How We Came to Run the Gamut
By Clark Nicholson
Chapter 1:
"The Road Goes On Forever: What Comes From a Long Talk"
Well, we’ve been inside for better than a week now, and like many of us, I’ve found that the time lends itself to reflecting on the path of our lives up to this point. As more than half of my life has been dedicated to the building and maintaining of Gamut Theatre Group, much of what has been on my mind is how it all came to be. So, I thought I’d give you a little thumbnail history of that, and over the next days and weeks I’d like to share with you some moments that really stand out for me. This first one will be rather long, as it sets the scene for all the great shows and programs that came later. Hope you enjoy it, but if it’s too much for you, just skip to the pictures, and we’ll have more individual memories later.
So, from the beginning, ehh? In the late Eighties, after I’d been out of college for a while, I was doing my best to make it as a young actor. Like so many of my friends, I was touring in the regions when I could, and also making as much of my living as possible by working with my father, Jud Nicholson, in his sign shop in Newberry, SC.
Since I was a young teenager, I’d worked with him off and on, painting billboards (this was back in the days when most billboards were actually painted), business signs, and customizing hotrod windshields with whatever could be stated or bragged about in vinyl application. I tell you this, because what I learned doing there, and also what form my father’s skills took, in later days had a huge impact on the story of Gamut.
Working in my father’s shop paid a lot of my bills. It was good work. But, what I really wanted to do, and indeed, was yearning with all my soul to do, was to continue with the work that I’d trained for in college: to be a stage actor.
Now, this is something of a tough “row to hoe”, as the saying goes, because it entails a lot of time on the road going from town to town to find and then perform the work. So, I had logged a whole bunch of highway time by this point, working for several small, and some larger outfits in the Southeast.
It’s really a difficult and guess-filled task to tell you exactly where I was and when in those days. I auditioned all over, and work often involved small, two-person tours in various states. One job actually saw me working every state on the eastern seaboard, from Georgia up to Maine, over to Ohio, and down to Arkansas. Then back through Tennessee. Lots of road. So many towns.
Anyway, during this time, I’d been lucky enough to land a job with The Lost Colony outdoor drama on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. If you don’t know about the Colony, you really ought to. It’s been running each summer since 1937, only taking a couple of years off during WWII, and thousands upon thousands of young actors have worked there. And, so did I, in one manner or another, from 1988 to 1992. I met lifelong friends there, and really, the earliest seeds of what became Gamut were sown there.
That’s where I met my girlfriend, and later, wife, Melissa Himmelreich. She had been hired as a singer in the choir, had a laugh that you could pick out easily and often in the gathering of the hundred person Lost Colony company. She was friends with everyone, a fixture and often instigator of the many after-hours parties, and a real force of a personality. I, on the other hand, was a pretty quiet and quirky fella. I loved alternative music, small experimental works of theatre, and long, more quiet conversations. We were really, in those days, total polar opposites. In fact, for the first summer that we worked together in that large company, we had not more than a passing, head nod sort of acquaintance. We really didn’t know one another very well, at all, and it didn’t seem likely that we would.
However, fate and fortune usually have other plans than those which we are busy making for ourselves, and so, at the end of the 1990 Lost Colony season, each company member went on to their next gigs, and as it turned out, both of our gigs were in the city that I had been born in, Columbia, SC.
She was hired by a children’s theatre company, and I was hired by a touring company which took productions to small towns throughout the Carolinas and part of Georgia. And… our respective bosses were ex-husband and wife. So, they weren’t too friendly with one another, but because they largely hired Lost Colony actors, all of us were great friends, and hung out and palled around with one another although our bosses weren’t… well, the best of friends, I guess you’d say.
We weren’t making much money, but we were all touring all over so much. It was exhilarating to constantly be in front of audiences in schools, at parks, and in front of civic organizations all over the Carolinas. It sort of set the tone which later would be reflected in the Gamut schedule.
People often ask us, “How can you guys do so many different projects in such a short amount of time on such a modest budget?” Well, the short answer is, that’s how we’ve always done it. That’s what we know.
Anyway, during this time, I was nearly dead broke. I couldn’t work for my father because my touring schedule was full, but I had to live. I actually lived in an empty gas station with no power or running water. That’s how dire the situation was. It was not ideal, to say the least.
During this period, Melissa and I did get to know one another. We hit it off well, and our differences seemed to compliment one another. I learned a lot of things from her, and she from me. We became friends, then partners. We started dreaming and planning… together. She told me that she wanted me out of the gas station, and unbeknownst to our bosses, invited me to come live in the company housing for her company.
The other actors in the housing were very gracious and encouraged this, because we all lived in a very tough neighborhood and the housing was constantly getting broken into and robbed. Since my tours were often at different times than their tours, it was agreed that I’d stay there when I wasn’t out doing shows, so I could keep an eye on their stuff. And, eventually, like many folks who find themselves thrown together in tough situations, we all became friends and really kept one another alive.
One day, I believe it was on New Year’s of 1991, Melissa and I decided to take a road trip over to Atlanta Georgia to see Laurie Beasley, Melissa’s best friend, and a wonderful actor, herself. We were all going to see Steven Spielberg’s “Hook” which had just been released in movie theaters. It was a long drive down I-20 from Columbia to Atlanta, just over 3 hours. So, we had a lot of time to listen to music, laugh, sing, and talk… and it turned out that we mostly talked.
And what we talked about, although we didn’t know it at the time, was what would some years down the line be known as Gamut Theatre. We discussed the form that we wanted the company ultimately to take, and mentioned that we wanted programming intended for all ages. We wanted the stories we told to reference the past, as we knew that would be the best way to learn about how to move into the future. And, we discussed the importance of this all being run by “Actor/Managers” who would not only be able to do fine work onstage, but would also take interest in and responsibility for some vital aspect of the theatre.
I know that during this first big conversation that I referenced “The Seven Samurai” and “The Magnificent Seven” somewhere in there. And, we talked about songs we loved. And books we couldn’t do without. And, of course, plays that meant a lot to us. We talked about Gamut, but it was years before it would have that name, or in any way be the things that we wanted it to be.
And so, from the beginning, from this very first big conversation about what we hoped we could create, I’ve found that a central part of my job is to try to be the keeper and relator of analogies, proverbs, riddles, and metaphors. Because, if our stories have any value when we tell them, it is that they can be remembered and brought forth for a useful purpose sometime in the future. So, I’ve always learned as many stories as I have been able, and I have brought them out time and again in pursuit of putting together new interpretations of yet more stories.
It was only in doing this “on the job” over the years, that I learned that this is very central to what an Artistic Director does. I found that what I would be doing for most of the second quarter century of my life would be to find resonances, echoes, points and counterpoints in stories, and then to apply them to other stories, and hopefully come up with a new, exciting and vital way of telling those old stories in new ways.
This was a job that I was so fortunate and blessed to have before me, even if I didn’t yet realize this. And, what I also didn’t know at that point, but certainly do now, is that I had the perfect partner in Melissa to be able to do all the things that we chatted about on that 3-hour drive. Because she was so gifted, and such a visionary. She had big dreams, like I did, but she also had a practicality, a drive, and a real need to make all these aspirations come true. She is the ultimate “do-er”. She sets her mind to things, takes in all the variables of what is to the advantage and disadvantage of the venture, and then she just does it… no matter how long and how hard the job might be.
So, that was the beginning of Gamut, although we didn’t know it at that point. There were many, many other people besides the two of us who were inspirational and instrumental in making this all happen, but that’s the start of it. I hope to tell you more about some of those amazing people in the coming days.
But, that will be my first entry: It all started on a long drive in a conversation between two people who didn’t know it yet, but who fit together very nicely, and set out to share some stories with some folks.
Stay tuned…….