F
And almost as soon as they clear away the refreshments and unplug the amplifiers at the end of Saturday night’s open house, the steadily growing center’s leadership and volunteers will begin setting the stage for a production of The Little Mermaid Jr., the first of four musicals in a festival spanning late summer and early fall.
“It’s one of those ‘go big or go home’ situations,” Chris Flockton, ArtisTree’s new director of theater arts, said on Tuesday, while waiting at The Grange Theatre for signmakers to arrive and put finishing touches on the exterior. “We decided to start with a bang.”
After Little Mermaid Jr. wraps on Aug. 13, the ArtisTree Music Theatre Festival moves on to productions of Always Patsy Cline from Aug. 25 to Sept. 10, Godspell from Sept. 15 to Oct. 1 and The Marvelous Wonderettes from Oct. 6 to 22.
The festival, like the theater renovation itself, was in the works long before Flockton, a 50-year-old stage, screen and voice actor who had moved to Vermont in 2011, took over ArtisTree’s theater program in February. After ArtisTree relocated its headquarters from Woodstock to South Pomfret in 2014, the center bought and leveled the house next door to create more space — revealing yet another opportunity directly across Stage Road from the village’s Abbott Memorial Library and diagonally across the road from the Teago General Store.
“We had a straight view to the grange,” ArtisTree Executive Director Kathleen Dolan recalled on Wednesday. “There was already a feeling of growth, of the ability to expand, and when Jarvis Green was directing our theater program, we were talking about doing more with theater. It was the perfect storm of factors.”
Eventually, Dolan approached the Teago Community Hall Association about restoring the grange look of the building’s exterior while transforming the long-idle interior into a state-of-the-art theater. Work began early in 2016, and this week Flockton is overseeing last-minute installations at the grange, among them those 90 seats, which as of Wednesday were still coming by truck from California.
After the festival, work will begin on phase two of a project that includes converting the barn on ArtisTree’s existing site into dressing rooms and rehearsal space.
“ArtisTree has been on a trajectory to increase theater curriculum and the theater program, and do regular productions in its own space,” Flockton said. “It was a happy accident that I came into this job just as this all was coming together.”
Dolan said that she hopes that longtime residents of Pomfret and neighboring towns, in addition to theater enthusiasts, come to the open house to see the next phase in the village’s evolution.
“It’s going to give people a lot of opportunities to have performing experiences, but it’s also a nice transition for the people who live around here,” Dolan said. “The grange was the community hot spot at one point. As a theater, it’s going to continue to be.”
ArtisTree Community Arts Center holds an open house for The Grange Theatre on Saturday night from 5:30 to 7:30, with tours, live music and light refreshments. To learn more about ArtisTree’s theater, visit artistreevt.org.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.