Community players get new space

The Bigfork Community Players  have a mission to marshal the acting talent available in the Bigfork area and produce plays that will entertain and delight the residents of the area.

And, even though the Bigfork Community Players is relatively small in size, as community theater companies go, it has considerable storage requirements for the props and set pieces necessary to produce its shows. Recently, finding its storage facilities no longer met its needs, the BCP decided to make a move.

“It wasn’t so much a matter that our storage was full,” chief set designer Michele Shapero said, “but that it was in the wrong place and difficult to organize properly. We’ve been building our sets in Charlie Rate’s shop in Ferndale; moving pieces to and from our Woods Bay storage took a lot of effort.  Now our supplies are right next to the shop.”

“Michele leased two storage lockers from Charlie at Ferndale Storage and helped develop plans for how to build them out to maximize their utility,” BCP President David Vale said. “So Charlie let us tear out the wall between the units and we bought some lumber and constructed a second level of storage in the back.”

“The fact often goes unnoticed,” he continued, “that creating the set you see onstage for a play is very similar to creating the interior of a real room.  It takes a lot of structural and decorative pieces to do that. And since we can’t afford to build every set from scratch, we have to store and recycle the pieces we have.”

“We’d had a second level in one of the Woods Bay lockers,” said Shapero, “but the access was essentially a ladder and I was scared every time I climbed it. The new loft has a real staircase.”

Shapero declared last Saturday move-in day and about a dozen BCP members brought cars, trucks, and trailers to the Woods Bay facility and transported almost everything to Ferndale.  “We left the Broadway-style flats behind,” said Shapero. “We’ll be replacing them with more modern Hollywood-style flats this year. We donated all of the old flats to another local group that can still make good use of them.”

Work is about to begin on the BCP’s fall production, Steel Magnolias.

Shapero is directing Steel Magnolias, which is scheduled to open Oct. 23.