The Barter Theater and the Importance of Alternative Stories
“Recently, I read this essay by Robert Porterfield, an aspiring actor who founded a theatre company in Abingdon, Virginia. The company called Barter Theatre is apparently the nation’s longest-running professional theater, except I’ve never heard about this theater until now.”
This was written by a 20-something theater person. It’s not their fault that they haven’t heard of it–nobody mentioned the Barter Theatre to me, either, when I was their age. In fact, it wasn’t until I had a doctorate and was well into my career before I discovered it independently thanks to Todd London’s anthology An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art, an amazing anthology filled with such stories. It could be a starting point for learning about other European, African, and South American theaters that are operated on an entirely different basis than theaters in the US.
The Barter Theatre was formed in a small town (Abingdon, pop 3005) in Virginia in the depth of the Great Depression, and it got its name from how people bought tickets. The people who lived in the area were mostly farmers, and they had a lot of food and nobody to sell it to because prices had dropped so low. So they’d bring eggs, or a chicken, or a pig, or jam, or cheese to the box office and trade it for tickets to the show. The produce and animals were then shared among the people who did the plays – theater artists who, in New York where the number of Broadway productions had gone over a cliff, would otherwise have been standing in the breadline waiting for handouts. Instead, they were doing plays and eating well in a community that otherwise lacked entertainment options. The founder, Robert Porterfield, said “There were two kinds of hungering…hungering in the body and hungering in the soul. I wanted to bring together the actor who was hungry in the stomach and the people I knew best, the people of the Virginia highlands, because I had a hunch that they were hungry for ther spiritual nourishment the theater could bring them. I thought they were hungry enough for it to pay in the vegetables and chickens and jam they couldn’t sell.”
People told him that it wouldn’t work, it couldn’t be done; he did it, and it worked. And while eventually (and perhaps sadly) they later shifted to a cash basis, the theater still exists and is thriving.
Students, in my opinion, need to hear this story and stories like it (there are many, many more just as innovative), but most theater programs don’t include them anywhere in their curriculum, which is a damn shame. A semester-long course could be devoted solely to London’s anthology – I know, because I’ve done it many times myself. While American Theater Magazine publishes an article by a theater professor who says that students need to learn more about the new demands of getting a job in the traditional New York theater (websites, video clips, etc.), I believe that they should be receiving information about how other theater artists have created vibrant and innovative artistic lives outside of that dehumanizing environment.
I don’t know. Maybe I need to do such a course on-line.