Other Voices, Other Towns: The Traveler's Story. Caleb Pirtle III
By the time he was ten years old, Porterfield had already decided that someday he would be standing in the harsh spotlights of Broadway. Maybe a star. Maybe a bit player. Maybe nothing more than a face amongst the scenery. But he would be on stage. Failure never entered his mind. His family frowned. Robert Porterfield had always walked the straight and narrow, and now he was taking a wrong turn that had more heartbreaks than pot holes. His father was adamantly opposed to the boy’s wild intentions, but he was not the kind of man to spit on a dream, no matter how ridiculous it might be.
By 1925, Porterfield was studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. He learned how to walk, what to do with his hands, how to project his voice, and what the world looked like from center stage. He liked what he saw. The young man was a beginner, to be sure, but he landed a couple of jobs, saw the curtain rise and fall, and heard the applause, which was not nearly as loud as the sounds of a Great Depression echoing empty across the land. Banks were locking their vaults. Businesses were closing their doors. The streets of New York were lined with men in search of a job, a bowl of soup, maybe just a crumb from the bread lines that had infested the city.
New York was broke. So was the rest of the country. It didn’t matter whether theater tickets cost a dollar or a dime, no one was buying. It was as though the edge of the stage was the end of the earth. Step off, and no one would ever see him again.
New York shut down is stages. The tumult and the shouting had turned to a faint whimper and the hollow growl of an empty belly.
Robert Porterfield rode into Abingdon and realized that the hard times had beat him home. Farmers who had grown cash crops now had crops but no cash. Money had saddled up and gone elsewhere, or, maybe, it had just evaporated like the mist atop the Blue Ridge.
Proud men had lost their pride. Pockets were as empty as the bank. Poverty was etched into the wrinkles on every face, even those faces too young to have wrinkles. Porterfield wearily glanced in the mirror and realized he had a couple that had not been there the summer before.
The idea came to him out of the blue, and for a brief moment, he wondered about the sanity of it all. A desperate man, down on his luck, could have all sorts of delusions, he knew, and not all of them made sense. But this one did.
Up in New York, he had a few friends with a lot of talent, but none of them were eating regularly. In Abingdon, life was devoid of entertainment, but most of the homefolks had gardens filled with vegetables, beef cattle grazing their pastures, pigs in their stalls, and tables graced with food.
He could not pack up Virginia and carry it to New York, but he could certainly bring enough actors down to Abingdon to occupy a stage, provided he could find one. His plan was a simple as it was ingenuous.
Not everyone would be able to buy a ticket with a handful of coins, but just about everyone could swap a peck of beans, a mess of greens, or a basket of eggs for the privilege of seeing a real live Broadway production, even if did happen to be as far off Broadway as anyone had ever been before.
Porterfield thought that the Town Hall of Abingdon might serve well as a theater. After all, it had heard the somber words of drama before. It had originally been built a hundred years earlier as the Sinking Springs Presbyterian Church, which staged its own theatrical production in 1876 to raise the funds necessary for repairing the building.
The stage was still intact, provided actors didn’t mind performing discreetly above the cells of an old jail, with prisoners, from time to time, shouting out their own drunken, angry, defiant, and sometimes profane lines of dialogue that would have never crossed the mind of any proper and self-respecting playwright
Robert Porterfield was a man with an idea, a second-hand stage, and a dollar in his pocket. All he needed were actors, a play, and a curtain.
From New York, the actors and actresses came. There was nothing to keep them on Broadway. Broadway, for the most part, was dark. The speaking parts had gone to those who were knocking on locked and shuttered doors, asking, “Brother, can you spare a dime?”
The troupe was hungry, hesitant, and hopeful. Some had pooled the last money in their pockets and bought jalopies for the long trek south. Others came by train. A few hitchhiked their way down a circuitous corridor of decaying pavement that led them to an odd little town beneath the timbered shelter of the Blue Ridge.
They were the outsiders. They didn’t belong. They looked around them. It wasn’t New York. And it wasn’t home. It was somewhere in between, not unlike purgatory.
Whispers drifted down the streets of Abingdon.
“The boy’s lost his mind,”
“He wasn’t quite right to start with.”
“He ain’t never been himself.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He’s always playing like he’s somebody else.”
“The prodigal’s back.
Robert Porterfield heard the grumbling and the complaints. They did not bother him. Only failure troubled him. He would not fail. In time, Porterfield was advertising: “Ham for Hamlet.” He immediately strung up a large banner across Town Hall that said: “With the vegetables you cannot sell, you can buy a good laugh.”
Abingdon smiled. Abingdon had not laughed in a long time.
On June 10, 1933, the curtain rose on a three-act drama called After Tomorrow. Admission was thirty cents, but the farmers who lived back among the highlands liked the idea of swapping victuals for tickets. With money becoming as scarce as hen’s teeth, it was a time-honored practice in rural America. Country folks bartered eggs for sugar, corn for tobacco, tobacco for rent, cows for cars, and cars for more cows. In the Blue Ridge, the fine art of bartering had already been a way of life for two centuries.
After Tomorrow was played before a full house. Sure the admission had been a nickel more than a movie ticket, but these were real actors, performing so close that those on the front row could reach out and touch them, see the sweat on their faces, smell their breath whether they wanted to or not.
Down below, the prisoners were unruly. Loud. Abrasive. Curses filled the silence. For them, “after tomorrow” would be no different than “the day before.” The actors were unruffled. Of course, Town Hall also held the fire house, and when the alarm sounded, those on stage merely froze in their positions, waiting until the wail died away before moving steadily ahead with the performance.
As the season ran through the summer, theater patrons found all sorts of ways to pay for their tickets. Live hogs. Dead snakes, tasted like chicken. At least they did when an actor had an empty table for supper. Toothpaste. Underwear. A dozen eggs. Tobacco. And vegetables. Wash tubs full of vegetables. A jar of homemade liquor, for medicinal purposes, of course, and actors were always sick of the rain, sick of the sun, sick of rehearsals, sick of the prisoners, sick of the howling dogs that replaced the prisoners in the cells below the stage. The dogs were suspected of having rabies.
Robert Porterfield looked up late one afternoon, only thirty minutes before the curtain was scheduled to be raised, and he saw a farmer and his wife walking slowly down the street and toward the box office leading a cow and carrying a battered tin bucket.
“How much for a ticket?” the farmer asked.
Porterfield thought it over and answered, “I guess a gallon will be enough.”
The farmer tied the cow to a lamp post, knelt down, grabbed a teat, and milked a two-gallon bucket half full. He showed it to Porterfield. The lady in the box office smiled and handed him a ticket.
“What about your wife?” Porterfield asked with a puzzled expression.. “Doesn’t she want to see the play?”
The farmer shrugged and leaned against the wall.. “Probably does,” he said. “But she can milk her own ticket.”
As the first year ended, Porterfield counted the coins and realized that the troupe had eaten well but had