Zion, Kentucky
Photo and Interview by Zion
Pioneer Playhouse Interview
What are some of your favorite memories?
My mother, she was 93, 92 last summer, was still singing and playing guitar with the dinner guests before the show… so we're a family that's just always working together. Luckily my parents always encouraged us to follow our dreams. But we also knew how hard it is; we know how hard following your dreams and running a theater can be. You don't get rich from that, we do it for the love of the arts, and the love of the community.
We're going to celebrate 75 years in the Bluegrass this June! We're going to have a big party in June. I'm trying to get John Travolta, because he studied here. He was a 15-year-old kid from New Jersey in 1966 and he came to Pioneer Playhouse because he heard you could learn about theater in the small town of Danville, Kentucky from New Jersey… so we're trying to get him to come.
It was so weird to be in a small town, to go to school like a regular person, and then every summer all of these actors and artists and people from all over the world would come, and I get to know them all, and then at the end of that summer they leave… So it was bittersweet. It was wonderful to meet all these people and then it was often a little sad to say goodbye to them all.
One of my favorite things is nobody I knew had their own giant costume room with costumes! From every era possible- it's chock full of costumes that have been handmade or gotten from Goodwill. As a kid you go in there and dress up… so that was a really fun memory.
Did you always know you wanted to run the Theater?
We had done a documentary for our 50th Anniversary, 25 years ago, and you can see the history. When my kids watched it again, they came to me and said, “Mom, you lied! You said you'd never leave New York to run the Playhouse!” I thought there was no way I'd come back to Danville, but my life changed. My dad died, I wanted to come back and help my mom, and I had three kids in Brooklyn. This is where I grew up; I live on the farm that my mother grew up on so I feel that connection and those roots that when you're younger, you think “I just want to chop those roots and I want to go and I want to get out of here and I want to do my own life”… but you kind of start to see as you get older your connection to the community.
I was always good at writing, my English classes were always the best. I sucked at math so obviously it would be something in the writing field, but you know I thought I wanted to be an actress. I left here to study acting in New York but then I changed to filmmaking because my brother was doing it… Now I'm a published author. I have a bunch of books published but that doesn't mean that every one of the books that I write gets published. So there's always some doubt- a special artist, the writer or an actor or filmmaker- there's always doubt like are you really doing the right thing, are you on the right path? So I think they're always doubts.