Community Notebook

Mucking It Out: Coach House Players Finds a Home

At the Tudor style coach house, a throwback to another era, looms dark and quiet in this quiet residential neighborhood. Inside, however, the Coach House Players teems with activity. A crew of half a dozen people places theatrical flats on a raised platform at one end of a large room. They try one out, look at it skeptically, talk it over, take it down and try it again. Workers scurry up to the attic storage and return with props. Upstairs, people work on costumes for the next show. Another crew continues the ongoing work of renovating theater seats. Each seat is disassembled, stripped, cleaned and reupholstered at a series of workstations. Others sweep, paint, and talk things over. Nobody has time to dawdle as preparations continue for the opening of the next chapter in the story of this 50-year-old theatrical organization.

The coach house itself has been a part of Kingston history for over 100 years, long before it was taken over by the theater. When the Delaware and Hudson Canal opened in 1828, connecting the hills of Pennsylvania with the Rondout Creek, the Hudson River and New York City, a new era began in Kingston. Business opportunities attracted young entrepreneurs, among them Thomas Cornell and, later, Samuel Coykendall, who married Cornell’s daughter. Together, the two men built a transportation empire based on railroads and the steamships that towed barges laden with the cement, stone, and brick that built New York City and the coal and hay for its furnaces and horses. They built lavish mansions on Kingston’s West Chestnut Street with commanding views of the Rondout. In 1894, Coykendall added an enormous coach house for their horses, coaches, sleds, and servants. Today, some of the mansions are gone, others have been broken up into apartments, but the Coykendall coach house remains, saved perhaps by its location on Augusta Street, below the crest of the hill, without a view.

As the story goes, the theater began shortly after World War II, when William “Irv” Rose and George Betz were bemoaning, in the comfort of a local pub, the lack of a permanent theatrical enterprise in Kingston. So, in the great Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney tradition of the American stage, they decided to start one themselves. Since they didn’t have a barn, they began looking for a suitable home for their dream and discovered the long deserted coach house. With money donated by interested parties, Rose and his new group made a down payment on the property in 1950, assuming a mortgage that was paid off and burned in celebration in 1965. The purchase price was $5000.

While the extensive work of mucking out, clearing, and renovating the space was undertaken by hardy volunteers, Rose spent summers working at the old Woodstock Playhouse gaining experience and using his connections there to borrow sets and equipment. For the past 50 years, the Players have built an organization based on those same virtues: willingness to acquire skills, to wheedle money, to borrow material and to put it all together with hours of volunteer work. The old coach house became the center of activity for the group, serving as rehearsal, shop, and storage space. There they also offered workshops, children’s shows, and small productions. Major productions, however, were performed at venues throughout the city, primarily large school auditoriums—until last year.

The Players faced a crisis in 2001. Because of increasingly congested school schedules, they had to look elsewhere for a space to produce their plays and musicals. They applied for, and received, permission from the city’s Building and Safety Division to present their entire season on Augusta Street. Although this would limit their audience size to 99 seats, the move would, in the words of a Daily Freeman editorial, be a “vibrant and healthy” one for the Players and the historic neighborhood. But before they opened the first play, much work had to be done: the building needed upgrades in handicapped access, parking and electrical service. And they needed 99 theater seats.

To the rescue came Ron Marquette and the Ulster Performing Arts Center with a donation of over 100 used seats. Marquette, Director of UPAC, is a strong supporter of the amateur group and has hosted many of their performances. “It’s hard work and nobody gets paid,” he says. “But the history of theater in this country has always been built on groups like Coach House.” The relationship between UPAC and Coach House is emblematic of Coach House’s community involvement.

In addition to their traditional three-production season, the Players make significant contributions to the cultural life of the community. They offer scholarships, hold workshops for students, perform for free on the Rondout in the summer, participate in the annual parade, and sing carols at Christmas. For many years they decorated the Infirmary, Kingston’s Retirement Home, and they have shared their space with a troop of Boy Scouts.

Community groups such as the Coach House Players are vital to the cultural lives of communities across the country: they introduce untold numbers of young and old to the delights of the theater, nurture talent by providing a place for experimentation, and allow people from all walks of life to give expression to their creative impulses. Even though the accepted meaning of amateur is nonprofessional, the root of the word is, after all, the Latin amare, to love.

—Bob Miller

The Players new season, and new era, will get underway this April with a production of the comedy “Love, Sex and the IRS” on April 4-6, 11-13, at their home on 12 Augusta Street in Kingston. For curtain times, ticket prices, or more information about the organization, call (845) 331-2476 or check out their Web site, www.coachhouseplayers.org.