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PIONEER PLAYHOUSE
create costumes for a historic outdoor theater
DANVILLE, KENTUCKY
I never used a blueprint. I would just put up a board and start nailing.
—Eben C. Henson, founder of the Pioneer Playhouse
29 | In 1951, there were only two states with official performing arts commissions: New
York and Kentucky. The Kentucky Arts Council led the country in progressive arts planning,
thanks to a funky outdoor theater in the unlikely town of Danville (pop. 15,477).
It all started in 1950 when Col. Eben C. Henson, a Danville native who had briefly studied
acting in New York, decided to turn a 200-acre cornfield into the Pioneer Playhouse. Lack-
ing sufficient funds to build even so much as a stage, Henson talked a state mental hospital
into hiring him to produce plays while he scrounged up used and abandoned materials for his
theater. Often joking that he was the country's first recycler, Henson traded four bottles of rye
whiskey for the main timber beams, scavenged lights from an ice-cream parlor, and somehow
managed to incorporate a couple of World War II army barracks into the playhouse. He even
hired prisoners from the local county jail to help him lay the first foundations.
His tenaciousness paid off. In the 1950s and '60s, Pioneer Playhouse became known as
the “King of Summer Stocks.” Although Henson passed away in 2004, the Pioneer Playhouse
is going strong nearly six decades after its founding.
Every summer from early June to mid-August, Pioneer Playhouse stages five plays in
ten weeks—and indeed they're still scrounging. The theater depends entirely on volunteers to
make costumes, hang posters, usher, assist backstage, and basically do everything that needs
doing to make sure the five-play season goes off without a hitch.
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