IOWA TENT THEATRE PROJECT

ORIENT - "COME ONE, COME ALL, TO THE GREATEST SHOW IN TOWN!"

On Saturday, August 4, Orient's Quasquicentennial Celebration will be the setting for a groundbreaking theatrical project with roots in our rural past when the Iowa Tent Theatre Project rolls into town with its 1930s vintage vehicles, a red and yellow "big-top" tent which seats 300, and a company of energetic young actors.

 
They will perform the play “Standing Tall : an Iowa Tent Play” by native Iowan Ralph Hall, who founded the professional, not-for-profit theater company and directs the play.  Designed to celebrate the contemporary people and places of Iowa while providing entertainment with the whole family in mind, this heartwarming comedy about an Iowa farm family in the '30s will be presented complete with talking animals, aerial puppets and other theatrical surprises, including a tornado! Hall says, "There is nothing like the magical ambiance created by a tent theatre performance.  I look forward to sharing this wonderful form of family entertainment with the communities of my home state."
 

Modeled after the traveling troupes of players that toured the American Midwest, and particularly Iowa, in an age before movies, television and video, the Iowa Tent Theatre Project promises a pleasant reminiscence  for those who remember the old time Tent Shows, and a surprising and exciting new experience for those who weren’t here to watch them the first time around!

 Hall's long term goal is to establish a tent theater troupe that premieres and tours a new tent play throughout Iowa each summer.  Only 11 communities will host performances across Iowa in this Premier Season;  Orient is one of only 3  located in SW Iowa.  All performances to date have been to sell-out crowds, with audiences giving rave revues!

The performance on August 4th at Orient's Quasquicentennial Celebration is sponsored by the Adair County Tourism Council, with funding assistance from the Empowering Adair County  Foundation.

The show starts at 7:30 p.m., but there are a variety of activities planned throughout the day, all designed for family entertainment in celebration of Orient's 125th anniversary.  Everyone is welcome to come early in the day to see the antique vehicles cruise into town, watch the "big top" tent go up, and visit with the actors and director.  The performance itself is appropriate for all ages and groups and is approximately an hour in length.

Tickets are $3.00 per person.  Since seating in the tent is limited,  only 300 tickets will be sold.  Advance purchase is advised,  and tickets may be obtained by phone or email from Lee Ann Nelson at the The Iowa Aviation Museum (641-343-7184 - aviation@iowatelecom.net) or purchased at any of the banks in Greenfield, Fontanelle, and Orient.  Bon's Bakehouse will also have tickets for sale.

Don't miss out on this fun tent event!  See you under the Big Top!

TENT THEATER HISTORY

"Repertoire tent shows, which began traveling America in the last half of the 19th century and continued well into the 20th, brought summer entertainment to thousands of small towns in all parts of the country. From 1900 to 1920 tent shows increased in number to form a rather sizable industry. Development was interwoven with many of the popular amusements of the early century until, carrying traits and the scars of such diversions as the circus, moving pictures, vaudeville, Chautauqua, and touring opera house companies, the repertoire tent show emerged as a distinct form of rural theatrics...With the emergence of hundreds of shows throughout this period, a rural audience, formerly remote from staged dramas, was created. Plays were written to satisfy this new body of theatre-goers; and special emphasis was placed on certain popular themes relating to the small town and the farm...The use of the canvas portable theatre by repertoire troupes that had customarily performed indoors created a distinct type of show business which by 1920 had become well established...(Theatre in a Tent, W.L. Slout, 1972)." "All across the country, traveling companies of actors came to a town once a year, erected a huge tent on a vacant lot somewhere and presented a new and different play each and every night...The 'legitimate' theater looked down its nose at this kind of entertainment and few indeed were the Broadway actors who would even admit they learned their trade in the tents. But in the decade before the Great Depression tent repertoire...not only was the lustiest but the most robust branch of American theater. Writing for The New York Times in 1927, Don Carle Gillette, editor of the show business trade paper Billboard, declared that 'the canvas playhouses of the country now constitute a more extensive business than Broadway and all the rest of the legitimate theater industry put together'...When hard times hit after 1930, these shows quickly disappeared from the scene. The better companies kept operating for a time, but with the Great Depression there also came the talking picture and, soon thereafter, air conditioning...One by the tent shows dropped by the wayside. Those that the Depression did not get, World War II did (The Fabulous Toby & Me, Neil Schaffner, 1968)."

To experience a true adventure in tent theater history visit The Theatre Museum of Repertoire Americana in Mt. Pleasant Iowa which houses a unique collection of memorabilia from early American popular entertainment dating from the 1850s. Theatre Museum of Repertoire Americana

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