M. Anne Vick
My husband Richard and I, with our three children (Christopher, Susan, and Betsy), came to Macomb in 1965, when there was a great influx of faculty at rapidly- growing WIU. Richard taught in the huge English Department.
In 1966 he also joined the Macomb Community Theatre (which I will refer to hereafter as the MCT), and he was cast in a production titled Blood, Sweat, and Stanley Poole. Written by James and William Goldman, it was a play about sergeants in the Army who had to earn their GED in order to get a promotion.
In 1967 I joined the theater group, too. Babylon Bend was the first show I was in. It was written by Merle and Virginia Lundvall, a local couple, but other MCT members contributed to the play as well. It was first produced at our theater on South Johnson Road— which was also known as St. Francis Blacktop—but later, we took it to nearby Canton, too.
MCT had been organized in 1959 as a non-profit organization, and the members produced their first play that fall, in Browne Hall on the WIU campus. It was The Teahouse of the August Moon, written by John Patrick, and it had “a cast of thousands” (theater jargon that meant “a whole lot of people”). Many of the founders of MCT were in the cast, or were crew members. It was successful, but that was the last MCT production in Browne Hall because the University Theater needed that production space.
Our organization had bought the old Gun Club building on St. Francis Blacktop during 1960, and for about five years, work was done on that building so it could be used as a theater. Among other things, lean-tos were added on the east side of the building, for a dressing room, a kitchen in the men’s dressing room, a women’s dressing room in the props room, toilets in the bathrooms, and an office in the furnace room. The stage was small, and the audience room had just two rows of white wooden seats, with ten seats each on the south and west sides, two rows of five seats on the east side, and five rows of ten seats on the north side. Those seats came from the old Princess Theater in Colchester. Also, when Macomb’s Illinois Theater took its balcony out in the early 1970s, MCT was given those seats for our theater. All of us in the organization, and our audiences, really liked the “new seats.”
We had no water system, so we had to bring in all the water that was available in gallon jugs. However, we did provide free cookies at intermission for our audience.
Working on the building was a good opportunity to get to know the organization’s members. Any Saturday before a play opened was “work day.” We would clean the theater, carry out the trash, mow the yard, remove any snow, and do whatever else was needed to provide a pleasant atmosphere for our audience.
In 1974 we opened the last addition to the theater. It consisted of a real green room, plus a kitchen, flush toilets, an office, and a lobby. It was a huge undertaking, but to us it was so very important to have a facility that was both functional and pleasant to be in.
After a show was over, we would have a cast party at the theater. Our Social Committee always prepared a wonderful dinner before our presentations as well. Each member of the cast was read a poem related to his or her characterization in the production. The director wrote each poem and also gave a small gift to the actor or actress, in remembrance of the show. The cast and crew would then present the director and stage manager with gifts. I remember that some of the women directors were given charms for their bracelets, and eventually several of them had quite a few. The gift of charms ended in about 1968, but there was always some gift provided to them that was related to the show.
For me, the most wonderful thing about the MCT was the people in the organization. Until the 1970s and the early 1980s, the group’s membership was about seventy. And I think most every local profession was represented. So, we all had a sense of community while we were doing a show or working together on the theater building.
The theater members produced over 250 plays during many years. We also did radio shows, dinner theater productions, summer musicals, and even went on the road three times to do shows at the Penitentiary in Fort Madison. I remember that we produced a play titled The Night of January 16th, by Ayn Rand, which was a courtroom drama, in the nearby courthouses of McDonough, Hancock, Henderson, and Warren counties. Those were very enjoyable and interesting times.
The Macomb community was always very supportive of the MCT. We had a long list of patrons who donated money and attended the plays. Businesses advertised in our playbill, and they often lent properties for use on our stage. Also early on, WIU encouraged its students to participate in our productions, and we even had an internship available for them. The WIU Theater Department always helped out with our sets and costumes, too. And of course, we had wonderful audience members who repeatedly came to our shows. As MCT members, we had a great time, and we knew that they did, too.
After sixty-five years, the era of the Macomb Community Theater came to an end, in 2024. And I was always glad to have been an active participant in that wonderful performing arts organization, for most of those years.
