Appeared on Page 2B of the Aug. 1, 2006, edition of The News & Observer, the 180,000-circulation daily newspaper for Raleigh, N.C.; photo by Chris Seward.
CHAPEL HILL - You've seen the forest in the trees. Now see the theater in the forest.
Chapel Hill's Forest Theatre, tucked among the tall oaks of Battle Park on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, offers theatergoers a peaceful stone sanctuary and a quaint reminder of the theatrical traditions of days gone by.
"Attending a show at the Forest Theatre, you feel the wind blowing, you look up and you see the sky -- it's like going back to the origins of all drama," said Scott Parker, director of the Institute of Outdoor Drama at UNC-CH.
The amphitheater hosts plays, concerts and even weddings throughout the year. It's also a hangout for guitar-strumming students and amateur climbers.
But beneath the rows of terraced stone seats and their leafy surroundings lies a university institution with a prominent place in the history of American outdoor drama.
The Forest Theatre was merely a dream in 1916, when professors staging Shakespeare in the park longed for a permanent venue. William Coker -- a botanist for whom the Coker Arboretum was named -- picked a spot on Battle Park's sloping hillside, and the Forest Theatre was born.
Famed drama professor Frederick H. Koch arrived in 1918 and immediately brought the theater to life, adding a stage and directing annual performances there by the Carolina Playmakers, which he founded.
Koch encouraged students to write plays about their daily lives, sparking a national playwriting movement known as folk drama. The Forest Theatre was dedicated in Koch's memory in 1953.
The theater remained active through the mid-'70s, said Bobbi Owen, professor of dramatic art at UNC-CH.
As a student, Owen performed in the musical "Hair" to sold-out crowds at the 1,000-seat theater in 1974.
"And there were almost as many people just in the forest watching it for free," she said.
Not all performances went so smoothly. Owen said the following year's show was rained out for a whole week.
Performers frustrated by the theater's uncertainties migrated to the Paul Green Theatre when it opened in 1978, Owen said.
Since then, performances at the Forest Theatre have dwindled, and the theatre's condition has deteriorated. The technical booth isn't power equipped, nor does it have a roof, and the lighting towers don't work anymore.
In addition to these technical hurdles, headlights from cars on Boundary Street shine into the audience's eyes at night. Combined with the sound of traffic whooshing by, it can be very distracting for patrons, Owen said.
Some of that could soon change.
Jonah Garson, 19, a student at UNC-CH, said he is working with the N.C. Botanical Garden to form an oversight committee to restore the theater to its former glory.
Garson, who has performed there several times, is the managing director at the Single Shot Theatre Company, a Chapel Hill theater collective that's staging "Julius Caesar" there this weekend.
He'd like to see the theater "restored in the town's collective memory," he said.
"If there's a space that warrants Chapel Hill tradition, it's that space."
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