The Barn Players Celebrate 55 Years of Community Theatre Productions

Kansas City's oldest continuously operating community theatre celebrates 55 years of productions in 2010.

Founded in 1955 by Earl Altaire, a prominent Kansas City interior designer and theatre devotee, the group got its name from its first theatre: a converted barn at the Woolf Farm near 83rd and Mission Road. Since that time, the Barn Players have moved to Manor Barn at 91st and Metcalf, Johnson County Community College and various other local venues, finally settling into our current location at 6219 Martway at Lamar in Mission in 2004. Our home on Martway comes courtesy of the Mainstreet Credit Union (formerly The Credit Union of Johnson County), due to the tireless efforts of long-time board member Nancy Wallerstein. Also, thanks to Barn pioneers such as Margaret Godfrey, Frank Robertson, Ross Harmon and many others, The Barn had survived the nomadic years to find a permanent home right in the center of the Kansas City metropolitan area.

Many people who have appeared in Barn productions over the years have gone on to greater fame on stage, screen and television. Among those are Academy Award winner Chris Cooper, John Rensenhouse, Broadway actor Henry Stram, film and television actor Arilss Howard, and local actors, Russ Simmons, Jim Birdsall, Dodie Brown, Melinda McCrary and Cathy Barnett.
The Barn's first season included productions of The Curious Savage and The Voice of the Turtle. The earliest years focused mostly on dramatic plays such as Life with Father, A Majority of One, The Lion in Winter, The Children's Hour and Boys in the Band, to name a few. In the mid-1960s the barn introduced comedies and musicals to its annual offerings and since that time its season has included classics such as Plaza Suite, The Fantasticks, The Tender Trap, Gypsy and Noises Off. The Pirates of Penzance was the Barn's first production at the new space in Mission.

The "Mission years" have been ones of growth and expansion for the Barn Players. It has taken creativity and ingenuity to transform the former Shawnee Mission Community Center & Soroptomist Club into a theatre that can produce challenging, thought-provoking and entertaining contemporary plays and musicals, as well as time-honored classics. Those efforts have paid off, as the Barn Players, under the guidance of Artistic Directors, Beate Pettigrew (2004 - 2008) and Eric Magnus (2008 - present), have produced the #1 community theatre show each year for the last four years according to KC Stage magazine: Urinetown (2006), Bat Boy (2007), Jekyll and Hyde (2008) and The Secret Garden (2009).

In 2005, we added the Barn Junior program, under the direction of Educational Coordinator Jason Coats, to provide educational theatre to youth aged 12-18. In 2009, that program was expanded to include a summer production for youth aged 8-12. In 2008, the Barn launched The 6 X 10 Ten-Minute Original Play Festival and added the playwright's workshop in following summer.
During the 2010 season, The Barn will offer a mix of great musicals and plays, both old and new. From the Community theatre premiere of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on March 5th, to the touching play The Boys Next Door; from popular musical comedies like Stephen Schwartz's Pippin, to the critically acclaimed Assassins by musical theatre legend Stephen Sondheim; from Jonathan Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent to Eve Ensler's controversial The Vagina Monologues, The Barn Players continues to provoke, enlighten, challenge and entertain its audiences unlike any other community theatre in the Kansas City metropolitan area.

For more information on season tickets to The Barn Players 2010 season, visit our website at www.thebarnplayers.com or call at 913-432-9100