Center stage
Struthers joins prestigious list with LHAT’s Outstanding Theatre of Year
At a Warren County red carpet event Friday evening, Struthers Library Theatre Executive Director Marcy O’Brien announced that the theater was named the 2018 Outstanding Theatre of the Year by the League of Historic American Theatres.
“This is huge,” O’Brien said during a celebratory ice cream social just outside the theater on Liberty Street. “This is one of those rare over-the-moon experiences. We — our staff and board of trustees — are beyond thrilled.”
The award is given for “excellence in community impact, quality of programs and services, and the quality of physical restoration,” she said.
“I have felt all along, through the construction, through its dirt, noise, and upset, and then through the application process, that this award, if we could win it, would not be just for the theater,” she said. “This win is for Warren County, for all our locals and neighbors who patronize, support, and attend our grand old theater.”
There is no runner-up for the award. It’s winner-take-all.
And the theater has those bragging rights forever, joining facilities from Hawaii to Vermont. The theater was established in 1883 and is the 18th oldest continuously operating theater in the country, O’Brien said. Only two previous Outstanding Theatres of the Year are older — Fulton Opera House in Lancaster (1852) and the Newberry Opera House in Newberry, S.C. (1881).
The banner that now hangs above the theater’s second story windows serves notice of the award.
“Bringing this award home to Warren is truly one of my life’s greatest pleasures,” O’Brien said.
The future was not always bright for the theater.
In 1982, at nearly 100 years old, the theater, “like so many dusky old theaters, was showing movies to seven and eight patrons at a time,” she said.
There were options: “bring our theater back or let it go to the wrecking ball — or worse, a roller skating rink,” she said.
She credited a “small group of visionaries: Chase and Mary Putnam, Quinn Smith, and Charles Tranter” with starting the public effort to save the theater.
“I’d like to dedicate this award to all the wonderful, stubborn, caring, and diligent citizens of Warren who, with their labors, their pocketbooks, and their cultural souls, have enabled us to be here tonight,” O’Brien said. “We can never thank them enough, or all of you enough, for the desire to retain Warren’s pride — our arts, our music, our theater.”
“She is your award-winning Outstanding Historic Theatre forever.”
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