Theatre-by-the-Sea (Mss. Gr. 191)

Historical note

The Theatre-By-The-Sea, a cultural landmark in the state of Rhode Island, was a complex of buildings on Card's Pond Road in Matunuck that operated as a summer stock theatre for seventy years, from 1933 until 2003. The Theatre building itself began as a barn, built in several sections from 1840 through the late 1800s, on the site of the Browning family farm. The barn was converted into a horse and carriage house in 1891, when George Browning decided to convert his family's house into a hotel for summer tourists, called the Ocean Star. Mrs. Browning sold the Ocean Star in 1919 after George's death.

The Browning farm was bought by Alice Tyler and her husband in 1921 for use as a summer home. After her husband's death in 1928, Tyler began using the property as a girls summer camp. In 1933, Tyler began converting the barn into a theatre. The conversion included the construction of a proscenium and fly space, and the addition of 300 seats to the barn. The proscenium was built by a contractor employing a team of twenty-four shipbuilders from New Bedford, MA. The installation of the technical equipment and lighting also occurred in the summer of 1933, with most of the equipment coming from a vacant vaudeville theater and movie house in Port Chester, NY. Alice Taylor brought in Abe Feder to design the stage lighting. Feder later worked with Orson Welles' Mercury Theater, and designed the lighting for Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Theatre's first show, a pre-Broadway tryout of "Amourette" starring Claire Kummer, opened on August 15, 1933.

Over the years, there were several other construction projects on the theater, including the addition of a balcony, and 300 more seats after the hurricane of 1938 destroyed a section of the roof and the back wall of the theatre. Hurricane Carol in 1954 also caused damage to the Theatre that required repairs. The other buildings in the Theatre-By-The-Sea complex included a ranch house that was used as the business office, a shed which was used to store supplies, a one and a half story costume shed that had been built as a 19th century feed house, and a two and a half story inn that contained the company's lodgings on the second floor, and which had a restaurant and bar for theatre patrons on the first floor. The bar and restaurant, which was housed in an attached porch that had been built in the 1950s, changed names several times as new owners and managers operated the business. The names included the Spotlight Club (early 1950s), Player's Patio (mid-1950s), Backstage Club (1960s), and finally, the Seahorse Grill. With the exception of the business office, all of the buildings were part of the original 19th century Browning farm.

Several times throughout the Theatre's history the business did not open for the summer. The first time, in 1942 and 1943, gas rationing during World War II caused the Theatre to shut down. It opened as a movie house in the summers of 1944 and 1945, and began live performances again after the end of the War, in the summer of 1946. In 1951, Donald Wolin and Harold Schiff began operating the Theatre for Alice Taylor, and brought in stage and screen stars to the theatre each summer. A common arrangement in small theatres at the time, the "package system", allowed the star to choose several of their co-performers. In addition, the "Equity system" mandated that a certain portion of the cast had to be members of Actor's Equity, and the casting costs began to make the star system prohibitively expensive for the Theatre. In 1959, after a particularly bad summer the year before in which J. Thornton Hall and Joseph R. Wishy had taken over as producers, the Theatre was shut down, and was sold to the Bontecou family. The Bontecou's re-opened it from 1960 to 1962, with John Holmes acting as the producer. From 1963 to 1966, however, the Theatre was closed again, largely because construction on Route 1 made access to the Theatre difficult.

By 1966, the Bontecou family had decided to demolish the Theatre. Shortly before the demolition began, Tommy Brent, who had worked at the theatre in 1958 as a press agent, invested his own funds to once again re-open the theatre. When Brent arrived at the site, in March of 1967, he saw that damage to the buildings from vandals and neglect was too severe to fix alone, so he placed an advertisement in the April 27 Narragansett Times for volunteers workers to make the necessary repairs. The Theatre was repaired in time to open the summer season on June 18, 1967.

Tommy Brent acted as producer and manager of the Theatre from 1967 to 1988, overseeing the hiring of actors, technical crew, and stage managers. Members of the cast and crew lived on the second floor of the Inn, and paid for their meals and rent. Brent also oversaw the Junior Company, an apprenticeship program in which young people, generally high school age, would build sets and play bit parts in productions to gain experience in the world of theatre. During Brent's time as producer and manager, then-Governor John Chafee proclaimed Theatre-By-The-Sea Week from July 28-August 3, 1968, and the Theatre was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

FourQuest Entertainment, consisting of partners Laura Harris (who had worked summers at the Theatre under Tommy Brent), Renny Serre, and Ric Ericson, took over the operation of the theatre in 1989, and purchased it several years later, in 1992. FourQuest made $3 million in renovations to the Theatre, and began using Actor's Equity members in their productions. In 1998, Ericson left FourQuest to produce shows independently, and the following year, Marcy Simpson came to the Theatre as associate producer. Members of FourQuest decided to sell the property several years later, and, after being unable to find a buyer, the Theatre closed in 2003.