The Chamberlayne Actors Theatre performs the play “Veronica's Room” in 2008. (Photo by Lin Heath)
Many local theater groups have come and gone during the Chamberlayne Actors Theatre’s six decades. The group has endured in large part thanks to hundreds of volunteers, onstage and off, and the welcome it extends to the theater-curious and stage veterans alike.
My own roles with CAT amount to brief walk-ons. I was Rafe, “The Grocer Errant,” for a script-in-hand staging of “The Knight of the Burning Pestle” in fall 1990, and I played the oily Wade Stoddard in “The Last Leaf” the following spring. Directed by Bob Walker, I wooed the ingenue Terry Bjorklund (now Gau), who rightly chose the sincere minister, portrayed by Mark James.
Terry Bjorklund (now Gau) and Harry Kollatz Jr. perform in “The Last Leaf” in 1991. (Photo courtesy Harry Kollatz Jr.)
CAT was created by the North Chamberlayne Civic Association’s entertainment committee. The group’s community center was dedicated in 1963, which, according to an introduction in the first program, “paved the way for a group of residents interested in Little Theatre to achieve another dream, that of bringing to the community and the city varied entertainment in the theatrical field.”
William R. Vial, an optometrist, is credited with organizing the debut of the Chamberlayne Amateur Theatre, as it was titled then. The event was announced in the entertainment pages of the Richmond Times-Dispatch on March 23, 1964, with the headline, “New Theater to Present First Play.” Tickets were sold at the Azalea Pharmacy and at the door, and the show, “You Touched Me,” a 1945 Tennessee Williams play billed as a romantic comedy, was presented on April 30 and May 1.
The play, to the surprise of directors Roy L. Wray and Ruth Blair, drew a standing-room-only audience. The new group donated $600 of its proceeds to the community center to pay for acoustical tiles. CAT’s first feline logo, which portrayed cat faces arranged like Greek comedy and tragedy masks, debuted in the first program; the image has lived on in various renderings.
Auditions for the 1964 summer show, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” drew 150 aspirants for its 16 roles: eight adults, seven teenagers and a 12-year-old. That number dwindled when director Wray told the youngsters that being cast meant they had to stay in town for the three-day July run.
According to Times-Dispatch writer Margaret Dowd, the musical was the first acting experience for most of the young cast and required “negotiating early 20th-century costumes, lengthening summer-shortened hairstyles” and caring for the injured. Hermitage High School senior Melody Wade sprained an ankle and fellow student Rex Wester Jr. broke an arm and “hoped to get the cast off for opening night,” Dowd noted.
She further observed the “excellent use” of the community center, which allowed for three-quarter staging and conversion of the smaller center stage into a semi-balcony. Usry Inc. donated a trailer to serve as dressing rooms.
A scene from “Dial ‘M’ for Murder,” October 1964 (Photo courtesy Jason Lucas)
The “amateur” in the name was changed to “actors” in the ’80s. Performers of varying levels of experience came to CAT, among them Jacqueline Jones, Amy Berlin, Billy Christopher Maupin, Donna Marie Miller, Kathy Northrop Parker, Daniel Moore and Todd Schall-Vess. CAT veterans and couple Lin Heath and Charlotte Scharff met at a cast party.
John Ambrose — a writer, educator and occasional actor — played a lawyer in the 1986 production of the Ayn Rand play “The Night of January 16th,” beginning a 20-year association. “I found a theater home at CAT,” he says.
As the company’s chair, he led the efforts to formalize CAT as a nonprofit and to pay the actors and technicians. Not easy decisions, the moves separated CAT from the civic association’s entertainment committee, which meant forming a board of directors, paying rent and holding annual fundraisers. “By then, CAT had practically taken over the whole building,” Scharff says, and the space required renovation, including adding more comfortable chairs, raked seating and better lighting.
Lin Heath designed the set for a 2001 performance of “The Lion in Winter.” (Photo by Lin Heath)
Ambrose and others sought to develop for CAT a presence in professional theater while remaining grounded in the community, a mission that took on a greater meaning as the audience, patrons and longtime volunteers grew older or left the stage. Atlee High School theater teacher Charles Wax organized play readings and encouraged student participation. The company picked up the Bifocals program for older actors from what was then Theatre IV and partnered with other troupes.
The company’s lease arrangements faltered in 2018, and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic depleted audiences and funds. CAT left its mother venue, now operated by the North Henrico Civic Association, and dispersed its costumes and props.
But after sauntering to other stages without ever fully going away, CAT has come back.
The company’s new home is Hanover Tavern, where I attended the closing night of “Painting Churches” in October. I had the theater-person sensation of sitting in a venerated space to see a well-done show. I received a copy of “The Last Leaf” program and experienced the time travel vertigo of memory. At the reception afterward, I visited with people I’d not seen in a while and paged through scrapbooks of programs and photographs that in some cases resemble vintage family images. You may not know all their names but they, too, played a role in your life.
Theater is, after all, a community of its own.
