With its 15th season in full swing, the Auburn Area Community Theater continues to provide a creative outlet for Lee County residents.
Auburn Area Community Theater began in the summer of 2003 after a calling from community members to create a theater program anyone could be a part of, said Andrea Holliday, artistic director of AACT.
“I was initially surprised that all of these people came out to start a community theater,” Holliday said. “I realized that people really want to be on stage.”
Holliday worked with other volunteers to call members of the community to gather support for the theater. Approximately 40 people gathered together to create Auburn Area Community Theater.
With the community gathered, they wrote bylaws and elected officers to lead the program. Then, they began to look at shows they could do with the resources they had.
“Trying to choose plays that we think people will like and recruit directors and find directors who want to give so much of their time,” Holliday said.
The program performed its first show in February 2004 with donated sets from the previous for-profit community theater in Lee County.
The turn out of participants and audience members for that first show was surprising to Holliday and others involved in the program’s creation, Holliday said.
The program has expanded significantly over the last 15 seasons, growing from two shows a year to five, which included adding a children’s theater program, Holliday said.
“The children’s theater has grown where there is so much demand for extra-curricular activities that are artistic in nature and not just sports related,” Holliday said. “So that the kids that are not soccer players or cheerleaders, they want an outlet. There is a great demand for our acting classes, and there are a lot of kids that come out to audition.
Holliday is one of two founding members that remain involved in the theater. She has served in many different roles over the years and plans to continue to work with the program because there is still work to be done, and she wants to keep giving people the opportunity to perform.
The program continues to be strictly volunteer based. From the directors to the producers and the actors to the set designers, every member of the cast and staff of the 55 shows AACT has performed in its 15 seasons is volunteer.
“We are a non-profit,” said Terry Kelley, president of AACT. “We are all volunteers. We just do this for the love of theater.”
Volunteers range in age, ability and skill, but they all share a desire to put on a great show.
Volunteers also help the program achieve its mission — to provide theatrical experiences and education for the community. They do this mainly through the program’s theater classes, workshops that are offered throughout the year and summer camps.
“It’s a three-fold thing,” Kelley said. “If people want to act and be a part of theater, if people want to see some really good theater, we’ve got that. If people want an education, we can help you with that, as well.”
Based on the amount of volunteers and what resources they have, Kelley works with other elected officers to choose the shows for each season.
“It’s just a matter of looking at a script and deciding, ‘Hey this is something we want to do, this is exciting, I think it tells a good story,” Kelley said. “Then, move on from there.”
The process is similar for picking the rest of the season’s shows, Kelley said.
This season, the children’s theater presented “Flat Stanley,” a story about a young boy that is flattened by a bulletin board and mails himself around the world. The children were excited to put on this show, Kelley said.
The teen show, which will be performed in March 2019, is more of a classic show, “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.” They chose this classic show because it is the program’s 15th year, and the elected officers agreed they wanted to do some classics, Kelley said.
One of the program’s other classics for its 15th season is “To Kill A Mockingbird.” They chose it as part of the celebration of Alabama’s 200th anniversary of statehood.
“We wanted to do something that was Alabama related and also a classic, so that was a natural for us,” Kelley said.
Kelley, in particular, wanted to perform a historical drama this season.
That’s why he chose “Silent Sky” as the first show of the season. It is about a group of 19th-century women astronomers that weren’t allowed to even touch a telescope. They spent their days looking at maps of the stars and made several discoveries about the universe.
Lori McCormack has been involved with AACT for 11 years, and “Silent Sky” was her second show to direct. She worked with the cast three to four nights a week to rehearse the show.
Like with every other show AACT performs, everyone involved was a volunteer, which meant everyone has a job or is a student. AACT also uses the Jan Dempsey Arts Center, which is a shared community space, so rehearsal times are limited and is often done without set pieces, McCormack said.
“That’s part of what we do for the community is inviting people in and help them grasp that imaginary space over there is going to have a door,” McCormack said.
The most challenging part came right before the opening of the show. The weekend before opening night, the cast and crew load the set, which they have been building for several months, into trucks and take it to the Jan Dempsey Arts Center.
They rebuilt the set on the stage over the weekend and began rehearsals with all of the set pieces, lighting and costumes that Monday. After four days of rehearsal with everything in place, the show opened.
“It’s amazing that once we pull it all together through tech week, the actors are being able to actually sit down in the chair they’re supposed to be sitting in and we’re going through a door that’s actually a real door this time,” McCormack said.
Directors and other cast and crew members have to be understanding of one another for this program to work.
But in the end, it’s all worth it to McCormack because she gets to continue doing what she loves and help others do it, too.
“It’s very fulfilling,” McCormack said. “We’re growing as a group. We have a much better idea of how we do good things and things that you can do.”
Do you like this story? The Plainsman doesn't accept money from tuition or student fees, and we don't charge a subscription fee. But you can donate to support The Plainsman.
Elizabeth, senior in journalism and political science, is the community editor for The Plainsman
