Mill Town Players New Season will Welcome Auditorium Updates
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The seats built for small students in the early twentieth century are gone from the Pelzer Auditorium, and Will Ragland wants you to know that is not a metaphor.
The hard, wooden, unpadded opera chairs — all 556 of them — came out as part of a renovation so thorough that Ragland, the artistic director and founder of the Mill Town Players, recently found himself climbing onto a furniture dolly and sliding down the bare, sloping hardwood floor of the historic hall, no obstructions anywhere, just the old wood and the open air of a building being returned, deliberately and at considerable expense, to something better than it was.
"Most folks just think it's new seats," Ragland said. "It's far more than that."
The Mill Town Players went dark after their “Cool Yule” Christmas show, and the Pelzer Auditorium — a building with the kind of bones that preservationists describe in reverent tones and contractors in detailed invoices — has been under interior renovation ever since.
The price tag for the transformation exceeds one million dollars, why pays for a theater that has been repaired from the floor up: soft spots in the hardwood addressed, the floors themselves refinished and returned to the darker stain of their original appearance, new carpet laid in the surrounding areas, molding and trim added to every renovated surface, and a paint job that Ragland said has made the whole interior look "dramatically different."
Handicap accessibility has been expanded throughout — wider rear entrance doors, additional railings, aisle lighting — bringing a nineteenth-century space into compliance with the expectations of a twenty-first-century audience.
The seat count, when the new seating is installed, will drop from 556 to 389, with wider, more comfortable seats and seating areas. Ragland is unbothered by the arithmetic. Fewer seats mean easier parking, better sightlines, and a more navigable house. It also means, as any ticket buyer this summer will quickly discover, a more urgent reason to plan ahead.
The Mill Town Players opened public ticket sales for their reopening production — a full staging of “Guys and Dolls,” running July 24 through August 9 across three weekends — and sold 800 tickets in the first seven days. The show does not open for two months.
“Guys and Dolls” will arrive with 21 actors on that small Pelzer stage and nine live musicians in the pit, a scale of production that Ragland said he is eager to begin rehearsing. The brass and woodwinds, the gamblers and showgirls, the particular brand of mid-century New York romanticism that Frank Loesser encoded into every number — all of it will unspool inside a room that has been made, after months of hammers and paint fumes, ready to receive it.
The season that follows, Mill Town Players' thirteenth, was assembled by survey. Some 1,300 patrons responded to a mass email asking what they wanted to see, and Ragland and his colleagues spent weeks in "discussion after discussion," whittling possibilities into a final slate. The result is nine productions organized around the format the company last used in its eleventh season: six main-stage shows supplemented by three one-weekend concerts.
The lineup covers a range that Ragland catalogued with barely contained delight — classic country, bluegrass, a gospel Christmas concert, Agatha Christie, Frank Sinatra, Southern rock (a first for the company), Tennessee Williams, a tribute to local blues legend Mac Arnold, and a closing production of Stephen Sondheim.
One entry, the somewhat claustrophobic “Floyd Collins,” may constitute a South Carolina premiere; Ragland said he had searched and could not find evidence of another company in the state having mounted it.
The thirteenth season opens in October. Current season ticket holders can renew immediately; new season tickets go on sale June 15. Ticket prices will hold at $18 for adults and $16 for seniors, military, and students — rates Ragland said the company intends to maintain for at least two more years.
The auditorium, meanwhile, is still under construction. The painters have started. The molding is going up. The original hardwood — salvaged piece by piece, patches cut from the same boards that were pulled, so that nothing is lost — is being stained back toward the color it held when the building was new. Somewhere in Pelzer, a theater is almost ready to be a theater again, a proud new chapter in its long history.
The Pelzer Auditorium, a fixture of the small mill town that shares its name, was built and opened in October 1920. It was built during an era when the textile industry anchored life along the Saluda River and a proper civic hall was understood as proof that a community intended to stay.
Pelzer itself was something of a company town in the classic sense — its mill, its streets, and its institutions rising more or less together — and the auditorium was among the more permanent expressions of that ambition. The Mill Town Players, who took their name in deliberate tribute to that history, have occupied the building for thirteen seasons, turning a structure that might otherwise have faded into a working theater with a regional reputation that regularly outpaces its square footage.
