The Theatre: Actors and Hams

In 1933 a disheartened young actor who had pounded Manhattan’s pavements far oftener than he had trod its boards saw some kids swapping candy for marbles, and got an idea. Thereupon young Robert Porterfield, with fire in his eye, a dollar in his pocket and 21 famished actors in his wake, went back where he came from, to Abingdon in the Virginia mountains. There he opened a summer theatre, offering tickets for 35¢ in cash or the equivalent in barter.

To show business, the barter idea sounded as crackbrained as opening a theatre at the bottom of a well. But farmers, housewives and hillbillies hitched up their wagons, armloaded themselves with victuals, and drove to town. All summer the actors ate hearty, and at summer’s end the Barter Theatre showed a profit of $4.30 and two barrels of jelly.

In six succeeding summers, the Theatre’s fame spread, its personnel increased from 22 to 75, its acting orbit widened to take in a dozen towns, its ratio of barter to cash went down, from 9-to-1 to 3-to-2. Not only food, but puppies, razor blades, coffins were offered in payment. A pig traded in the first year for a season ticket produced a litter the second year and started a profitable little sideline in hams. Today, as in the beginning, neither actors nor playwrights receive any cash. To such playwrights as Robert Sherwood, Noel Coward, Maxwell Anderson and Vegetarian George Bernard Shaw have gone hams for royalties. Shaw refused his, demanded spinach instead. Among dozens of productions, most unusual is a hillbilly version of Romeo and Juliet, with the feuding Montagues and Capulets looking more like Hatfields and McCoys. To Porterfield, the highest compliment his theatre has been paid is that not one vegetable has ever been thrown at the stage.

Last week, its Abingdon season over, the Barter Theatre paid its third annual visit to Manhattan. In chain-store-fed Manhattan there were nine cash customers to one barterer. But the box office accepted a gallon of wine, tubes of toothpaste, some rayon underwear, size 36 and from Drama Critic John Anderson “a jugful of the milk of human kindness neatly skimmed.” All these swelled a trifle the season’s profits: $95, five barrels of jelly.