CHAPTER 17

Barter Theatre

ABINGDON

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.

—William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

IN 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, an actor named Robert Porterfield, along with many of his colleagues, was out of work and hungry in New York City. He decided to return to his home region of southwestern Virginia, where food was still plentiful. Once there, he launched an innovative enterprise that both brought entertainment to the people of the isolated mountainous region and allowed himself and his friends to survive in their chosen vocation. It was to become the great work of his life—and, some people believe, has continued beyond it.

“With vegetables you cannot sell, you can buy a good laugh,” was the slogan of the theatre when it opened June 10, 1933. Price of admission to the aptly named Barter Theatre was thirty-five cents or the equivalent in produce, and the concept of trading “ham for Hamlet” caught on quickly with the local people (who, presumably, were not induced to laugh at the gloomy Dane despite the various catch phrases of the institution). “At the end of the first season,” according to the theatre’s published history, “the Barter Company cleared $4.35 in cash, two barrels of jelly, and enjoyed a collective weight gain of over three hundred pounds.”

Porterfield established his theatre in a building that had originally been constructed in 1831 as a Presbyterian church. Just six years later, it was acquired by the “Sons of Temperance,” an anti-drinking organization that used it for various events in the years before, during, and after the Civil War, during which the building was caught up in some of the fighting that swept through the town of Abingdon. And, in the decade after the war, while it was still known as “Temperance Hall,” it was used on January 14, 1876, for its first theatrical performance, a production of The Virginian.

In 1890, the town of Abingdon acquired the building from the Sons of Temperance and converted it into a town hall, jail house, and fire station. One of the improvements made during this era was the addition of a fire siren on the roof of the building, which remained there even after it became a theatre and would sometimes sound during its performances. When this would happen, the actors on stage would freeze in place until it had stopped and then would resume their performance where it had been interrupted (a tradition that continued for more than six decades, until 1994, when the fire department shifted over to a new system for alerting firefighters).

Porterfield spared no effort to make the luxurious, five-hundred-seat Barter Theatre a success in the four decades that he directed it. One of the stories most often told about his dedication involves the old Empire Theatre in New York City, which had been built in 1875 and in 1953 was slated to be demolished and replaced with an office building. Porterfield obtained permission to remove all that he could from the doomed theatre but only had one weekend in which to do so, so he organized a crew of volunteers, pulled everything he could out of the Empire, and then had it loaded on trucks and shipped nearly six hundred miles overland to Abingdon.

All told, Porterfield managed to salvage about $75,000 worth of furnishings and equipment, including seats, carpeting, paintings in large gold frames, red wall tapestries, and a lighting system designed and installed by Thomas Edison that remained in use at the Barter through the mid-1970s. Most of the Empire elements were removed in 1995, when the Barter was completely renovated. Those remaining to this day include four sculptures holding lighting fixtures and a number of portraits, among them those of thespians Dennis King (in the Empire’s production of The Three Musketeers), Maude Adams (as Peter Pan), and Katherine Cornell.

In 1961, Porterfield acquired another historic property, across the street from the Barter Theatre, and converted into a second, smaller stage that is used for more avant-garde performances. It began its existence in 1829 as a Methodist church and subsequently served as part of the Stonewall Jackson Female Institute, as a chapter house, and by Martha Washington College, first as a gymnasium and then as a storage area.

The Barter Theatre has made significant improvements to the 167-seat theatre a number of times over the years, including in 1973; again in 1985, with the addition of a lobby and a memorial garden; and in 2003, with improved seating and a café. Additional refinements were made in 2004.

Barter Theatre has enjoyed a great deal of success, and many luminaries of the stage and screen have been associated with it over the years. Playwrights who accepted Virginia ham as payment for royalties, for example, included Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, and Thornton Wilder (vegetarian George Bernard Shaw having instead bartered the rights to his plays for spinach). Actors who walked upon its stage before achieving fame included Ned Beatty, Ernest Borgnine, James Burrows (creator of Cheers), Gary Collins, Barry Corbin, Hume Cronyn, Frances Fisher, Larry Linville, Patricia Neal, Gregory Peck, Kevin Spacey, and Jim Varney. And in 1946, the Barter was designated “the State Theatre of Virginia.”

Barter Theatre has also enjoyed recognition beyond its home region, and, in a tradition of touring that dates to the year of its founding, its troupe gives visiting performances throughout the states of Virginia, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. It even gave its first international performance in 1949, when part of the Barter company took a production of Hamlet to Denmark.

Today, Barter Theatre has more than 140,000 annual patrons and a staff that includes 135 fulltime employees and as many as an additional 145 seasonal ones. And beyond its two stages, the Barter Theatre today also has administrative offices, rehearsal halls, and dormitories set up in an additional half-dozen buildings throughout Abingdon.

By the time Robert Porterfield died in 1971 at the age of sixty-five, he had clearly created through his passion and dedication a lasting legacy that has continued to grow. There are suggestions from some, however, that he never left it behind and that his spirit not only inhabits the theatre but that it is not alone.

“It hasn’t happened recently, but there used to be a certain seat in the theatre that he always used to sit in, and people would swear that they would see him sitting there in that white sweater he was known for, watching rehearsals and plays years after he had died,” Peter Yonka, director of marketing for the theatre, told my wife and me when we visited the theater in May 2008. Yonka himself used to be an actor with the theatre and left it for some time before returning in his current capacity (which still includes the opportunity to act, as he was rehearsing for the role of Che in Evita during our visit).

“Porterfield is larger than life,” Yonka said, and noted that organizations often don’t survive long after their driving forces disappear but that this has most assuredly not been the case with the Barter. “He’s still a positive presence here [and] people claim to have seen him. It’s been awhile, though.”

Indeed, while Yonka has personally spoken with actors who say they have seen Porterfield in the Barter Theatre in the years since his death, none claim that this has happened recently—perhaps not since the major renovations to the theatre in the mid-1990s.

“There have been paranormal investigators that have come and stayed overnight at the Barter,” Yonka said, indicating the continuing interest of ghosthunters, even in the possible absence of a reciprocal sentiment from the theatre’s main ghost. It may be that he is not the only one to have ever haunted the Barter Theatre, however, and Yonka told us that a number of others have been seen or sensed by people in the institution’s various buildings over the years.

In the basement of the main theatre building, for example, the boiler room underneath the stage once had a tunnel leading from it to the Martha Washington Inn across the street. This room is supposed to be the site of several brutal killings during the Civil War, and a disquieting sense that the spirits of the dead men are still present has led actors and stage crew—especially those who have had to go into it by themselves or at night—to dub it “the Scary Room.”

“Two Confederate soldiers were running guns between what is now the Barter Theatre and the Martha Washington Inn, a girls’ school that was used as a hospital during the war,” Yonka said. “They were caught by Union soldiers who shot and killed them in the tunnel. They were buried there when the tunnel collapsed.”

Since then, a number of people have sensed a very angry presence in the room and the feeling that they were not welcome there. Some have even heard a voice telling them to “Get out!” Yonka said. It is right next to the costume room, he added, and people do not like to linger there by themselves after shows and generally take care of what they need to as soon as possible so that they can leave.

Yonka was both kind and brave enough to take us down to the Scary Room during our visit, and, even with three of us there during the early evening, it was definitely creepy. One thing that enhanced this feeling, of course, was the presence of a low metal door that served no other function than to cover the opening to the now-filled-in tunnel that had once been there. Rather than simply brick this up, someone had had the almost perverse forethought to put a door on it, so that no one could ever conveniently forget it was there. We did not experience anything paranormal during our visit to the theater, but if we had, I suspect it would have occurred here. During our visit to the Barter Theatre, Diane and I also attended the final production for the current run of Look on the Sunny Side, which told the story of the Carter family, a local clan of musicians that played a major role in the early years of country music and into which Johnny Cash married.

Door leading to the filled-in tunnel in the Scary Room

Throughout the performance, I kept glancing toward the spot where we were told that Porterfield used to be seen, at the front of the theater and to the left of the stage, near where rows of elevated boxes used to be. Those were removed during the major renovations in 1995, and maybe, I reflected, that was why Porterfield was no longer seen sitting in the theatre during performances. Sitting in a private box over the stage, after all, has a certain elegance, even for a ghost, but just hovering in the air where a box used to be could be kind of horrifying.

Perhaps a desire to keep from upstaging his own actors and spoiling their performances was part of the reason Porterfield had not been spotted for so long in his familiar spot. And, perhaps too, I thought, his desire to be a continuing part of the great thing he had created might not have been as great as his sense that the show must go on, with or without him.