How a ‘crazy’ idea 50 years ago transformed theater in eastern Maine
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In 1973, George Vafiades and Lou Collier hatched a plan to launch a summer stock theater company on Mount Desert Island, and then produce shows from fall until spring in Bangor, for a year-round audience.
Vafiadis, the creative guy, and Collier, the business guy, knew it was a gamble. Local lawyer John Ballou told Vafiades he was nuts for thinking Bangor was ready for its own professional theater company.
“I said, ‘You people are crazy. No such thing will work in this community,’” Ballou told the Bangor Daily News in 1990. “I advised them not to waste their time and energy. He proved how very wrong I was.”
Five decades on, both regions have benefited tremendously — creatively and economically — from the end results of that plan: Penobscot Theatre Company in Bangor and Acadia Repertory Theatre in Somesville.
Penobscot Theatre kicks off its 50th season this weekend, with the dark comedy “Crimes of the Heart” running Sept. 7-24 at the Bangor Opera House. The 2023-24 season features a mix of contemporary plays such as “Constellations” and “Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play”; premieres from Maine playwrights such as “Dirty Deeds Downeast” and “My Story is Gluskabe”; and beloved shows produced in previous seasons, including “A Christmas Carol” and “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Few may realize that the two companies were one and the same at first. Acadia Repertory Theatre’s first season was held in the summer of 1973, in an old Masonic Hall in Somesville converted into a 150-seat theater, a facility it performs in to this day.
Before that season was over, Vafiades and Collier were working on bringing productions to Bangor, with a goal of featuring both professional actors, directors and crew from New York and elsewhere, and local talent — a format Penobscot Theatre still holds to, both onstage and backstage.
Bangor shows did not begin until the following year, with a production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man” in September 1974. The 1974-75 season also included Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” Jean Kerr’s “Mary Mary,” Noel Coward’s “Private Lives,” Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park,” James Goldman’s “The Lion in Winter” and William Inge’s “Bus Stop.”
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Between 1974 and 1983, Acadia Repertory split its season between Mount Desert Island and Bangor. In the Queen City, the company’s home base was the building at 183 Main St., a former Unitarian Church vestry that had been empty for years. In 2004, Merrill Bank bought the building; now it’s owned by Bar Harbor Bank & Trust.
Over the course of its first nine years, the Bangor company produced 97 plays and musicals at the Main Street theater space, took the shows on the road at other eastern Maine auditoriums, and, a few times, produced dinner theater at local hotels and restaurants.
By 1983, the MDI and Bangor operations were different enough in their missions that the Bangor group split off to form its own nonprofit professional theater: the Penobscot Theatre Company.
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From then on, the Penobscot Theatre Company began to develop more of its own signature programming, as well as its education department. Founder George Vafiades retired in 1990, and in 1992, artistic director Mark Torres took over. He launched the Maine Shakespeare Festival, an outdoor summer play series which was among the first such events on the Bangor waterfront, which then was in the early stages of industrial reclamation. The last festival was held in 2003, at which point Ten Bucks Theatre, a local community theater company, took over outdoor Shakespeare performances in Brewer.
In 1997, after more than two decades at 183 Main St., the Penobscot Theatre Company purchased the Bangor Opera House at 131 Main St., an art deco theater built in 1920 to replace the original opera house, which burned down in 1914. The opera house originally hosted vaudeville, music and theater, until the mid-1950s, when it switched to showing movies. By the time the urban renewal project in Bangor took out all the city’s other historic downtown theaters in the early 1970s, the Bangor Opera House was the last remaining old theater in the city.
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It took another ten years for the Penobscot Theatre Company to raise enough money to begin opera house renovations in earnest, undertaking a facade renovation in 2008 and an auditorium overhaul in 2017. In 2015, it moved its costume and scene shop out to a building on Griffin Road, in 2018, it opened a separate space for its education program at 51 Main St. in Bangor, and this spring, the theater company opened The Stage Door, a cocktail bar immediately adjacent to the opera house.
Today, the Penobscot Theatre Company offers programming year-round and is the northernmost professional theater company in the lower 48 states. What was once a risky idea launched in the early 1970s by two guys who loved theater now has a yearly budget of nearly $2 million.
Vafiadis, who died in 2022, told the BDN in 2013 that he knew early on that the Bangor area would support his idea — despite the naysayers.
“There were people who said, ‘I give you three months, max.’ They were almost right,” Vafiadis said. “I got in my car and drove to ten different businesses in Bangor and asked if they’d consider giving the theater $25 per week, and we’d set aside $25 worth of tickets for them. Ten out of 10 said yes, and they didn’t know me from Adam. That said to me that we have an unusual community. That said to me that this theater can continue and that it can thrive.”