Strode's Mill, West Chester
“In those early days, we were really doing something: Revolution on a very small scale.”
- Meg Fruchter, People’s Light & Theater Company co-founder
Danny Fruchter, Meg Fruchter, Ken Marini, and veteran designer, Dick Keeler began People’s Light and Theater Company with a fearless sense of purpose and agency at a time fueled by seismic artistic and cultural shifts. The U.S. in the 1960s and early 70s was abounding with social and political movements: Civil Rights, identity activism, feminism, Back-to-the-Land, and sexual liberation. The then-nascent Regional Theater Movement sought to counter the divisive commercial model of Broadway, bring professional theater to local communities, and make a theater career beyond NYC possible. Young theater artists were inspired by Chaikin’s Open Theater and Grotowski’s poor theater, which demanded emotional honesty and human connection in a time when acts of dehumanization – assassinations, bombings, and war – dominated cultural outlooks. Making “good theater” was just as much about discovering new dramatic work as it was about the unifying ways work could be created.
(L to R) Meg Fruchter, Danny Fruchter, Ken Marini, Dick Keeler
In the early 1970s, all four PL founders were committed company members at Hedgerow Theatre, an outcropping of the anti-industrialization artisan-centered Rose Valley Arts Movement. Founded by Jasper Deeter in 1923, Hedgerow became one of the most groundbreaking repertory theater companies in the country pre-World War II, and became an artistic refuge with a cooperative non-hierarchal structure and shared ownership of what was being done and how, from choosing the plays to building the sets to cooking dinner and washing dishes. It took everyone to make any of it happen. This social design inspired People’s Light’s founders and informed its organizational ethos from its founding and beyond.
In May of 1972, Danny drove Jasper Deeter to the hospital, where he closed his steely gray-blue eyes for the last time. Almost immediately, generation factions at Hedgerow formed. The older artists gained control of the building, and the younger group were “thrown out.” In two quickly mounted shows at the Westtown School, those ousted from Hedgerow realized that they had all the ingredients needed at the time to create “good theater.”
They quickly sought a name to apply for space rentals, throwing out place names and ones that sounded like banks, such as “The First Theater Company of Chester County.” “Chadds Ford Rep” and “Brandywine Rep” sounded like “bread off the shelf” theater names. Dick Keeler, a brilliant lighting designer of over 300 professional productions at that point, had called his freelance design work “People’s Light,” signaling the less resources a company had the more he wanted to work with you. All were in alignment with that ethos, and so “and Theater Company” was appended. No one at that meeting thought the name would last.
(L to R) Marcia Saunders, Roger Carleton, Tony Humpal, James F. Pyne, Jr., & John Loven in the barn that became the Leonard C. Haas Stage, 1979.
After an adventure that involved a wet cold hitchhiker, copious amounts of Napolean brandy, and a woodcraftsman of duck decoys, Danny Fruchter found and agreed to rebuild a collapsed grist mill that would become People’s Light’s first location, Strode’s Mill. Stories of the 70-seat space abound with sounds of pigs, cows, and dogs from the adjacent farm, prison buses, water roaring down a sewer pipe anchored to the stage wall, and low concrete off-stage threshold that left more than one actor bleeding and semi-conscious upon a re-entrance.
Soon, People’s Light was offering workshops and touring shows in local prisons and juvenile detention centers, holding acting classes for community members, and producing educational projects for schools alongside their season of professional productions. In two years, People’s Light outgrew its first residence and moved to a 250+ seat house in Yellow Springs. This growth, and the subsequent move to the current Malvern campus, invited many discussions about the purpose of the theater. Who are we here for? How do we want to work? What kind of work is “good theater”? What is the balance between the business and the art? What makes our presence in this community valuable? How does theater matter?
Summerstage feature in The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1989.
These questions persist today. The ongoing conversations and explorations they provoke continue to illuminate People’s Light distinctiveness over time. Lou Lippa (1928 – 2018), an early core company member, described it this way:
The true mettle of a theater is its determination, under the most inhibiting and discouraging conditions, to establish continuity and build an audience on its own terms. Not every play was popular at People's Light, [but] gradually, play by play, the company evolved. [T]hrough the doing, People's Light defined itself. “Good theater” was identified through experience; yet even then an illusion, for the closer one came to it, the farther off it seemed. What was thought good theater at one moment in time was something else at another.
Each change in artistic direction is movement into unexplored territory, into open seas, toward uncertain horizons that constantly recede. There is no absolute definition. No final destination. No arriving. There is only movement, directed and redirected again and again, with every attempt a wholly new start… each venture a new beginning...
“Old men ought to be explorers,” wrote TS Eliot. “Here and there does not matter. We must be still and still moving into another intensity, for a further union, a deeper communion...” Those words, perhaps more than any other, distinguish the history of this theater. People's Light is more than an idea. It's a movement. A voyaging.
The founders never made a mission statement. “No proclamation was issued and no manifesto nailed to the stage door.” But they all felt theater’s deepest ability to connect, open, invite, and reveal ourselves to each other. Throughout our history and today, we still and still honor our roots, moving for a further union and revelatory communion.
A Little (People's) Light Music
It’s a party, and you’re invited!
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