A decade ago, Colquitt, Georgia, was one of those sleepy Southern towns that seemed about ready to fall off the map. Double-digit unemployment, coupled with the complete absence of an industrial base, was forcing most of the young people out of town. Old-timers seemed content to sit on their porches in rocking chairs and watch the sun rise and fall. Farming, the community’s chief industry, seemed every summer to suffer from drought or flood. Colquitt was a poor town in a poor county in the ninth poorest congressional district in the nation. For people here, theater either meant a 45-minute drive to Tallahassee, Florida, or a trip to Albany, GA, the largest neighboring town, for a visit to the multiplex. This hot, dusty corner of Georgia, just north of the Florida line, held little promise of offering the world a musical comedy-drama so unique—and successful—that it could transform the concept of local theater in one town after another. But it did.

The communal and collaborative elements of Swamp Gravy shine brightly.

Called Swamp Gravy, after a local concoction using whatever ingredients are at hand and thrown into a pot to stretch a meal for growing families, this stage production has been presented in dozens of cities throughout the South (30 traveling performances in one year). The play has been performed for sell-out audiences at Atlanta’s prestigious and avant-garde Seven Stages Theater. It was named Georgia’s Official Folk Life Play and won several awards during performances at the 1996 Atlantic Olympics. That same year, Swamp Gravy performers wowed an audience at D.C.’s Kennedy Center and was featured in USA Today. The Washington performance was underwritten by several of America’s most recognizable corporations, and during its eight-year run, Swamp Gravy has attracted more than $500,000 in grants from corporate giants like Coca-Cola and Procter and Gamble. More importantly to residents, Swamp Gravy has become a source of $1 million in annual revenues through ticket sales and the injection of tourist dollars into the local economy.

All of this is impressive for a production that began with a casual remark from a Colquitt arts patron to a theater doctoral candidate during a cultural conference luncheon in New York. In 1991, when Georgia’s Joy Jinks mentioned to Chicago theater student Richard Geer that her community would like to do a folk play, he simply replied, “Let’s do it.” Geer had long been fascinated with the folk aspect of the theater and particularly its role in the plays of Shakespeare. Jinks, the patron, and Geer, the director, had a simple formula: Collect stories from the community and transform them into theater. The results would tell stories the locals already knew, but would do it in an entertaining manner, and just maybe a few out-of-towners would drop in.

Of course, there were a few small details like rounding up volunteers to collect the stories, finding a theater, building sets, recruiting actors in a town that only occasionally saw a locally produced revue, installing lighting and selling tickets. By 1992, volunteers were assembling the oral histories that would form the foundation of the play. These local stories were turned over to Jo Carson, a Tennessee author and playwright whose affection for rural stories was easily visible and attractive to the fledgling Colquitt theater group (see SD March 2000).

The first theater space was an elementary school lunchroom, and the play performed there was little more than a revue with sketches and songs, all homemade. But it was a sell-out, prompting one local wag to comment, “People will always turn out to see their neighbors make fools of themselves.” People did turn out, but only because the performance was entertaining and touching.

The foreground and background concerns of a backwater Southern town are explored in the popular Swamp Gravy.

With the initial success of the play, The Swamp Gravy players were soon able to move into a 70-year old cotton warehouse, which became a makeshift theater. The new theater had dirt floors, no heating or air conditioning, brick walls and lofted ceilings. The only sound system came from the lungs of the actors. Lighting was primitive and included washes made from the local football stadium field lights. To combat the sweltering South Georgia heat, members of the audience were given hand fans as they filed in. For many students of the theater, the cotton warehouse would hardly qualify as a proper venue for productions of any kind. Yet the actors and singers performed with gusto and the stage technicians became seriously devoted to their work, providing professional guidance on direction and lighting.

Brackley Frayer (see September SD 2000), a lighting design professional who heads that department at the University of Las Vegas, has long been fascinated with what he and Geer call “community performance.” He was present at the birth of Swamp Gravy. “As soon as I walked into the cotton warehouse I said, ‘This is perfect.’ Like the performance, we were able to use what was on hand to install the lighting.” An ancient sprinkler system with pipes eight feet apart along the ceiling became the perch for the lighting. “The lighting helped create an environment with texture and form,” he notes. In Frayer’s design, the followspot became a critical element, shifting the audience attention from one scene to the next. With four stages often filled with performers and play action in the pit area, the followspot operators kept busy.

A unique corps of volunteers—inmates at the local county prison camp— proved to be valuable workers in completing the warehouse renovation. Technicians for the play were situated in a crow’s nest above the actors and audience—a configuration made more difficult by the sloping roof line. With so many technicians who had never been involved in a performance, the effort was a little tedious in the beginning. “The technical rehearsals seemed to go on forever,” says Frayer. “But the rewards were many.”

When the final mix of Swamp Gravy went on the public menu, the play became a moving and joyous experience for all who saw it. In fact, one local couple found it so moving they purchased the old cotton warehouse and donated it to the show’s players. Christened Cotton Hall, today the building is the official home of the entire Swamp Gravy cultural experience, housing the theater, the Museum of Southern Culture, a street of shops designed as a Victorian village and a concession area.

Creating the physical structures in the old warehouse became a happy task for Joe Varga, a professional set designer who today teaches the subject as a faculty member in the theater department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “We knew immediately this was not to be a theater from the conventional world,” says Varga. “Richard Geer wanted something that harkened back to the stages and groundling areas of Shakespearean theater.”

The final product, a collaboration between Geer, Varga and Frayer, features four stages in a 5,000-square-foot area and a common area where the standing audience and players often interact. One of the stages is simply the back of a flat-bed truck pulled into the building for that purpose. While there are plenty of seats, even they face in many directions. For Varga, the members of the audience became cameras.

“There is a great cinematic effect here,” he says. “The audience must often turn or pan to follow the action from one stage to another. Action often occurs simultaneously on several different stages, forcing the audience to jump-edit from one scene to another or take wide angle views. The actors can be right on top of the audience creating closeups,” says Varga. The mobility of the actors and the audience creates a lively atmosphere.

For Geer and Varga there is nothing revolutionary here. “Working with the people of Colquitt, many of whom had no sense of the formal theater, was an exciting and humbling experience,” says Varga. “Every community has resources and talent that are not readily apparent. The people I worked with brought fresh ideas to a centuries-old concept. It worked very well.”

While the play celebrates the joy of living in a small town (Colquitt’s population is 1,200), it also features the darker side of rural life. Alcoholism, child abuse and neglect, fraud and wife-beating are all exposed and explored by the performers. “The collection of stories lends authenticity to the play,” says Richard Geer, the play’s founding director who currently makes Chicago his home base. “In this play the universal and the particular are married and the results are certainly entertaining, but the concept of community has a much larger meaning. Most American theater misses the fact that its matrix and support is the community.” Geer believes true stories performed by the people who know them best can not only hold interest among locals, but also give the world a larger truth.

A father and a daughter share a quiet moment in Swamp Gravy.

Karen Kimbrel, who composed the music for Swamp Gravy, acts in its productions and serves as a consultant to other communities interested in the concept of community performance, has found the play to be a great tool of economic development in a region that has few. “Not only has this play put our little community on the map, but it is lifting the spirits of us all,” she says. “Teachers here will tell you that the school children who perform in Swamp Gravy are better students. This play is giving all of us a sense of pride and a better understanding of each other. It has also made us an important part of the Southern cultural scene. And we did it all in spite of difficult obstacles and challenges. For us, theater has become an awakening to the potential that rests in the human spirit.”