While lots has changed for the Olathe Civic Theatre Association in the past 50 years, one thing has remained consistent for its participants: the feeling of a “home away from home.”
That’s a feeling that Shelly Stewart Banks, president of the Olathe Civic Theatre Association, said she hopes is felt by not only those on stage but also the audience members sitting in the playhouse’s seats.
“Everyone here comes from a different place, but we have at least one thing that we share, and that is a need to do theater,” she said. “It gets in your system, it becomes part of your DNA.”
That common thread that brings OCTA’s performers and patrons together is on many of their minds as the Olathe theater enters its fifth decade.
The amateur theater company is marking its 50th anniversary this spring, and marked the milestone with a gala event at the end of April.
OCTA got its start in the 1970s
Olathe Civic Theatre Association initially began as the Olathe Community Theatre Association — a group that aimed to provide local theater “by and for” the Olathe community.
After receiving a $1,000 grant from the Olathe Parks & Recreation Department, the group put on its first season of shows in 1974-1975. Without a permanent home, OCTA practiced and performed in borrowed spaces, including strip malls, basements and school auditoriums.
“They would perform wherever anybody would let them,” said Stewart Banks, who also performed in some of those earliest productions.
Then in 1977, OCTA landed its first permanent home. With the help of fundraising OCTA purchased a building previously occupied by the Reformed Presbyterian Church at 500 E. Loula St.
It wasn’t necessarily a seamless transition, with the historic building, built in 1870, having to undergo several renovations and upgrades (including the addition of air conditioning to allow year-round shows).
But the building, dubbed the Buddy Rogers Family Playhouse, (after the silent film star and Olathe native who helped organize fundraising for the space) is still home to OCTA today.
“The advent of technology has changed a lot of what we do and how we do it,” Stewart Banks said. “We’ve changed the look of the place, we’ve had a couple of remodels — at least two, maybe three of four.”
OCTA provides local community theater
Though OCTA does dabble in musicals, its main focus is on plays.
Most recently, OCTA’s production of “Bus Stop” — a drama centered around stranded bus passengers at a roadside diner near Kansas City — wrapped up in April.
“OCTA is the perfect space for it, in my opinion,” Jo Bledsoe Collins, director of “Bus Stop” (and former holder of many other hats at OCTA, such as president and secretary), said about the show. “The play calls for such intimacy, and OCTA is such an intimate space with the stage. You really feel like you’re trapped in this diner with these individuals, which is really cool.”
Following “Bus Stop”, OCTA’s next show, “The Musical of Musicals” (a satirical story that features five different musicals in one show) will open to the public later this month.
In its earliest years, OCTA remained pretty “Olathe-centric.” But over the span of its five decades, Stewart Banks said the theater has expanded its reach beyond Olathe, bringing in performers from other parts of Johnson County and the wider Kansas City metro.
At the same time, Stewart Banks said, OCTA is still in an ongoing process of introducing itself to its neighbors.
“We’re in our 50th year, and we still have people who say, ‘I’ve lived in Olathe for 40 years, and I didn’t even know this place existed,’” she said. “We still find that fascinating.”
Additionally, Bledsoe Collins said, OCTA’s audience itself has changed — particularly in terms of age.
“Even in the last 11 years that I’ve been on (OCTA’s) board, we’re seeing a lot of younger people coming into OCTA,” she said. “We want people to come back, and to feel like they belong here. That’s a part of theater, community and coming together and telling stories and sharing humanity with each other.”
Looking toward OCTA’s next 50 years
Aside from April’s anniversary gala, OCTA’s 50th theater season will also take a walk back through its five decades — with the theater featuring shows from each of its five decades throughout this year.
“That’s different from what we usually do, but a way to kind of celebrate our history,” Stewart Banks said.
The theater recently launched a new kids’ program, which will kick off this summer. The hope there is to help the next generation of actors hone their skills and potentially widen the age range of the theater’s patrons.
“My son’s a little over a year old, and I don’t know what his path is going to be, but I just think about him and others his age coming to OCTA, and the next generation of storytellers here,” Bledsoe Collins said. “Just the idea of continuing that, I just love that.”
After all, Bledsoe Collins’s time on the stage played a crucial role in shaping her own life and development. To get to walk in someone else’s shoes in a role is a privilege, she said, and she hopes many others get to enjoy that in OCTA’s next 50 years.
“I’ve never not grown after doing a show,” she said. “You just learn and grow every single time. I just think it makes you a more empathetic person, a more open-minded person. And why wouldn’t we want more of that? To make a better world, to make room for everyone?”
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