WINSTON-SALEM -- Community theater is filled with people who go that extra mile to put on a show. Few of them do it quite as literally as John Collier.
The director of the Stained Glass Playhouse's "The Cemetery Club," which opens tomorrow night, commutes 26 miles daily from his home in Graham to his job as an oncology nurse at UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center in Chapel Hill. Tack on an evening play rehearsal an hour from home in the other direction, and he'll have added 160 miles to his odometer by the end of the day.
"You go where the good work is," he says. "But I'll admit the price of gas is making me pick my shows a little more carefully. And I did just trade in my Highlander for a Corolla."
Collier has been acting in community theater for 25 years and directing plays and musicals for half that time. It was the touching humor in "The Cemetery Club" that drew him to the project.
"I saw the show about eight years ago in Burlington," he recalls. "The writing is very Neil Simon-esque. The humor is there, but it's a drama with comedy. It's about loss and forgiveness and redemption -- all heavy themes -- but it's disguised with laughs."
The 1990 play, which had a short 56-performance Broadway run, is about three New York widows who meet once a month for tea before visiting their husbands' graves in Queens. Written by Ivan Menchell, it shows the deft hand with one-liners he learned at the knee of his father, the late comedian Lou Menchell. Extremely popular throughout the world, it has often been compared to the heart-tugging "Steel Magnolias."
Collier likes the intimacy of the relationships among the women, which is shared by the audience in the small 90-seat Stained Glass Playhouse.
"The acting has to be subtle; it can't be bigger than life," he says. "A lot of people who auditioned primarily worked on bigger stages and weren't able to pull back their performances. But our cast easily handles the challenge."
Collier, who deals with issues of death and dying through his day job, recognizes an honesty and truth in "The Cemetery Club" which shows Collier that Menchell had dealt with loss. In fact, the play is partially inspired by Menchell's mother, an actress-singer who retired from the stage for more than a decade after the crushing blow of her husband's death in 1979.
"Each of the three women in 'The Cemetery Club' is at a different point in their grieving process," Collier says. "[Doris] is obviously not going to move past her husband's death. [Ida] is still respectful of her marriage, but is ready to explore having a new relationship.
"And [Lucille] has moved well beyond her husband's death since her marriage was not that happy."
Leslie Mizell has been covering the Triad's theater scene for more than a decade. Her column runs weekly in Go Triad. Contact her at LAMizell@aol.com.
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