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It’s estimated that the improvements, together with the purchase of the building, would have cost almost $40,000 if all the work hadn’t been done by volunteers. The actual cost was about $14,000.
To the Guild, that was still a lot of money. They got it through donations and proceeds from a long round of rummage sales, card parties, book reviews and fashion shows. The Theatre Guild of Webster Groves was the only drama group in St. Louis to own its own building.
Six hundred people came to the opening of the building on February 10, 1952. They wanted to see for themselves a dream turning real--
the transformation of a run-down building into a theater. Some of those guests included the stars of "The Rose Tattoo," a Tennessee Williams’ play being performed in St. Louis.
The touch of Tennessee Williams was a special one for the opening of the new building. The Guild had heard of him before. When Williams was a student at Washington University in 1936, he entered the Guild’s annual one-act play writing contest. His play
"Magic Tower," was a prize winner and the Guild became the first producer of a Williams play. The playwright later rewrote his entry into a three-act entitled "The Glass Menagerie."
The Guild’s play writing contest, started in 1934, still goes on every year. It attracts hundreds of entries from all over the United States, as well as Canada, Mexico, Europe, South America, and Australia. Nowadays, the contest is called the Russell Sharp Drama Fair after a charter member and past president. The fair is sort of an experiment, held each summer, to encourage people new to theater to display their potential ability. It’s unique in that it provides the chance for someone who’s never acted to work for a director who’s never directed in a play that’s never been performed. Who knows when another Tennessee Williams might come along?
(Editor’s note: An early incarnation of William Inge’s Pulitzer-winning Picnic, titled Front Porch, was also a Russell Sharp winner, sometime in the early-to-mid Forties.)
Williams isn’t the only celebrity the Guild has known in its 50 years. (Editor’s note: Perhaps this monograph dates to 1976?) Remember "Texas Bruce" from the 1950s? He was the host of the Wrangler’s Club, a local children’s television show. Texas Bruce is known to Guild members as Harry Gibbs, actor, director, and lifetime member.
A lot of people pass through the doors of the Guild. Some stay just long enough to appear in one show. Others have been around almost from the beginning. People meet, get married, [and] raise families. And when they’re old enough to talk, the offspring are enrolled in the Children’s Theatre which presents its own production three times a year.
Unlike the bad old days, the Guild now has some money in the bank. But members keep as watchful an eye on the treasury as they do their own family budgets. When it comes time to repair the air-conditioning system someone will get a friend to do it cheap.
Someone else knows somebody who can get a break on insurance. And no one gets rid of old furniture or clothes without first checking the set and costume requirements of the current season.
Why do they do it? Why contribute all that time? After all, nobody makes a dime. In real life, the members are housewives, lawyers, janitors, businessmen, students. It must be this. They love the theater ... and maybe each other.
Each year brings more and more sell-out performances. As the Guild’s reputation grows, the seating capacity of 147 seems to shrink. What now? Expand? Look for a bigger building?
Doubtful. One member, standing on the front porch on a summer evening, put it this way. "We’re not the American Theater. We’re amateurs and we welcome anyone who wants to work in amateur theater. If we became big-time ...well, then it just wouldn’t be the Guild anymore."
If you’re ever in Webster Groves and happen upon Theatre Lane, stop in the third house on the left and take a look around. But one word of caution. If you’re not careful, you just might find yourself with a script in one hand and a paintbrush in the other.
