The historic the Waterside Theater on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina. This has been the workplace and training ground for thousands of young theatre professionals. Clark and Melissa first met here when Melissa came to visit a friend in 1988. Melissa returned the next year as a member of the cast, and both Clark and Melissa worked there over successive summers until 1992.
This historic venue has been the home to Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Paul Green's premiere Symphonic Drama, "The Lost Colony" every summer since 1937, designed by Albert "Skipper" Bell and originally constructed with the aid of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's infrastructure programs The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and The Works Progress Administration (WPA). The Waterside is the home of the longest consistently produced work of theatre in North America, producing since 1937, and shutting down for only 3 years during World War II after Nazi submarines were spotted off the North Carolina coast.
Sadly, much like Gamut and thousands of other theaters in the world, it has been necessary to halt production until the threat of COVID-19 has passed. But, with strength, love, and determination, The Lost Colony, like Gamut Theatre, will return.
This is just another important place where Gamut Theatre was born.
Photo by the Roanoke Island Historical Association.
How We Came to Run the Gamut
By Clark Nicholson
Chapter 3:
“The End of the Beginning”
In my last installment, I told you about the unexpected and happy break from a dark time that followed after Melissa and I first discussed the sort of theatre we wanted to build and the kind of life we hoped that we could have together while working on that endeavor.
This next bit is also a transitional period, but thankfully, one that really opened up in vibrant and unexpected ways. I know that I read somewhere once that life can seem chaotic and random while one is living through it, however, if one is open to it, viewing this journey in hindsight often shows that there actually was a very clear path.
I’ve found this to be largely true.
And so, we worked through that summer on the Outer Banks: Melissa at The Lost Colony playing the matron and midwife in that story, Dame Coleman, and I working for the Melodrama Theater as a sound/light technician, and also playing the title character in Melodrama/Little Big Theater Company’s children’s theater production of Pecos Bill, King of the Cowboys. Also, Little Big Theater Company had released its script for Aesop’s Fables to The Lost Colony for a production to be performed on the lovely waterfront of the charming town of Manteo, NC, right down the road from The Lost Colony. Melissa was tapped to direct this. Both Pecos Bill and Aesop’s Fables were written by my new boss, and person whom I will always consider as an important role model and mentor, Don Bridge.
As I mentioned in the last chapter, Don was very invested in making sure that his children’s plays were genuinely engaging, and most especially, funny, for all ages. This made a great impact on both Melissa and me, as we had both done some children’s theater before, but our sense was that these earlier scripts, while entertaining for children, seemed only to be written with children in mind, and, there’s nothing wrong with that, surely. However, it seemed to both Meliss and me that Don; his wife and partner Lisa; fellow actor and artisan BC Ellis; and director and production head, Robbie Fearn; were truly on to something that we hadn’t experienced in the medium of theatre: stories ostensibly for kids, but that also were really for whole families to engage in all at once. I’d seen this aesthetic fully embraced in other mediums, primarily the cartoons I grew up loving: classic Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, Heckle and Jekyll, and most importantly, Rocky, Bulwinkle, Mr. Peabody, Sherman, and the Fractured Fairy Tales.
It was in the spirit of these that we were working. We were literally learning how to become living, breathing cartoons. And, it wasn’t just what we said, it was how we said it. It was the voices that we were using, the cadences and tones, and what we were doing with our bodies. We had done this to some extent in the earlier companies we had worked in, but this time it was fully “the mission.” We pulled out old cartoons, watched them on video repeatedly, and tried to get what they were doing not just into our minds, but into our bodies. Along about this time I became fascinated by the musical scores that Carl Stalling had done for Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies. Don cued us in to that. I’d have never thought twice about who put the music behind Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and Tweety & Sylvester. But these sounds were essential to what the characters did and how they did it.
Not that we had musical accompaniment in these shows, because usually we didn’t, but still, once you realize how important that trombone sound is to Bugs slowly looking left and right, and you the actor hear it in your head when you do it, even though the audience can’t actually hear it, the quality of what they see is greatly influenced by it. Even though they don’t hear it… they do. If you get what I’m saying.
So, we took these things to heart that summer of 1991. And then, it came to an end. Another lovely summer out on the “Goodliest Lande Under the Cope of Heaven,” the Lost Colony, on the Outer Banks of NC, under our belts.
We left NC and headed to PA, ready to get started with our endeavor, which we had decided would be a touring theater company somewhat like ones we had already worked in the Southeast. And, we had a name:
The Rolling Rep Theatre Company.
Huh?
Yes, this was the original name of what would, much later, be known as Gamut. I even contacted my Pop and we had a template made for the signs that we planned to have on our touring vehicle.
We came to Millersburg, PA, to the big old Victorian house that Melissa grew up in, and that her parents still lived in, and we moved into a part of the lovely old place. (Incidentally, it’s the house that she and I still live in today.) We had no history whatsoever as a company. We hadn’t developed our own scripts yet. We had no idea where to begin, and, in those pre-internet days, no real clue of how to find out.
Except. There was one way. You know it, and I know it, because we all grew up hearing it, didn’t we? Yes.
Go look in the Library.
Well, I decided that not only would we go to a Library, we would go to the Big One: The Library of Congress in Washington, DC. I wanted to have access to whatever was out there to adapt for our first script. We had no money, so whatever we adapted had to be in the public domain.
There were some stories that my Grandmother had read to me as a kid by a very smart retired naturalist named Thornton Burgess. Starting in 1910, he had written a series of books called The Mother West Wind Stories, which were fun and taught lessons. I still remembered quite a few of the stories, because as a kid, I’d had my Grandmother read them to me over and over. As it turned out, all these sessions of my Grandmother reading me stories as a child had a huge impact on what would eventually become Popcorn Hat Players, and later, Gamut Theatre.
Having really enjoyed Don’s approach to his Aesop’s fables scripts, I thought that Burgess’ Mother West Wind Stories, each of which were only a couple of pages long, would lend themselves very well to the kind of children’s show that Melissa and I had come to call “Two Knuckleheads and a Trunk” and later a “Trunk Show,” which meant, essentially that two actors with healthy imaginations and a trunk loaded with a few props and hats could conjure in the audience’s minds the essence of the story.
So, Melissa and I went to Washington, DC for the weekend, and we spent the days during that weekend in the reading rotunda of The Library of Congress. We requested the Burgess books, got a stack of them, and began to pore over the stories, reading as many as possible, looking to find which would be best for our first script. We picked about five, made copies of them, took the copies home, and I wrote a script. I was pretty proud of it. Stories about Drummer the Woodpecker, Franny Frog, and the Merry Little Breezes. Delightful, if I do say so.
And then: nothing. We had nowhere to perform.
So, Meliss and I hung out in Pennsylvania for a few weeks not sure of what to do, when it was suggested by my mother, I believe, that we see if my home town of Saluda, SC would be interested in what we had to offer. And, this was just what we needed to happen. Also, my Pop went a long way to mend fences with Meliss and I by helping me build and paint our new touring set. Little did we know, that years later, this action would be repeated in much bigger and more impressive ways.
So, we booked a couple of performances of The Mother West Wind Stories at the Elementary School where my mom taught, along with workshops for the kids there, and workshops for the Middle School, and workshops for the High School, as well as a public performance downtown at one of my favorite haunts back when I was growing up, The Saluda Theater. This theater was a tiny and charming old movie house, which, to this day sits in the middle of my hometown, a well-preserved vision in the neon styles of yesteryear, and is kept up by the Saluda Historical Society. I tell you this, because each one of these little local treasures is precious. And good and appreciated institutions have a way of spawning and encouraging the growth of other good and appreciated institutions. That’s the lesson I take away from it, anyway.
This is the historic Saluda Theater in Clark's home town of Saluda, SC. It was designed by Charles B. Thompson, and opened in 1936.
Several generations of Clark's family attended films there over the decades, and every kid who ever grew up in Saluda has a story about it.
This was also the site of the first public performance, in 1991, of the organization that would eventually be called The Gamut Theatre Group.
It is currently maintained by the Saluda County Historical Society, and among the volunteers are Gloria Caldwell and Dr. Bela Herlong, who, as teachers at Saluda high school, both introduced Clark to the theatre, and also to the works of William Shakespeare.
Located right in the town square, across from the Saluda Courthouse, The Saluda Theater is still a central showplace and meeting venue for the lovely little town.
This theater was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 13, 1993.
We coupled that performance with a presentation of a one-act comedy, The Boor, by Anton Chekhov, because it was classic, funny, and again, owing to it being in the public domain, also free. Dwayne Walls, our friend from Lost Colony and from our touring days in Columbia, joined us for this show, and it was just a whole lot of fun. As I very fondly remember it, my hometown was one of the most gracious, welcoming gigs I’ve ever played, either before or since.
And, they paid us well, which goes a long way toward brightening a young theatre couple’s outlook. Thank you, Saluda! Although I’ve lived in Central PA for half of my life, you will always be one of three places that I consider “home.”
Unfortunately, after this amazing experience, we had no prospects lined up. We didn’t know what we’d do when we got back to Central, PA. But as luck would have it, our old friend Don Bridge from Melodrama Theater/Little Big Theater Company got in touch with us and told us he could use a hand. His wife and partner, Lisa, had gotten a short, couple of months-long touring gig with Nebraska Theatre Caravan, and he wanted to know if we might be able to come to the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill Triangle of NC, to work at his theater for a couple of months, since they were a bit of a “Mom and Pop” operation, and Mom had the opportunity to go and do an outside gig for a bit.
Of course, we leapt at the opportunity. As I’d said, we loved working with Don, Lisa, and crew on the Outer Banks, and this was even more of a solid opportunity for us. We took the gig, moved into Don and Lisa’s TV/Rec room, became sort of hybrid big brother/big sister/sorta-kinda-extra-pseudo-parents-in-training to their whip-smart, funny, and really cool kids, Max and Alice, and also their dear deaf Dalmatian, Icee (as in “I see, but I can’t hear.”) And, we started doing a lot of children’s shows. Don already had a ton under his belt, and BC churned out the most charming, truly magical looking props.
The cast of the Little-Big/Melodrama Theater's production of Puff the Magic Dragon with puppets The Great Gloomy Goo Gah Moo Gah, and the Three Pirate Swine, and humans from left to right: Cletus Smith as Jackie Paper, tiny Alice Bridge as Backstage Support, Lisa Bridge as Fifi Dragon, Clark as Puff, Don Bridge as Puppet Master, Max Bridge as Puppet Apprentice, and Melissa as Pirate Queen Rosie.
Their theater, The Melodrama, was a very small empty storefront space in downtown Durham, and it was a little enclosed world unto itself. Several days a week, kids and parents alike crowded in to catch one of Don’s shows, sometimes co-authored by a nice local fellow by the name of Joe Appleton.
The whole set-up was just wee, and beautiful. I marveled at how much I loved the tiny place: just an old empty store in a small Southern city that became a Place of Magic for so many families in the surrounding area.
Eventually, Lisa returned from her tour, but to my surprise, Don and Lisa asked that Melissa and I stay, and also, to keep things “fresh” in their company, also asked if Melissa and I would produce and direct one of their evening Melodrama shows, geared more towards a grown-up audience.
Wow. You, of course, know what our answer was. How could we even think about refusing? So, we agreed to put together a production of various Chekhov one-act comedies. We brought back The Boor, which I directed, this time with Melissa and Don as the two contentious but hopelessly attracted leads, and me as the apoplectic butler. Then Melissa directed me in the bizarre but always fun monologue The Harmfulness of Tobacco, which was just one long lab experiment in building a character and working the hell out of comic timing. And finally, the group all pitched in to bring together the hilarious sitcom-like scenario of The Celebration with me as the blowhard bank CEO, Lisa as my frivolous, dithering wife, BC Ellis as the misanthropic and psychotically agitated accountant, and Melissa as the very irritating, hard of hearing, relentless old woman. It was a hoot. We had a blast.
But, we got a review in the Chapel Hill newspaper that was not complimentary. I would even go so far as to call it savage. The reviewer had always been a fan of the work at Melodrama, but he did NOT like this show. Not one little bit. And, he especially didn’t like me Melissa or me, and singled us out for nearly the entire review to point out why we were the living embodiments of everything that could ever be wrong with Live Theatre.
It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. He even went so far as to say, in print for many thousands to see: “Clark and Melissa Nicholson need to take a little time off and go learn how to act.”
It hurt. Badly. I still remember that day, and how angry and depressed I was. I doubted myself terribly, as did Melissa. It felt, in a way, almost like we had been physically beaten. But, here was the thing: the audiences were loving the show. It was booking well, and the laughs were deep and heartfelt. Melissa and I spoke about this, and we knew we weren’t wrong.
And, as it turned out, this was probably one of our most important steps in our education: It hurt to get knocked down, but if we wanted to do this, we absolutely had to get back up. This would not be the worst hit we ever took; however, it was the first really bad one, and really the only review that I’ve ever read in the Press that I thought was overly harsh and unfair. But, it was a good lesson to be shown that as rewarding as a life on the stage can be, its humbling embarrassments can come swiftly, and with absolutely no warning. This was a good lesson to learn, and it was the right time to learn it. You’re blessed if you learn how to take a cheap shot early. Those that come later with little experience can tend to be fatal.
And so, what a year! We worked on quite a few shows with the Bridges, et al., and logged a lot of experience points, just from the sheer number of hours that we were on stage, both rehearsing and performing. We even had great experiences working on a play that would become a later Gamut favorite: George Herman’s A Company of Wayward Saints, about a deeply-flawed, co-dependent, dysfunctional, and utterly charming Italian commedia dell’arte theatrical troupe. But, we’ll tell you that story later, when we get to Gamut’s production.
Eventually, the season was up, and Melissa, myself, and the whole Little/Big-Melodrama Theater was hired to return to The Lost Colony. Melissa and I went back to our lovely Roanoke Island for one last summer. I won’t bore you with too much detail about the Colony summer, as we’ve been through all of that before, except it was nice to be rehired by a place that I’ve always loved and that was one of my first professional jobs. So, we’ll just leave that there, except save one very, very important detail: That summer, I jumped into the Shakespeare pool.
It was in this final summer at America’s longest running historical drama, that I got cast in an extra production, and it was one I didn’t expect. It was also a role that would shape a huge chunk of the rest of my life and one that I would revisit at several different pivotal points in my life.
That summer, an old Lost Colony roommate, Tommy Hensel, who was also a former tour mate from my days of doing roving dinner theatre comedies in South Carolina, was directing Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The whole of the nearly 100-person cast and crew of The Lost Colony was allowed to audition, and so I went in and gave it a shot. I read for Nick Bottom, because I felt that hammy, loveable nincompoop was just the kind of guy that I was most suited to play. The audition went well, and I felt I had a pretty good shot at it. I crossed my fingers and waited. When the cast list came out, I was stunned beyond belief. Tommy had cast me as the lithe, chaotic, childlike trickster, Puck. Now, I’d always loved the character, and thought he would be a blast to play, but I never felt that he was in my “wheelhouse,” so to speak. I’m a fairly big, broad-shouldered guy, naturally, and I had always thought of Puck as a small, wispy sort of creature.
Melissa was also cast as one of the fairies, Cobweb, I believe, and so we went to enchanted fairy-creature school. I did lots of stretching and tumbling exercises, as my first entrance in the show was falling out of a full-sized actual tree. And, spent hours on the backstage dock of the Lost Colony walking a long 2x4 track, on its narrow edge, to develop my balance. I would do this for hour-long stretches of time, and I found it to be a great way to balance not just my body, but also my brain.
I also went through my first Shakespearean text analysis and “scansion” work with this show. Tommy had asked Jack Parrish, a great, robust soul, and longtime stage and television actor to take me through the text line-by-line, and even syllable by syllable, to find the rhythm and life of Puck’s speech. This was at first daunting; because I was proud and thought I knew it all. But Jack was patient, and guided me through, saying things like, “Whoa! Hold on. ‘Hempen Homespuns’ is an alliterative line. It sounds the way it sounds for a reason. Shakespeare has given you the gift of those two repeated H’s. Are you just gonna drive right over the line and throw it away? Go back and read it again.” And, so we took apart the whole script.
Now, I’d always been a fan of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, all the way back to early high school. And, I’d seen a fair amount of Shakespeare at this point. Maybe 6 or 7 plays, but I just never thought of myself as this kind of actor. I admired Shakespearean actors, but I didn’t think of myself as one, nor did I, until this experience, fully grasp all the variables that go into putting together a Shakespearean role. And, it was just fascinating to me. Not to mention, it was really, really fun. Playing Puck is like going to an amusement park every day. You’re tired when the day is over, but boy, did you have a blast wearing yourself out!
So, that was an eye- and soul-opening experience. If I hadn’t gotten that role, I doubt that the twists and turns into the future would have eventually brought us to Shakespeare being such an important cornerstone in the makeup of Gamut.
And so, Melissa and I finished up our final full summer at The Lost Colony. It had introduced us originally, and in many ways, it had shaped us. But, I believe we both knew at the end of that summer that it was time to move on. We had formed life-long friendships there, learned valuable lessons in both the business and craft of our work, and would always feel somewhat connected to the place. But, it was time to do whatever we had to do to make “The Rolling Rep Theatre Company” a reality.
Back to PA, and yes this time, pretty much for good. Don asked us if we wanted to come back and become permanent members of Little-Big/Melodrama Theater, and we did think long and hard about it. But we decided it was a “no go.” We felt if we went back, as much as we loved the Bridges and the rest of the Durham crew, we’d likely never start our own company.
Now, here’s an important thing for you to know; that many who’ve been friends of Gamut for years don’t: I originally had no intention of our theater affiliation with Central PA to last more than a few years. I wanted us to establish ourselves, build our resumes, hone our skills, hopefully make some money, and then move on to a major market like NYC or Chicago.
Truth be told, I’d always been a big fan of Improv and Sketch comedians, and I really had my heart set on Chicago. So, we’d do a few years in PA, establish “The Rolling Rep Theatre Company,” and since it was to be a touring company, when we left, it would leave with us.
But, fate had other plans.
So did Melissa.