From the 1850s to the 1950s, traveling performers brought entertainment to rural America in the form of repertoire theatre. Troupes would appear at small-town opera houses or put up outdoor tents to perform comedy, plays and music to the delight of audiences across the frontier.
The century-long era of tent and repertory shows effectively ended with the advent of movies, radio and television, and most of Iowa's thousands of opera houses were lost or converted to other uses.
But opera houses and traveling theatre weren’t forgotten forever. In 1973, the Theatre Museum of Repertoire Americana opened in Mount Pleasant to preserve that history. A small collection of memorabilia originally owned by Neil and Caroline Schaffner — of Iowa's famed "Schaffner Players" — has grown into hundreds of donated artifacts from descendants of theatre troupes around the country, including photographs, music scores, playbills, scrapbooks, newspapers, costumes and scenery.
“It's the scope of the museum's contents which are really remarkable,“ said scenic artist and consultant Wendy Waszut-Barrett, owner of Historic Stage Services in Minneapolis. "It's like visiting 20 historic theatres in one stop."
The museum was founded by the National Society for the Preservation of Tent, Folk and Repertoire Theatre and built on the Midwest Old Threshers Reunion grounds. Over the last half-century, it has collected artifacts from opera houses across the country and traveling theatre troupes and has hosted seminars and summer plays using the scripts from their own research library.
Its impressive store of painted curtain backdrops in particular are what brought Waszut-Barrett to Mount Pleasant. The collection of scenic curtains is possibly the largest in the U.S., and she worked with the museum for a week to catalog each backdrop and teach the society and volunteers about how to preserve them.
The backdrops were discovered, thanks to the research of George Glenn and Richard Poole, who published the book The Opera Houses of Iowa in 1993. As they were visiting the former opera houses around the state, they took note of the curtains that were still there. After learning this, theatre society members Jimmy Davis and Jim Adams took one of the Midwest Old Threshers' buses and drove around the state, asking building owners if they could take the curtains.
Jimmy's wife Grace Davis, current vice president of the National Society for the Preservation of Tent, Folk and Repertoire Theatre, says a couple of the curtains they picked up were in an opera house operating as a bar. “The curtains were up in the rafters rolled up. Nobody cared.”
“The curtains were up in the rafters rolled up. Nobody cared.”Grace Davis, vice president of the National Society for the Preservation of Tent, Folk and Repertoire Theatre
Waszut-Barrett says the scenery is an insight into the community, and themes were consistent throughout the U.S., based on traditions from the United Kingdom and Europe.
"This is a shared American aesthetic that wasn't only found in small, rural opera houses and music halls, but large metropolitan theatres and Coney Island and World Fair amusements and Grand Circus spectacles," she said on IPR's Talk of Iowa. "This aesthetic had been constant for well over a century, and it was everywhere ... it was a shared experience that so many Americans got to witness together. It was not divided. In so many ways, it was a communal experience across the United States.”
The museum displays a special time in history for rural America. Residents would plan to see shows every night when the theatre was in town.
“It was a fairly big deal. I've had people that told me when they were kids, they would plan out the week,” Davis said. “Another gentleman was telling me his mother would always save the egg money to buy tickets for the family for the week. They went every night because they did a different play every night.”
Davis’ own grandfather was once in early traveling show business. He ran his own tent show from 1917 to 1938 with his wife, teaching his eight children to juggle, sing, dance and tell jokes for audiences as they traveled across the country.
Not every troupe traveled with all of their scenery. Waszut-Barrett said many opera houses and theatres would purchase stock scenery collections for traveling shows to use. But tent shows had to travel with everything.
“The tent shows did because they had to,” Waszut-Barrett said. “They were bringing the theatre with them, which makes the tent repertoire so remarkable in American theatre, because this isn't just pitching a tent, putting up a platform and hanging a couple of backdrops. Some were incredibly complex and the engineering is remarkable.”
Preserving history
Waszut-Barrett will return to Mount Pleasant to lead a two-day scenery preservation workshop this June — the first of its kind in the U.S. — to demonstrate how to clean and do basic maintenance on history scenes. This workshop will coincide with the Preserve Iowa Summit being hosted in Mount Pleasant this year. She hopes that if the event is successful, she can work toward the preservation of scenes all over the world.
"Nothing's offered worldwide and it needs to be," she said.
She's been working for the past 35 years to find methods of preservation to make the backdrops functional in a theatre setting, as that's how they were meant to be displayed.
“These drops are metamorphic in nature," she said. "They're intended to change. They're intended to be touched, and they're intended to be part of a performance, not just stationary on a wall — and that is the challenge. When you put it on a museum wall, how can you convey how amazingly alive these were under light and the artists that created them? This was their exploration ground. They might be members of fine art societies and different artistic communities all over the country because they were recognized for their easel art. But this is where they could implement a live painting that would alight on the stage.”
The Theatre Museum reopens for the season on Memorial Day.
