Michener Museum exhibit tells Bucks County Playhouse's 75-year story

IF YOU'RE schlepping out to Doylestown to take in the Grace Kelly exhibit at the Michener Art Museum, make sure you leave an hour or so to check out another multimedia historical exhibit there, dedicated to something that is as much a part of the region's pop-culture history as Her Serene Highness.

The program's title, "Local Mill Makes Good," may be a little jokey, but its subject and the scores of pieces contained within are nothing less than fascinating. The display, which runs through March 2, tells the story of New Hope's 75-year-old Bucks County Playhouse.

The playhouse was founded in 1938 (it opened in '39) by local resident Don Walker, a Broadway orchestrator, inside a closed 18th-century gristmill on a plot of land between the Delaware River and Main Street. Conceived as a summer-stock venue and laboratory for new projects by such illustrious part-time area residents as Pulitzer-winning playwrights Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, it quickly became a popular and influential stop on the East Coast's theatrical circuit.

By the late 1970s, the playhouse's halcyon era had faded, a victim of changing tastes and economics, as well as the loss of the all-important affiliation with Actors Equity, the professional stage actors' union. While it remained open until late last decade, it spent the better part of 35 years as a low-level operation in a constant state of disrepair. It shut in 2009.

In 2010, the nonprofit Bridge Street Foundation bought the property and instituted a restoration and revival that today has the playhouse back in the front ranks of regional theater. It has already premiered two major works - a version of the Stephen King story "Misery," written by multiple-Oscar-winner William Goldman, and Terrence McNally's "Mothers and Sons" - which is headed to Broadway.

But during its 1940s-through-'60s heyday, a Who's Who of American show business performed at the playhouse, both established heavyweights (Helen Hayes, Angela Lansbury) and unknown up-and-comers destined to leave deep footprints across the show-business landscape (the aforementioned Kelly, Robert Redford, Dick Van Dyke, Liza Minnelli). It also introduced plays from top authors, including Neil Simon, who debuted three of his shows there.

These folks and scores of others - including Merv Griffin, James Earl Jones, Larry Hagman and Harpo Marx - are represented in the exhibition. Their connections to the playhouse are illustrated via posters, production stills, newspaper clippings and other memorabilia.

The traditionally silent Marx Brother, by the way, had a speaking role in a production of Kaufman and Hart's "The Man Who Came to Dinner." His character, Banjo, was a thinly veiled version of himself.

Compiling the collection wasn't quite as simple as you might expect, because as its present became more of a struggle over the years, saving mementos of the theater's past became a low priority.

"The playhouse itself did not have much of anything," offered David Leopold, the freelance curator who assembled "Local Mill Makes Good." In fact, "so many things were thrown away."

Plaques bearing the names and dates of entire seasons "were found in the dumpster by the [theater's] landscaper. He just happened to find them and thought they should be saved. There were no programs. There were no production photos. There were no posters. What the playhouse had was material from the renovated playhouse of the last two years."

Luckily, the Michener's vaults also were a source of memorabilia.

"I wanted to show how New Hope was a river town, just like every town [on the Delaware] before the playhouse opened," he said. "I'm down in the museum's vault, and the registrar of the museum, Sara Buehler, says, 'Oh, we got this Edward Redfield painting a couple of years ago.'

"It's a painting of Redfield standing on what would become the playhouse parking lot looking over to the Benjamin Parry residence [across the street]. It's quite obvious this is not a major metropolis. It tells everything. To have one of the greatest Bucks County painters telling that story for us, to me it sort of hit all the bases."

Another museum-owned gem on view is "Study for the Bucks County Playhouse Stage Curtain," by Charles Child. The piece is essentially a large blueprint from which Child created the playhouse's one-of-a-kind stage curtain. The piece had never been shown before.

The exhibit's artifacts tell a story unique in show-business annals - a story that resonates within the entertainment industry to this day.

"As soon as you see the structure, you just know. It's like Europe; people have been here before. This has that same feeling," actress Marilu Henner told the Daily News last summer, when she was starring in "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife" at the playhouse.

"You say, 'I'm walking in the footsteps of greatness' because you can feel the good ghosts - the good energy - of the actors who were here."