Win Tickets for Historic Theater’s World Premiere Play
“Open your imaginations, gentlemen. Open your minds. Stand behind a local girl who’s earned the right a thousand times over to be undiluted, undiminished Manager of a Major Motion Picture House. An Academy of Moxie and Renown." –Mildred E. Walker to the Academy's Board
This fall, after several months of scaffolding, hammering, painting, and the like happening behind closed doors, western Massachusetts' historic Academy of Music Theatre in Northampton celebrates its grand reopening. And what’s even more exciting is that the theater officially reopens with the world premiere of its first ever commissioned production, Nobody’s Girl, October 17 and 18, about its first ever female manager.
In spring 2012, the staff at the Academy found a box containing dozens of letters, memos and other documents, dealing with a long-forgotten character in the theater’s past: Mildred E. Walker. When Walker’s manager was called to military service during WWII, she was appointed by the Board of Trustees to run the theater. This didn’t sit well with the film company that leased the Academy, so they attempted to oust Walker on the grounds that a woman should not be in a managerial position. The case wound up in court and became front-page news.
With his interest piqued by Mildred’s character – “a feisty, unconventional woman” – and a love for local history and the 1940s era, local playwright Harley Erdman spent two years researching and writing Nobody’s Girl. The production is a screwball comedy with elements of documentary theater, or in Erdman’s words, “fiction that plays with fact.”
“I was surprised to discover – haunted, maybe – by how totally this story has been forgotten,” Erdman said. “Totally erased from history or popular memory … It was very hard to find anyone who had personal recollections of her, let alone of the fact that she was the first woman manager of the Academy. She made history, and yet she was left out of history.”
If you make it to the production, you’ll also be delighted by the summertime auditorium renovations which included repairs to the decorative plaster, painting of the auditorium walls and ceiling in a color palette inspired by the original color scheme, refinished floors, historically appropriate lighting fixtures, and brand new seats for the first time in decades.
This contest closed on October 16, 2014.