Project Challenge Playhouse May Yet Have Third Act

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

Those who don’t believe making their voices heard can still change things were not at Tuesday’s Anderson School Dist. 5 Board of Trustee Members, when more than a dozen students and former students spoke with passion about the potential loss of a landmark community institution.

Some said the program changed their lives, others their children’s lives, citing stories of success and accomplishments of Project Challenge.

One brick wall in that aging building is covered with 40 years of signatures paying tribute to Project Challenge of those who say the rest of their lives were made richer by the program.

It’s a wall built in 1937 when the old North Anderson Elementary School added the auditorium to the original 1919 building, built with the cooperation of John Linely and E.C. McCant’s, as a Works Progress Administration Project.

It’s also a wall that captured the attention of Anderson School Dist. 5 Board Member Tommy Price, who said seeing those signatures after hearing the testimonies Tuesday night, brought a change of heart.

Some of the signatures are careful, the letters of a high-school senior who has been performing on that stage since first grade. Some are enormous and crooked, the work of a six-year-old who did not entirely understand the assignment, whose hand was likely steadied by a teenager kneeling beside her.

Price, who has served on the Anderson District 5 school board long enough to be unsentimental about buildings, had never seen the wall. A tax man by trade, and the third generation of his family to work out of the same office on Whitney Street, he speaks about old structures the way an accountant speaks about a depreciating asset.

"I'm attached to it," he says of his own building, "but I'm not that attached to it."

But the building in question, once a school a school of more than 90 years, has been home to the Project Challenge Playhouse, a youth theater that everyone involved calls PCP (however unfortunate), and has a leaky roof, an aging HVAC system, electrical wiring that runs on snakes of extension cords, and a bathroom that while technically ADA compliant but, as Price puts it, "not ADA friendly, if that makes sense."

Patrons who need a restroom during intermission go down a ramp and next door, into the adult-education building, which is itself a potential candidate for the wrecking ball.

When the school board decided to end the theater's use of the theater space, the math seemed self-evident. There was a newer auditorium at Southwood. There was a budget to protect, a middle-school crisis pending, a Robert Anderson question unresolved.

"I really thought, well, this will be great," Price says. "They can go use Bozeman Auditorium at Southwood, have a nice newer facility, more modern, But I also know (former Dist. 5 Superintendent) Mr. Wilson has always told me they're in love with that building for some reason."

The love arrived at the board meeting Tuesday night in the form of 16 speakers, many of them students, each allotted three minutes in the public comment part of the meeting.

Diane Lee went first. She wrote the original state grant that added a performing-arts component to Project Challenge, back when the program was for gifted and talented students. She taught drama in every middle and high school in the district, and it had been 20 years since she last walked into the board room.

"It's hard to talk about 39 years in the three minutes that I've been allotted," she said, "but here we go."

Her argument was structural in a different sense than the architect's. Auditions at PCP are open to every District 5 student. There is no team, no home school, no zoning.

"It sits in the middle of town, available to all, and it brings students together on neutral ground" — students, she said, who would never otherwise meet, to build sets and hang lights and learn what it requites to finish something together. T

he theater is preparing for its fortieth season in 2026–27.

"This old lady of a building may need some liposuction and a facelift," Lee said, "but she is strong and vibrant, a jewel who carries a history you should be proud of."

Jill Coker spoke next, and she came in with a grievance the board could not answer, because boards are not permitted to respond during citizens' comments. A member of the board had said things on Facebook that weekend — things that traveled fast enough to reach Price on a Saturday morning, on his tractor, in a cluster of missed calls and texts.

"A lackluster apology does not erase the hurt that was caused by the comments in the first place," Coker said. "Particularly those comments coming from someone trusted with serving this community."

Then came the students and recent students.

Benjamin Williams, two years out of T. L. Hanna arrived with statistics and George Washington. He noted that neither of the district's major high schools has a theater program, which makes PCP not an enrichment but the whole of the offering. Williams said he was bullied for being a little different, and he found a home in the theater. "Truly, I do not believe that I would be who I am today without theater."

T. L. Hanna Sophia Gay said she spent two days collecting a hundred signatures on a petition and stood in front of her classmates "physically shaking" to ask for them. She had done one show at the Playhouse, “Twisted Tales of Poe,” her first outside of school, and had signed the wall at the end of it. She held the papers up, uncertain of the procedure. "I can submit this to the school board somehow, if you guys would like to look over these."

Claire Williams, a ninth grader, described her logistics: packing up early in geometry, one bus to a different school for a theater class her own school does not offer, another bus back, arriving late. She takes P.E. and health over the summer to make the schedule work. She has been performing since she was five. "I felt alone until I met my PCP family."

Lucy Gray, a senior, promised at the outset not to be negative — "this issue is far too important" — and then made the case for the building itself, which is the case the board had thought was merely sentimental.

"That building is old, but it has a magical quality to it,” said Gray. “I have seen audiences transform into other places and different times. I've heard people laugh and I've seen grown men cry." Gray said she has dyslexia, and memorizing lines was, at first, nearly impossible, and then PCP was the thing that let her read aloud in the third grade, and in front of the board. "No amount of tutoring got me that."

She closed: "I beg you, each one of you, please don't turn the lights out on my stage."

Owen O'Halloran, an alumnus now assistant director of theater at the Montessori School of Anderson, had prepared a statement and abandoned it. He said in September of his tenth-grade year he overdosed in the back of his vehicle. Days later, at rehearsal, the director of the show he was in noticed the state he was in.

"This person gave me a space that I didn't have anywhere else to speak," he said. "I would not be here today if it were not for that director."

Kinley Davis asked the board to look past the building and the numbers. She described walking into rehearsal drained, struggling at school and at home, and walking out laughing. She described helping the youngest cast members write their names on the wall "because they don't fully understand what they're doing." Thirty-nine years of that, she said. "Yes, we're young, but that doesn't mean we don't have a voice."

Emmylou Owens is thirteen.

"To some people, PCP might just look like an old building," Owens said. "Please do not let the curtain fall permanently on forty years of community history."

Ann Turner, who sat on this board from 2007 to 2018, read a letter from her son, Captain Matthew Turner, an active-duty emergency medicine physician at Womack Army Medical Center. He performed in more than half a dozen productions between 2010 and 2013. He credited the Playhouse with the composure he has since used before an international audience of military professionals at the Army War College, on a Discovery Channel episode, and on a podcast for military emergency physicians. He listed his predecessors: Jimmy Stewart, James Earl Jones, Charlton Heston, Elvis Presley — Army officers who used theatrical training in service to the nation.

Anderson City Councilman Marshall Pickens read a letter from his daughter, a freshman studying fine arts at Coastal Carolina, a graduate of the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities. She had gone there, she wrote, because Anderson did not offer enough. "There is no earth without art." Then Pickens changed hats. "I lost the last two years of my daughter's high school education, because there wasn't enough for the arts here."

Board members are not supposed to respond during citizens' comments. Price responded.

"Y'all touched my heart more than you'll imagine," he told the room. "I think we need, as a board, to sit down and reevaluate everything and just see what we can do."

Then he reached, by his own admission, for an unlikely reference. "This is going to sound stupid and redneck," he said, quoting the movie “Christmas Vacation” where the boss at the end, the one who made decisions from the bottom line and could not see the emotion attached to them, until he could.

"Y'all don't realize this — you might — but you've got an old man in tears."

Recounting the evening later, Price kept returning to what he had watched from the dais, a thing visible only from where the board sits.

"You could hear it in their voices, but you could see it in their eyes — their love for that building," he said. "And I'm sitting here thinking, I think we've made a wrong decision."

He is careful not to promise money he does not control. "I know we have to be responsible with taxpayers' money," he says. "But I've told these new people running for school board: if you make the students your primary mission, everything else will work out. That's what we're here for."

There are complications. Project Challenge is a non-profit, separate from the school district. The district has been allowing use of the facilities and done some upgrades to the building over the years. The school district is also on the hook for insurance, since PCP has none.

That distinction, Price says, was lost on most of the public, who assumed it was an A5 program.

By Wednesday, Price had walked the Playhouse himself, alongside the district's director of facilities. The district has already contacted its electrical contractor to price the elimination of the extension cords — a condition, the contractor noted, common to every theater he has ever worked in, and against code in all of them. The electrical is the main challenge, and though it is not dangerous, Price said, it needs fixing. The small and aging bathrooms also need upgrades, so that patrons and children do not have to go next door.

Price said all options are on the table. Insurance. A lease, perhaps. Adding requirements for adults working with students, including the DSS training every district employee completes — an idea suggested by his daughter, a reading coach at Centerville.

"If you want to help somebody out and give them a car," said Price, "you want to make sure it's at least running good."

The board meets in a workshop September 25th, where the matter is expected to be taken up in executive session because contracts are involved. Nothing is settled. What is settled is that a board that had decided a nearly hundred-year-old building was not worth further investment has agreed to look again, because 16 people, most of them teenagers, spent 48 minutes explaining why PCP is more than a building..

Price had never been inside the Playhouse before this week. But what he saw left an impression.

"I saw the signatures on the walls," he said, "and that really made me realize the love for this building."

This story is developing.