For the first time in years, the Stonington Opera House has been open all year long. That it has been able to do so speaks to the efforts of the last six years by the four theater professionals who bought the Opera House in 1999 and the non-profit organization they formed, Opera House Arts, which owns and operates it.
“We feel we serve our year-round community better during the off-season months,” Executive Director and spokesperson Linda Nelson said, because everyone is so busy in July and August. “But in order to be open all year round, we had to insulate the building; we had to heat the building. So the fact that we’re going into our seventh season having accomplished this says a lot, both about the community support for the project and for peoples’ feelings for this historic building and what they want to see here.”
She said there had been fairly good attendance at this winter’s movies — the first time in recent memory that movies had been shown in winter — and she said it was like starting a new business. On Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays the movies shown at the Opera House bring 100 to 300 people to Stonington.
“The potential is there for this to be a viable year-round downtown on a commercial fishing harbor,” she said, explaining that she feels staying open supports the year-round population. And, she said, “We think that our seasonal population, by their initial support of our summer programs, has helped it to stay open and should be proud of itself — our mission is to foster excellence in all the ways we perform our lives, so we have a very broad understanding of performance.”
She feels that having townspeople participate with professionals in original theatrical productions offers them a unique opportunity. “All the original programming we create is really about this Downeast rural culture.”
Last year they produced a chamber opera that had Downeast voices and sounds combined with a contemporary, classical score, The Singing Bridge, by Anna Damask, who lives in Hancock and New York City, and libretto by Beatrix Gates of Brooksville. This year, on July 9th and 10th, using a local cast, they will do a fully staged production of “Women and the Sea,” based on oral histories of women along the coast who fish.
The Opera House has enriched the lives of everyone connected with it, but probably most of all, the island’s young people, starting with a free weeklong acting program each year for 14- to 19-year-olds called Summer Stage. Also each year Nelson, Jerome and Estey mount a five-day production of a Shakespeare play. Their efforts have earned critical acclaim. They cast the major roles in New York with members of Actors Equity and use local students and residents for minor parts. Due to the large cast needed for this year’s production of “As You Like It,” Nelson said, “Some of the students who have been in the [Summer Stage] program for several years have been cast in supporting roles in our annual Actors Equity Shakespeare in Stonington production.”
“We collaborate with just about anybody,” Nelson said. “The state is looking to us as an example of the creative economy at work. It’s about where our world economy is going, a way to create new opportunities for teenagers and young people. … We see theater as a way to build leadership skills.”
In collaboration with the Healthy Island Project [HIP], the Opera House initiated the Wicked Good Student Film Series in 2001. For the past six years, students have taken over and operated the Opera House one weekend a month, until this year usually from April through September. They choose a film to show, run the box office and the concessions, and since Doha started its Digital Media Project last spring, they’re getting into filmmaking. Numbers vary, but from 7 to 15 teenagers take part. Hip helped because, as Nelson said, “It’s about the overall health of our young people.”
A year ago OHA collaborated with Stonington-Deer Isle High School to start an “entrepreneurship project,” a teen-run nightspot for teenagers called the Big Rock Café. Seven students opened the café for the first time February 24th. They plan to have it open Friday and Saturday nights. Nelson also collaborates with the high school in teaching a mandatory career preparedness course for ninth graders.
Opera House Arts is also collaborating with the Island Heritage Trust to produce a new, site-specific performance of dance at the Settlement Quarry in Oceanville, “Quarryography,” by Alison Chase and Mia Kanazawa, of Brooksville. The work, Nelson said, “Will be specific to the place, the history, and the people in a spectacular place. It’s like a natural amphitheater, and our audience sits up on the edge, and looks down on the performance, which is on a huge, 400 square-foot space, and, of course, they’re looking out over the thorofare.”
The sound of screeching tires outside led Nelson to discuss a film they conceived and made on the obvious “performance” of Stonington’s pickup trucks as they come barreling down Schoolhouse hill and careening onto Main Street on two wheels. Nelson said, “We got a grant from the Maine Community Foundation and we commissioned filmmaker John Steed to make a video documentary.” Steed, 28, a Stonington selectman, is also house-manager for the theater. That job, Nelson said, is an example of how the creative economy can produce opportunities other than service-related ones. By hiring someone who grew up in Stonington for a creative job, OHA give him options and helped make it possible for him to return.
In addition to Nelson and Jerome, Opera House Arts operates with an executive board of nine, an advisory board of 20, and about 100 volunteers. “Without our board members,” Nelson said, “it wouldn’t be as successful and vibrant as it is. No one or two people could have done this. It really is a community-wide effort.”
For more information call 207-367-2788 or go to www.operahousearts.org or write Opera House Arts,
P. O. Box 56, Stonington, ME 04681.