By the mid-1930s, Gilbert and Sullivan productions had become a regular part of the repertoire, and Royce “Tim” Pitkin, the founder of Goddard, played a lead in several of those productions. Several one-act plays performed by members of the Plainfield Little Theater won state competitions. (Her father was owner of Greatwood Farm, which was purchased by Goddard Seminary in 1934 shortly after his death). They were encouraged to do so by Nellie Gill, who retired to a home she purchased on Laird Pond Road outside Plainfield. Under the leadership of Harold Townsend, a Plainfield carpenter, and Marjorie and Jerome Johnson. In 1930, a few years after the Nellie Gill Players disbanded, the “Plainfield Little Theater” was formed (perhaps, “revived” would be more accurate since, as early as 1851, many years before it was transformed into an opera house, the Plainfield Universalist Church sponsored a group called “Plainfield Little Theater” which put on “music, glees, orations, and three-act plays”). Summer tourists who arrived by train (and, later, by car) and stayed at the Bancroft Inn, next door to the theater, were drawn here, in part, because of the summer theater. Their performances in Plainfield and elsewhere were well-attended. The acting company, known as the Nellie Gill Players after the leading actress, became the first acting troupe to tour throughout Vermont, putting on a series of summer shows that had were on-stage in Boston and New York at the time. Three years after its opening as an opera house, in the summer of 1915, a group of professional actors from New York City began using the Plainfield Town Hall Opera House as their base. Bartlett, Mildred and Marjorie Cate and Amy Borland in starring roles, with music provided by Mr. The grand opening in 1912 was a comedy called “Uncle Josh” featuring a cast of local residents including Mrs. The Plainfield Town Hall Opera House has been a venue for amateur and professional theater for over 100 years.
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