Rawhide Court: Little More Than Children

A Midsummer Night’s Dream in November, 1984 was our last show at St. John’s. It had been a wonderful relationship; too good to last. Our rental cost was trivial, our attendance was growing; but we were over-filling the space, and we had to strike our sets into closets a couple of times every weekend. But we were flush. And our ticket price—remember, this was 1984, way back in the last millennium—was four dollars. (!) So we thought we needed to move, and, as it turned out we found a building that we could lease by the year. It was an industrial building, a manufacturing plant, at 5853 Rawhide Court, a mile north of Boulder. (That building became, last year, Boulder’s first recreational marijuana dispensary, but that is not to our credit—or blame.)

I no longer remember who found the building, I no longer remember what we paid for it, but I will never forget the work we put into it to make it a theatre. We built a stage, of course, and a grid to hang our lights from. We had to repair broken windows because our first show would be in February and it gets chilly in Boulder in February. We installed two restrooms and built a box office. The walls were concrete and the acoustics were too live. We padded the walls behind the audience to dampen the sound. So we spent two months building a theatre but we ran out of time and supplies to build the first set. Luckily the first show we did at the Upstart Crow Theatre was an adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood. Luckily, because Under Milkwood is a radio play, and radio plays tend not to require sets. We had a table and a couple of chairs, we built a couple of benches and we played in front of a blank concrete wall. This is what it looked like:

I think I mentioned a couple of blogs ago that we were an ensemble company. See the two women in front? They’re still with us: Joan Kuder Bell is directing our current show, Misalliance, and Katherine Dubois Reed is in it.

And, by the way, Kathy wrote the fourth play we did at the Rawhide Court Theatre, York 8 Lancaster 6, but more of that later. Anyway, the building was ours and we could build our sets right there on the stage, and the next few plays we did there displayed some of the finest sets we have ever had. Here is what our second show, Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet looked like:

We were able to augment our income (still $4 a ticket) by renting the space to other companies. I recall a production by the Boulder Civic Opera company and another by an ad hoc group that did a play about basketball players. (I don’t remember their name or the name of the play.) We were like children with a brand new playground of their own.

Yes, we were like children. We knew a lot about playing, but we didn’t know much about playgrounds. The county shut us down after a year. The building had no sprinkler system, and worse; it had no drinking fountain. So, back on the road again.