Homegrown Theater: Watertown's River City Theater Company

Here in Minnesota, we know that the Twin Cities is second only to New York City in live theatre per capita and it’s the third largest theatre market in the U.S. after NYC and Chicago. But we can also be proud of how far that cultural enthusiasm and artistic ardor extends beyond the Twin Cities. Just take a drive west about 35 minutes from Minneapolis and you’ll find Watertown -- a small, picturesque town along the south fork of the Crow River. With a population just under 5,000 people, you’d be surprised at the amount of live theatre in the town. Before 2008, the school kids and the Summer Youth Theatre group performed the only theatre shows in Watertown. In 2008, Mark Gould put a notice in the local paper about starting community theatre. About 75 local residents responded and River City Theatre Company (RCTC) was born. Folks here wanted to have a theatre company that people of all ages could join. Our first production had a small cast and a small audience, but we grew! From our first small show attended by only 135 people, to our record-breaking attendance of nearly 1,800 people for Willy Wonka last fall, RCTC certainly has grown. RCTC grew, not only in size, but also in scope. We expanded our vision of what was possible. In 2012 Charlotte Johnson, current Watertown Mayor and then President of the Watertown Area Historical Society (WAHS), approached RCTC about doing a history play on Isaac Lewis, the founder of Watertown. RCTC said yes without even considering what we would do for a script. Nathan Johnson, historical society member and Charlotte’s husband, wrote an initial draft. Unfortunately, the script was overloaded with facts and needed more of a unified story. The RCTC board members took both Nate’s script and the primary source – Isaac’s journals – and wrote an entirely new script. RCTC board member Mollee Erickson wrote the second draft. With edits and jokes contributed by Board members, we had a finished product: a 15-minute history play called Watertown: A River Runs Through It which ran three performances a day for the two days of the Rails to Trails festival in Watertown in July 2013. Writing our own scripts was nothing new to RCTC. We had already performed our own version of The Wonderful Wizard of OZ adapted for stage by Mollee Erickson, and Alice in Wonderland, adapted by artistic director Hannah Steblay. Our audiences enjoyed these shows so much that we didn’t blink when another board member, Sarah Sakry, said she wanted to direct Little Women and write her own script. Approximately 750 people came out in the bitter winter nights to see Little Women last February! The 2014 RCTC season is filled with original scripts, starting with Little Women. Next RCTC will be producing another history play, this one by Lenore Eyrich Larson, another local author who has passed on but left a legacy of establishing Summer Youth Theater in our town. Summer Youth Theater (SYT) has a long history of using original music and scripts for their productions. Lenore was so well-known for this that the Justus family, descendants of Watertown's earliest settlers, asked her to write a script about their family and how they came to live on Swede Lake. Her play A Cabin on Swede Lake will be produced by RCTC for the history society this year at Watertown’s Rails to Trails festival July 18th and 19th in the WAHS exhibit in City Hall. After our history production, we will be producing Cinderella, another production written by a local. Brigit Larkin is 17 and has been active with RCTC since she was 11 years old when RCTC was formed: acting, helping with props, costuming, and now writing. We are thrilled to be able to provide her with the opportunity to be involved in so many aspects of theater. Talk about homegrown – RCTC is growing our own talent pool and filling it with not only the adults who are given the chance to write, direct, costume, design and build sets, and act, but with our youth too. We credit a great deal of our success in recent years to our commitment to emphasizing the “community” in community theater. Casts of our past shows have consisted of as few as two actors to as many as 54 actors ranging in age from four to 85 years old. We focus on casting locally whenever possible and are always impressed with the collaboration and synergy we discover as we often cast novices who have shown a spark alongside more professionally trained, experienced actors. River City Theatre Company is always looking for ways to give back and be involved in our community. From walking in the parade handing out invitations to the royal ball and supplying past characters like the Wicked Witch for repeated deaths by dunk tank to racing a Cinderella carriage-themed toilet in the annual toilet race, we’ve found community involvement to be essential to our marketing strategy and love the opportunities we’re seeing as a result – both opportunities to grow our company and to bring joy, laughter, and the theater experience to many who would not otherwise seek out theatrical performance.