occupancy. In the meantime, ninety-nine shows have been produced on our stage. The people who produced them and the gyrations they go through to do it remain to be explained.

But There Doesn't Seem to Be Anyone in Charge

On paper the organization of Civic Little Theatre is uncomplicated. The Board of Directors sets theatre policy. The Board chooses directors and plays, and oversees production. Then, as often as not, it has to be done all over again because the play is recalled, or the director moves to St. Louis, or the costumers are all out of gorilla suits. The Board appoints chairmen, the chairmen corral workers, and somehow things get done - usually. (Note #4)

The executive committee of the Board comprises the officers - President, Secretary, Treasurer, and Vice Presidents to suit the organizational preferences of the president. They handle daily routine decisions, which means that every time the box office runs out of carbon paper, the carpenter runs out of glue, the wash room runs out of soap, the ushers just run out, or the program writer forgets that the deadline was last week, the executive committee goes into a screaming panic. Not the whole committee, of course, It isn't easy to get the whole committee together for crises, so sometimes two or three are galvanizing for one crisis while two or three are working on another, and then when the third comes up they split up and recombine like bombarded uranium. It's all pretty humdrum. (Note #5)

The Board of Governors owns the building. They are charged with its upkeep, they pay off its mortgage loans, they collect rent from its tenant stores and movie exhibitor (Note #6) and even, in good years, from the CLT board. In lean years, when the theatre did not draw enough patrons to meet its rental obligations, the Board of Governors has made up the difference. They are, for the most part, men and women who never appear on a stage or collect an instant's applause. They deserve it, perhaps more than anyone else.

The Children's Theatre School was founded in 1956, so it has flourished in this building for all but its first year. It has been one of CLT's most successful ventures, providing theatrical training for as many as two hundred children in its biggest years, and producing two or three shows on its own every season. The Theatre School's first director was Mrs. Ralpha Senderowitz, whose principles continue to guide its policy. "We're not trying to make actors of the children," she once told an interviewer. " We're mainly interested in giving each child the assurance of what he is capable of doing himself, guiding his creative imagination, and providing for a controlled emotional outlet." The experience of growth in theatre, rather than professional training, remains CLT's ideal for its young clientele.

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

The last twenty years have seen changes. The theatre-going habits of the nation have changed drastically in that time. During its peak years, from 1959 to 1966, CLT averaged fifteen thousand paid admissions per year. (Note #7) Those were the years when the theatre's income was so big and earned so easily that it seemed only sensible to turn the fifth show of the season into a musical extravaganza, something with a big cast so that everyone could participate, something with songs and dances and plenty of theatrical splash so that the patrons would go home and wait impatiently for the following season. What did it matter how expensive it was? Community was the important thing. Cost was immaterial.

Those were also the years when Broadway was turning out half a dozen solid hits every year, turning them out to the little theatres all over the country. Within weeks after it closed in New York, the previous season's best publicized play might open on our stage. A newspaper commentator on the local theatrical scene in 1966 said, "Here in Happy Valley we get only the winners." Another as late as 1968, when a decline had already set in, wrote, "CLT is a Lehigh Valley 'institution,' offering the most popular of the hit Broadway productions, and headlining an amateur talent of great renown." Theatre goers didn't have to ask what tonight's play was. They had been looking forward to it for months. Today's programs regularly carry a squib "About The Play." In the sixties such information would have been superfluous, and it was never included.

With the onset of the depressed and depraved seventies, attendance dropped sharply. Money tightened, and too many Broadway productions were the sort that couldn't be exported to amateur theatres. The economy changed, the public taste changed, the nature of theatre changed. Technology changed - the Zebra Trap that worked so hilariously in The Girls in 509 in 1961 was meticulously built for the 1976 production, but it didn't work nearly as well. Why? Because in 1976 it was built with nylon rope, which unfortunately, stretched. Even the language changed. When CLT did The Moon Is Blue in 1964, it was something of a scandal that the word "virgin" was spoken onstage. Today, contemporary plays are written in contemporary language, and those who do not wish to hear barrackroom talk onstage must wait for a revival of Babes In Toyland. But it works the other way, too - you could say things in the fifties that you can't say today. For example, in 1953, back in the Muhlenberg theatre, CLT did a play called Strange Bedfellows. The Morning Call, blissfully unaware of what the future had in store, headlined their announcement, "Little Theatre To Present Gay Comedy."

CLT has weathered the changes, although not without absorbing some lumps. In the summer of 1971 the Board announced that the following season's roster would include The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (Marat/Sade). The Board of Governors met, decided for the first time ever to break their policy of non-interference, and sent an urgent plea to the directors to reconsider. The play deals with the irresponsibility of madness. Is this suitable material for an amateur theatre that caters to the entire community? Very well, then, can a little theatre that aims at young and old alike afford to tie itself to tradition and snub the new? The debate covered several meetings with the result that the play was dropped, but the question of what sort of plays "ought to be" on the playbill is still, more than any other, the arguing point - the question that will surely be answered that they certainly should. And then again - they shouldn't.

Continued