Community Dramatics in Early Castle Valley BY ELMO G. GEARY AND EDWARD A. GEARY
Huntington High School opera cast preparing to tour the county, ca. 1922. The school, which opened in 1915, had an active drama department that gradually became the town's leading theater group. All photographs are courtesy of the author.
I HE THEATER WAS THE GREAT entertainment medium of nineteenth-century America, despite the opposition of some religious and educational authorities. 1 In early Utah, where M o r m o n l e a d e r s were themselves active playgoers, the theater was largely free from the a u r a of d i s r e p u t e that attached to it elsewhere; but it appears that Utah audiences differed little from their counterparts in other Dr. E. A. Geary is professor of English at Brigham Young University. He notes the following about his co-author: In 1953 my father, Elmo G. Geary, completed a master's thesis at the University of Utah titled "A Study of Dramatics in Castle Valley from 1875 to 1925." T h e thesis, on which he labored for several years, was based on extensive study of newspapers, diaries, and records from the period covered and on scores of interviews with surviving players from the early theatricals. T h e timing of the study was fortunate in that many pioneer performers were still alive, some of them in their nineties, but even then there were evidences of how quickly sources of information about the past can slip away. For example, an interview was scheduled with Don C. Woodward, one of the leading members of the Huntington Dramatic Club, but before it could take place he had slipped into his final illness and was unable to convey any information. Thirty years after its completion this thesis remains one of the most detailed studies of dramatics in Utah. T h e purpose of this essay is to make a representative selection of its findings available to a wider audience. Since the information comes almost entirely from the thesis, it would perhaps be most fitting if I represented myself simply as an editor rather than a co-author. However, I have brought to the task of selection a perspective based on my own studies of the region and have slightly modified some of the conclusions. Moreover, the research for the thesis was to some extent a family project, and I remember evenings spent in poring over the files of the Emery County Progress in search of theatrical notices and reviews. I remember, too, traveling with Dad to some of the interviews. Indeed, I can see in retrospect that my own interest in history had its origin in those experiences. Therefore, I have come to think of this essay as the result of a kind of posthumous collaboration. I don't think Dad would have minded. 1 Arthur Hornblow, A History of the Theatre in America (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1919), 1:23-26. Hornblow quotes an 1824 statement from President Dwight of Yale: "To indulge a taste for playgoing means nothing more or less than the loss of that most valuable treasure the immortal soul."
