Pelzer Auditorium Overhaul to be a Historical Showpiece

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

The Pelzer Auditorium was built by design in 1920 — a deliberate, top-down benefit of the textile industry, which in the late nineteenth century was remaking the Upstate with the same systematic confidence it brought to everything else.

The Pelzer Manufacturing Company arrived in the 1880s, drew its power from the Saluda River, and proceeded to construct not just a mill but an entire community around it: houses for workers, streets laid in orderly rows, institutions meant to signal that this was a place with permanence and ambition. The Pelzer Auditorium was among those institutions. It was, from the beginning, several things at once: a high school auditorium for Pelzer School, a venue for the traveling vaudeville shows that came through on the train and unloaded directly onto Lebby Street, and a civic hall that the Pelzer Manufacturing Company built in the conviction that its workers deserved somewhere to go.

"I love studying the history of this building," said Will Ragland, artistic director and founder of the Mill Town Players, "and just imagining the thousands of people and students who spent time here."

The Mill Town Players who have occupied the auditorium since 2014, which is in the middle of a renovation so extensive that it has kept the building dark since the Christmas show — a production called "Cool Yule" — closed last December.

What is being remade inside the hall exceeds one million dollars in cost and touches nearly every surface. It is, by most accounts, the most significant intervention the building has received since a local principal named Wayne Fowler led a restoration effort in 1983, when the mill was still operating and Gerber helped pay for the work.

Without that effort, Ragland said plainly, the building would not be standing. A subsequent cosmetic renovation around 2010 left the hall in presentable condition, but the theatrical infrastructure when the Mill Town Players arrived four years later was essentially nonexistent. The first thing he did was pay to hang new pipe on the stage, because what he found there was not safe to hold a lighting instrument.

The building's history between its construction and its salvation is, in the way of neglected civic structures, a catalog of improvisation and decline. Around 1940, after the old movie theater next door burned in 1930, the auditorium became a cinema. It later reverted to school use as the auditorium for Pelzer Primary Elementary School, then sat largely empty for a period during which it served mainly as storage. At some point in the 1950s, someone painted everything pink.

"The walls were pink, everything was pink," Ragland said, with the tone of a man who has seen the photographs and has not fully recovered. There were radiators. There was a roof leak that damaged the floor. The attic was, for a time, infested with bats. The building was falling apart — which makes the fact of its survival, and its current transformation, something more than the story of a theater renovation.

The renovation that has kept it closed is, Ragland said, "far more than just new seats" — though the seats are where it begins, because the seats were, for years, the single most consistent complaint from the Mill Town Players' audience.

The ground floor seats installed during the 1983 restoration were already old at the time, with cushioning laid over frames of indeterminate vintage. The balcony seats were the originals from 1920: wooden, uncushioned, and exactly as comfortable as that description implies.

A grant from the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism provided the primary funding for the new work, and the new seating has become a small obsession to Ragland.

He spent considerable time designing the new seats, with a governing principle that they should feel as though they came from 1920. They will be dark-stained wood, with oiled bronze, no plastic here, and red velvet upholstery. Dedication plaques will run along the tops, allowing patrons to memorialize a seat in honor of someone they love or simply as a tribute to themselves.

The end panels — cast in aluminum, customizable, and therefore irresistible to a director who also designs sets — are where Ragland's research produced its most distinctive result. He found a neoclassical design widely used in American theaters in the nineteen-twenties, suited to the Greek Revival architecture of the building, and asked the manufacturer to replace the decorative daisies with palmetto trees at the top — a nod to the state grant that is paying for most of the work — and to swap the remaining floral ornaments for cotton bolls, in acknowledgment of the textile industry that built the hall to begin with.

"Nowhere else in the world can you get them," he said of the panels. He is correct.

The seat count drops from 556 to 389, a reduction that required the removal of the central aisles and the adoption of what theater designers call continental seating — a single wide sweep of rows accessed from the sides. Ragland anticipated the anxiety this would produce in regulars accustomed to the old configuration and addressed it with the precision of someone who has clearly had this conversation many times.

Standard theatrical seating runs nineteen to 21 inches wide, measured armrest to armrest. Luxury seating runs 22-24 inches. All but seven of the new seats at the Pelzer Auditorium will be luxury width. The depth between rows, typically three feet in American theaters — the standard at the Peace Center in Greenville, Ragland noted — will be three feet four inches throughout the house, with the rows behind the wheelchair spaces running to three feet eight inches. The removal of the central aisles required eliminating an entire additional row to achieve these dimensions.

"You're not going to be crawling over people," Ragland said. "Every single seat is a great seat."

The floors beneath those seats are original hardwood, being refinished and returned to the darker stain they carried in 1920. Salvaged pieces from the boards that were removed have been used to patch the areas that needed repair, so that nothing artificial was introduced where wood once was.

The molding and trim throughout — including the pilasters on the vestibule — were sampled and matched exactly, so that the new work is indistinguishable from the historic fabric it adjoins.

The paint is darker and warmer, moving toward the rich reds that characterized the Broadway theaters being built at roughly the same time as the Pelzer Auditorium — a historical parallel Ragland researched and took seriously.

New carpet, deep red with gold patterns, will run throughout the house. Aisle lighting has been built into the end panels of each row. A new entrance vestibule — functioning as what theater designers call a light-and-sound lock — will prevent the experience-rupturing intrusion of afternoon light that used to occur when late arrivals opened the lobby doors during matinees.

The audio system is being upgraded as well. The stage extension that the company had used for recent productions is being removed for "Guys and Dolls," the better to show off the renovated interior in its full width, which means the speaker arrangement required redesign. The old mobile setup, with its long snake cable running down to the stage, has been replaced by a permanent booth at the rear of the house. Acoustic panels behind the booth will improve sound balance in a room that Ragland describes, with affectionate exasperation, as very live.

"When you're on stage in a comedy and the audience laughs, you can feel it," he said. "It's so loud."

The grand reopening is opening night of "Guys and Dolls" — July 24, running through August 9 — and the tickets are moving at a pace that suggests the community has been tracking the renovation's progress with considerable impatience. By Ragland's most recent count, approximately 2,000 tickets have already been sold, representing roughly 37 percent of the total available inventory, for a production still weeks from its first performance. In the first week of public sale alone, 800 tickets moved. The house, when it opens, will seat 389 people per performance. Ragland intends to add Saturday evening shows to the schedule to address demand resulting from the fewer seats available per show.

What follows "Guys and Dolls" is Season 13 — lucky 13, Ragland called it — organized as six main-stage productions and three one-weekend concerts, nine shows in total covering a range that reflects both the ambitions of the company and the survey of 1,300 patrons that helped shape the slate.

The main stage opens in the fall with what may be a South Carolina premiere of "Floyd Collins," a bluegrass-inflected musical about a Kentucky cave explorer who became trapped 200 feet underground in 1925 and whose rescue attempt became a national media event.

The Christmas show, "Go Tell It on the Mountain," will be a gospel concert. February of 2027 brings Agatha Christie's "Witness for the Prosecution," a courtroom drama with a surprise ending that Ragland said fooled him completely on first viewing, prompting an immediate second watch. April of 2027 is "Simple Man," a Southern rock concert featuring the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top, the Allman Brothers Band, and Molly Hatchett — a first for the company, and, Ragland noted, something of a personal passion.

June of 2027 is Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," which Ragland has wanted to direct for years and will, following the company's well-received production of "A Streetcar Named Desire." The summer of 2027 closes with "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," Sondheim's Roman farce.

The concert series runs alongside the main stage: "Country Outlaws," a celebration of the classic country and outlaw movement of the 1970s, opens in September; "Strangers in the Night: The Songs of Sinatra" follows in March of 2027; and the series concludes in June of 2027 with a performance by Mac Arnold — a local blues legend who farms organic land just across the river from the auditorium — and his band, Plate Full of Blues.

"If we don't have Mac Arnold on this stage," Ragland said, "we are missing out."

All of the shows will be performed by local artists who are paid for their work. All of it will be accompanied by live musicians. Ticket prices will remain at $18 for adults and $16 for seniors, military, and students, for at least two more seasons. Season subscriptions to the six-show main stage series are available now at $100 — roughly what a single ticket to a traveling Broadway production costs at the Peace Center.

The building's resilience across more than a century of use is partly a function of original construction that was made to last and partly a function of the community that has declined, across successive generations and economic transformations, to let it become a ruin.

The textile industry is gone. The company town is a historical category. But the instinct that led the Pelzer Manufacturing Company to build a proper hall for its workers — the instinct that a community needs somewhere to gather and be moved — has proven more durable than the industry that first expressed it.

"The measure of success for theater and theater artists does not have to be New York City," Ragland said, taking pride in bringing more than 32,000 theater goers to the small town of Pelzer for shows. "It doesn't have to be Chicago. It can be Pelzer." He said he cannot wait for opening night of "Guys and Dolls," when the doors open on the restored hall and the people who have been following the renovation from a distance finally walk in and see what has been done.

"I just can't wait to see the faces," he said. "The eyes widened. They will have to pick up their mouth off the floor."