In North Carolina: The Play Plays On and On

By Gregory Jaynes

In the summertime, on mountaintops and mesas, down in valleys, out on beaches, back up in hollows, there is staged in America what goes by the name of outdoor drama. Historical works for the most part, family entertainment (young people playing good and brave and true Indians, loutish colonists, supercilious monarchs), they exist, in the hope of snagging tourists, in spots that afford a vista. The oldest of these productions is The Lost Colony, which was commenced in the summer of 1937 on Roanoke Island, a sandspit between Nags Head and the mainland of North Carolina. The director for the past 21 years has been Joe Layton (a director of some note, as Diana Ross, Bette Midler or Barbra Streisand could tell you), who was saying to the cast during their muggy dress rehearsal, "You're boring. You're dull. Everybody's sounding alike. Everybody's saying lines!

This is a very positive night. You got that?

Be courageous. Be courageous, please!"

Roanoke Sound lay beyond the stage; water lapped at the set. Lightning bugs not yet mature enough to illuminate danced on a northeast breeze. The smell of Cutter's lay heavy upon the air. Now and again someone would thwack a thigh and a mosquito would perish. Periodically, Layton would clap his hands three times sharply and stop the work: "People, make it your own--even though I am giving you all this picky stuff!"

The Lost Colony is a play about the English colony that was established on Roanoke Island 22 years before the Jamestown folk first sailed into Chesapeake Bay and 35 years before the Mayflower put in at Plymouth. In 1584 Walter Raleigh's agents landed here; the environs were named Virginia, after the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, who chose the name. The next year Raleigh sent out the first colonizers, all men. Sir Richard Grenville was heavily involved; Sir Francis Drake paid a call. In 1587 a second group was dispatched, this one including women and children. They baptized an Indian named Manteo (Manteo is the name of the principal town today), the first successful act of Protestant proselytization in the New World, and a girl, Virginia Dare (Dare is the name of the county today), was born, the first British foal in this land. From 1587 to 1590 the English were tied up with King Philip's Spanish Armada, and the colony assumed far less importance. When an expedition at last arrived to check on the settlement, it found no one home.

In the 1930s the villagers of Manteo had the idea of putting on a play. They did it on the beach on the north side of the island, the better to catch a cooling wind.

As 1937, and the 350th anniversary of Virginia Dare's birth date, approached, they commissioned Paul Green, whose 1926 drama In Abraham's Bosom had won a Pulitzer Prize, to turn their origins into art. By 1963 the play was growing a little long in the tooth, and they asked Broadway Director Layton to overhaul it.

Layton grew so fond of the place and play he set up house there. Layton: "Stop right there! What are you up there? Ninety, 70 people, and I saw four of you move. Short of a tarantula, you will not move--and you will have to show me the tarantula later."

"Joe is mean, but he's good," said Cora Mae Basnight, who played an Indian in the first staging of the work and who has had the supporting role of Agona, an Indian maiden, off and on since 1957. All seven of her children have been in the show. "Even so," Cora Mae went on, "I feel sorry for all those young girls; he just tears 'em up. Us old ones let it roll off our backs."

For years only local people were in the play. When Layton was brought in, he beckoned outside talent. A sizable gathering of natives still have parts, however.

"The outsiders are not better," said Mary J. Moore, a deputy clerk in superior court who has been an usher, sung in the choir and played a colonist. "They're just more professional." Mary's husband Frank has worked backstage, and her daughters Betty, Janie and Gracie have all had roles.

The Moores, like nearly everyone else on the island, have long since memorized the play. "We used to divide up the whole show, just us kids," said Daughter Janie.

"We'd go through all the parts sitting on the front porch during a rainstorm."

Down in the front row, Layton hollered, "What's wrong?" "He's reloading his musket," an actor responded. "Cockamamy! Just say 'Bang!' or something."

"Joe keeps it interesting," Mary Moore was saying. "He changes things depending on his talent. One time we had a Hungarian here who did a busker dance. All of a sudden there was a busker dance in the show. When we get a juggler, there is juggling in the show."

"I'm an islander," Maxine Peele was saying, "and I've been in the show 22 years." She was saying this at midnight, the night of the dress rehearsal. "My husband has a party boat; he's a sport fisherman. I get up at 5 o'clock and get him off to work. I fix his lunch. It's rough during rehearsal, but this is good for me. I stay home right much of the time, and there fore this is an outing. Backstage we talk everything from politics to religion."

"Fear is not important tonight," Layton was preaching, "knowledge is. You've got to listen.'God, that's a word we haven't heard in a long time."

Walter Tucker, a local dentist who has played a clergyman in The Lost Colony for the past six years, made it through a scene in which he lies supine and ill and then took it upon himself to explain his devotion to the production.

"In school I was told, 'You have a vocation, and you are either going to be unnoticed in a big town or you are going to be something big in a small town. Whatever, you owe something to the community.' That's what this is all about. This is an important thing to this community."

Hearing Layton issue a stiff command, Tucker said the director is not nearly so harsh as the first-night audience, Dare County citizens all. "The county is the toughest audience we have to play to. They talk during the performance until they hear a change. They don't care if your feelings are hurt."

"The community will tear it apart," volunteered Mary Moore. "They know every word."

A full moon rose upstage center, like a prop, and the rehearsal wound down.

"People," Layton said in a soft, paternalistic voice, "you did good. I love you."

There was nothing left to do but go on with the show. The gates opened the next night to long lines of Dare Countians.

"Souvenir program?" a woman proffered. "No thanks," an older woman replied. "I know it by heart." "Well, I just offered it just in case."

The audience filled the bowl of the Waterside Theater. Whole families climbed over the backs of seats to situate themselves. "We can make it," said a woman with a tot on her hip, "but I don't think Granny can get in this way." Granny went round by the aisle, and people stood up to let her in. Well into the show, when Dentist Tucker as Father Martin emoted an illness the script saddled him with, Granny said, "I don't get it. Last year Father Martin fainted. This year he just blacks out. It was better having him faint."

-- By Gregory Jaynes