Main Street Arts

The Little Theatre That Could—Main Street Arts

By Joyce Marcel

Main Street Arts is a little community arts center that always thinks big. “Main Street Arts is to Saxtons River as Lincoln Center is to New York City,” it likes to say.

“It’s the heartbeat of Saxtons River,” said Kathleen J. Bryar, the chair of Main Street Arts’ audacious capital campaign. “And it’s not just for Saxtons River. It’s Grafton, Westminster West, Putney, Bellows Falls and even Walpole in New Hampshire. People come to participate from a 50-mile radius. They have this passion for Main Street Arts. It’s a very welcoming community where people who have some creative ability can find talented people of similar interests. And you don’t have to be a professional.”

This small and beloved arts center is currently stuffed into every nook, corner, cranny and crevice of the two-floor, 1850’s Green Revival former Oddfellow’s Hall which it owns on Main Street in Saxtons River — a tiny township of about 500 people that is part of the Town of Rockingham.

Hence, the need for a capital campaign, which was begun quietly last year and is now about to go public. But what makes it audacious?

First, most small arts organizations don’t last long as MSA, which was founded in 1988. Second, in a down economy where most arts organizations find it difficult to raise money, MSA wants to raise a whopping $875,000. And third, it has already raised an astonishing $595,000 — 68 percent of what it needs.

Main Street Arts may be small, with a budget of about $90,000 a year, but it packs a mighty artistic punch.

“At every given day, something new is happening at Main Street Arts,” said part-time managing director Margo Ghia. “The Vermont Arts Council has said over the years, ‘You epitomize the arts in a community.’ We’ve existed on the generosity of our community and the frugality of this organization for almost 25 years.”

Each year, over 10,000 people come through its creative doors. They include seniors taking strength classes, children taking art lessons, choruses rehearsing, choreographers, directors, scenographers, actors, musicians and dancers working on the next big musical, the  audiences that fill the 125-seat theater and even, every now and then, the Oddfellows themselves.

In 2010, MSA offered 70 classes, including watercolors, Zumba, dance, Tai Chi, writing, songwriting, drumming and crafts. In the 2011-12 season it staged 32 events including dances, a magic show, a wildly popular once-a-month Scrabble Night, language potlucks where people can share a meal and practice their Spanish or French and, of course, lots of community theater.

The building also houses the largest collection in Vermont of historic, preserved, painted theater curtains.

These were painted by Charles Washington Henry (1850–1918), who lived in Guilford but spent several months a year traveling from town to town with his family — The Henry Traveling Players. Henry would design and paint a curtain or two and then write and produce the plays that were performed in front of them. MSA has about 15 curtains or pieces of curtains, which it still uses in its productions.

“One of them is a street scene, one is a brick wall, one is a seascape with a broken-down ship and grey clouds, one is a living room scene with side panels that can stand alone,” Ghia said. “There’s a cabin scene, a dungeon, and a ‘Grand Drape’ that has a Tyrollean village with a castle. Henry never traveled to these places. This was all from his imagination.”

What with tables and chairs, art supplies, huge puppets, theater seats and historic painted curtains, MSA ran out of storage space a long time ago.

“There is not a bare corner in this building,” Ghia said.

The historic building has a five-step entrance. The beautiful theater is on the second floor. That means that nothing is really handicap accessible. Even the Oddfellows, as they get older, have to find another space to meet. MSA needs to fix that problem and expand its space.

So far, the capital campaign has been “like pulling a string on a sweater,” Ghia said.

“One thing just led to another,” Ghia said. “We started in earnest over a year ago to figure out how to put in an elevator. And the cost blew us away.”

There was also the problem of changes to the building being controlled.

“Our building is historic, and we have to make sure we maintain the historic structure,” Ghia said.

Then there came an “Aha moment” when the board of directors recognized that the building next door was abandoned and might provide some badly needed extra space.

“There were squatters living in it,” Ghia said. “It has a long history of not being taken care of. Live electric lines were just dangling. And as we’re discussing that, all of a sudden we said, ‘What if we look at this project as not just Main Street Arts?’ We began a very long process, working with the Preservation Trust of Vermont and the division of Historic Preservation, looking to see if the building next door could be saved. The reality was the building was far enough gone that the cost to stabilize it was huge. So we decided to buy the building and demolish it.”

Then the board discovered that along with the dilapidated building came a brownfield.

“There was a dry cleaner on the premises in the 1980s,” Ghia said. “We’re working with Windham Regional Commission on how to remediate the brownfield. So there’s a whole environmental piece. Then there’s the historic preservation piece.”

Not to be deterred, the board of directors went quietly to work. Bryar said that so far, the capital campaign has been like “the little engine that could.”

“Every time we take a step, karma or luck is on our side,” Bryar said. “The project always keeps moving forward despite the roadblocks.”

The results are startling.

Of the $595,000 MSA has already raised, over $90,000 came from the state’s Downtown Tax Credit Program. which was designed to help communities develop their downtowns. The Vermont Community Development Program gave MSA a $300,000 grant to make the building accessible.

“We’ve got about $193,000 in in-kind services,” Ghia said. “Everything from businesses that have donated expertise, to architects who helped us design plans, to state and federal funding for assessments and cleanup costs for the brownfield, to the Preservation Trust, to individuals who have given donations. It’s amazing to me, the belief people have in our organization. I feel like we have been supported and encouraged from the very beginning.”

MSA now owns the building next door and will soon tear it down.

“Then we’’re going to put an addition on the side of our building, an accessible attachment that will house a new elevator, accessible bathrooms and a nice lobby,” Ghia said.

To complete its capital campaign, MSA is seeking to raise $175,000 from its community, $70,000 from grants and $35,000 from staging events.

“Hopefully, we’ll be constructing in our 25th year and opening in our 25th year,” Ghia said. “We’ve had this belief that we can do this, and it’s so encouraging when so many people and organizations are saying, ‘You can do this and we want to help you.’ I can’t come close to tracking the hours our volunteers have put in. This new building is a celebration of 25 years of the past and we’re looking forward to another 25 amazing years.”