Chapter 25

The Red Barn Theater opened with a hopeful flourish on the last Saturday of June 1926. The horde of college students and young adults, all would-be actors, had been at work for nearly a month, stringing lights along the old turnpike to mark their parking lot, painting the whole front of the graying barn dark red, rehearsing plays and black-out sketches, and finishing the building of their make-shift theater.

The raked stage now stood three feet off the floor and the seat problem had been solved in a hammock fashion with heavy canvas stretched between poles driven into the dirt floor. There was not a proper curtain, but Polly was working on a heavy scrim that would roll up and have a bucolic scene with the theater's name on it in ornate script. The first play would be a flamboyant melodrama written by two of the teachers at Catholic University. It was called "A Murder in the Red Barn."

Ads in the Washington dailies and on several radio stations, as well as some free publicity in the form of news stories, helped produce a good crowd and a few curious critics, mostly the younger ones, from the city papers. When the house lights dimmed and the kliegs and footlights came up to paint Polly's curtain with white light, she stood in the back of the barn and smiled as the translucent cloth was pulled aloft. They had given up on the idea of rolling it up like a window shade because the paint kept peeling off.

Actors made entrances from outside and from the darkened wings and the audience soon was hissing the mustachioed villain and getting into the spirit of the thing, laughing at the broad jokes, enjoying the numerous asides, and ignoring the minor gaffes like the painted door that refused to open. When the blank pistol was fired, everyone jumped as the stage went black and the scrim descended. The dangling houselights came up and most folks applauded as they got off their sagging canvas seats and went outside for a smoke or to get a drink or an ice cream cone at the refreshment booth in the corncrib.

An hour later, the field was clear of cars except for the few that belonged to the actors and their friends who were still discussing the missed cues and flapping scenery as they passed a jug of red wine back and forth. Numerous folding cots now dotted the stage and some of the crew were already asleep.

"How did it go?" Sammy asked when Polly came in the back way. "I heard the shots clear over here."

"It was fun," she said. "I was surprised how things looked at night, how the room I had painted looked I mean. I need some more flat paint I think instead of the glossy stuff."

"People seem to enjoy it?"

She smiled and nodded. "And the children?"

"Deep asleep; couldn't wake either of them with a French 75."

During the day, the summer theater folks worked on rehearsing their next play and on making improvements in the props and reinforcing the scenery with cross bracing. Jenny and her boys came down and watched the bare-chested young men and the girls in shorts and tied-up shirts as they sweated and played. They were obviously having fun as well as working hard.

Since there was no water in the barn, the Williams' pump got a good workout as did the outhouse at the store, and Jenny found a couple of old dippers and soon had her boys hauling two big buckets of water down to the barn in their wagon at a nickel a trip.

Jenny was perched on the seat of a rusted hay rake when an older man approached her, fanning himself with his straw hat, the back of his shirt plastered to his skin and stained black under his arms. "Your boys?" he asked, nodding toward them.

"Yes, aren't they a pair? Your idea to pay them?"

He nodded. "Fine looking lads. In this next play, oh, by the way, I'm Tom McCullough. I'm the director, more or less."

She shook his hand and enjoyed the feel of his firm grip as well as his handsome grin and ripe smell.

"In the next play, another melodrama of course, we need a child to play a small role, just one line of dialogue at the end of the first act. I have a couple of actors with girls at home but no boys."

"Paul, he's the older one, I'm sure he could do it, but the other one's more of a ham. Could they take turns?" Jenny mentally evaluated the man; forty maybe, six foot plus, 175 or so, clean-shaven, well spoken. He smelled a little gamy but then so did most of them in the early summer heat.

"I suppose, but it means staying up until nine or ten at night," McCullough said as he watched the boys pulling the wagon up the hill from the barn. "How old are they?"

"Paulie is nine and his brother is seven. He's called Mike," she said. "Come over here boys. This is Tom, Mr. McCullough." Both boys nodded and said "Hi" jingling nickels in their pockets.