Dear Friends,

My Pop received a diagnosis of cancer in November 2008.  He listened and blinked and said to his doctor, “Well let’s get it taken care of quick ‘cause I have a play to do in Peterborough this summer!”  A play to do in Peterborough this summer. Words that had great meaning for my father throughout his wonderful life.

James Whitmore was an actor, but the story of how his career began is not universally known.  Mustered out of the Marine Corps at the end of the Second World War, he hit the streets of New York City with a dream that he had nurtured in the chaos and terror of the Pacific:  To become an ACTOR!

He was a farm boy from Buffalo who had thought about becoming a Presbyterian minister, like his father before him, but had fallen in love with Gilbert and Sullivan.  The war experience had made it clear that he better go after what he wanted in life!  No matter how farfetched.

So, he hit the bricks in New York and started learning his craft and auditioning for jobs.  He got a job in early 1947.  He was hired to work at a summer stock theatre way up in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Before he left New York he was in a scene class at the American Theatre Wing.  A casting lady came in from the rain and sat in the back of the theatre.  She was waiting for a cab.  While she waited, she watched.  She noticed the stocky kid on stage, he was a good actor and seemed like the Marine that he was.  A few days later she was having a meeting with Kermit Bloomgarten – a big Broadway producer.  He was producing a new show about the war Command Decision starring Paul Kelly, and he was looking for a new guy to play Kelly’s adjutant.  An important part.  But he needed a kid who he could believe was military.  The casting agent thought of the tough kid she had seen doing the scene on that rainy afternoon.  He was perfect!  But who was he???  She tracked him down and found out his name.  The problem was he had left town a few days ago and was starting that summer stock job.
 
So, she called up to Peterborough Players and told the kid to get back to New York!  He said “No I can’t risk this job! It’s the first paying job I’ve gotten as an actor and I’m not blowing it!”  As luck and fate would have it, the woman who founded the Players, Edith Bond Stearns overheard the conversation and told my Dad, “You must go to the city and audition for this role, and I will pay your way.  You cannot pass up chances like this.”

My old man did what she said and after several auditions which took him back and forth to NY a few times, he got the job!!  Mrs. Stearns footed the entire bill for all the train rides, and she kept a place for him in the Players company that entire season.

My Dad met my Mom at the Players that summer and they got married at the church in Dublin. I showed up the next year.  Command Decision got 21 curtain calls opening night!  Pops was on his way to a career as an actor that few have matched for integrity and commitment to craft.

James Whitmore made his bones in Hollywood but never stopped going back to the theatre. It was the source of it all.  It all began with Edith Bond Stearns and Peterborough Players.

In 1998 Pops was in Peterborough doing his renowned one man show, ”Will Rogers USA.”  He was once again feeling the excitement of the place, the dedication to doing great work, and the young people working hard.  He remembered his beginnings.

Gus Kaikkonen asked if Dad would be interested in coming back in 2000 and doing “The Stage Manager” in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, for the millennial.  “If I’m alive, I’ll be here” Dad said.  He was and he was!!   And so, James Whitmore started another run at the Players, one which lasted to the end of his life.

In 2004 he invited me to leave my TV and film work to come to the source.  We did Inherit the Wind together and Tuesday’s with Morrie here at the Players.  I got to finally give my Dad something back after all he’d given me.

My Dad had found his Oasis at the end of his life!  A place to explore great plays with wonderfully gifted collaborators.  The seasons were rich in tradition and classism.  Gus pushed the envelope into groundbreaking and edginess.

The Players is a cultural treasure which continues today.  With Tom Frey ascending to the role of Artistic Director, this place is more alive than ever.

Mr. Frey’s vision for coming out of the pandemic was with a dynamite Grand Restart lineup, -- Our Town, downtown in the town, BEEHIVE: the 60s Musical, and the US premiere of Where You Are -- all staged in beautiful outdoor environments for the times we’re living thru. And, this spring my daughter called me very excited and said, “Dad I can’t believe it,  I have a play to do in Peterborough this summer!”  There she was Mrs. Gibbs, Peterborough Players 2021.  She was wonderful!
 
It is an exciting time for the theatre.  It’s also a life and death time for the theatre.

The Peterborough Players is a bastion of excellence and commitment to all that makes us great as a country and a species.  The human heart does not keep beating in a vacuum.  It takes support.
 
Help us please!  Will you join me now in making a generous gift to the Players Annual Fund at this important time?  Let’s keep this national treasure alive and thriving.
 
Thank you,

James Whitmore, Jr.

Dear Friends,
 
Spring is here! I’m sitting on the porch as I write to you, windows finally open. After the challenges and heartbreak that have marked the past year, I am beginning to feel a great deal of renewed hope and excitement about the future, bit by vaccinated bit. I hope you share this feeling.
 
Your support and encouragement have made the current “forced intermission” at the Players much more bearable and have allowed us to think creatively about our future.  Thank you.
 
The past year has given us an opportunity to imagine how we will be an even better Peterborough Players. In addition to the public health concerns brought about by the pandemic and the need to put audience, performer, and staff safety first, there is a renewed call for equity, diversity, and inclusion in the theatre and the world right now.
 
We want to answer this call.  As a result, we have spent our intermission not only planning for when we can produce live theatre again, but also asking bigger questions:  Who do we want to be?  What can we do now to help ensure the future of the Players?  What is the theatre’s responsibility to this town, this region, and beyond?
 
We envision a chance to create art with gratitude for all the support you have shown us and with a sense of renewed energy in knowing we have an opportunity to be part of the healing.
 
I am thrilled to tell you now that the Players plans to restart with three plays this summer, beginning in early August. All will be produced in a way that is safe and comfortable for our audiences, as well as inclusive and equitable for our artists. 
 
As far back as last summer, we knew that the play we would return with would need to be one of historic significance, a play that we had a deep relationship to, one that would speak of where we’ve been, where we are now, and where we’re going.  We had to reach deep into the DNA of the Players and hear what it had to tell us.  Any guesses?  You got it: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town! 
​
This summer we will produce the familiar in a bold new way.  We are proposing a two-week run of Our Town to be performed outdoors, in downtown Peterborough, on the Green between the Guernsey Building and the Town House.  In this way the town of Peterborough itself becomes a backdrop to the performance.  
 
Our Town will be followed by two additional shows, outdoors on the Players grounds, that also speak to this moment in time, and provide some much-needed celebration.       
 
As we all begin to emerge from the pandemic, the Peterborough Players intends to be part
of the harmonizing force represented in Our Town, a force that, to paraphrase Wilder, helps us all “to realize life while we live it—every, every minute”.        
 
Restarting the Players requires a significant investment. Your support of this is vital in our achieving this unprecedented event, vital in helping us express that the Players has been listening and is responding to the changes in the world around us, vital to continuing to build the future of
our Theatre.
 
As we realize life, and the joy that the Players brings to our lives and the Monadnock Region, I ask you to consider making a generous donation today.  Your support now is vital towards the Grand Restart.
 
As I put away my winter boots and look forward to lacing up my sneakers, the anticipation
of returning to the stage with my family of artists, surrounded by you my Players family in the audience, makes me feel buoyant. There’s hope in the air.
 
           
With Gratitude,

Tom Frey
Associate Artistic Director

Dear Peterborough Players,
​
Here we are nearing the end of the uniquely challenging 2020. How are you?

I am by nature an optimist and a problem solver; this year, however, has gotten to me.
I have felt deep sadness and a sense of loss. I have missed all of you. I miss welcoming you as you arrive for a show. I miss hearing your voices between acts. I miss the joyful energy I feel every time I am in the audience with you.

Thankfully, Peterborough Players' family has held strongly together. Your outpouring of encouragement, kind words, support, and enthusiastic engagement in the many events we have hosted, by necessity online, have been uplifting.

Live theatre is a dialogue between artists and audience. Without both of these essential and very human elements, it cannot work. Your faithful continuation of this dialogue, despite the difficulties of this year in which we have had to be apart, has been a boost to our spirits and a lifeline to the continuing mission of the Peterborough Players. Thank you!

My grandmother, Edith Bond Stearns, a single mother of three, founded the theatre in the depths of the Great Depression. While the Players grew during that harrowing time, it went on hiatus from 1943 to 1945 while the United States was at war and closed twice in the 1970s due to my mother’s health. In our 87-year history, the Peterborough Players has been no stranger to difficult times. Each time with love and support, and so, so many people deeply wanting this theatre, in this community, the Players came back.

Today we find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic in a year that has seen economic uncertainty and social upheaval. A return to live theatre, with its power to feed souls and encourage healing, feels urgent.

There is lots of hard work to do for the future of your Players, and we are gratefully absorbed in that work now. We are planning theatre that is innovative, inclusive, welcoming, and expresses our gratitude. And, of course, we will produce it in a way that is safe for all involved. We are eager to see you in person again. To have that dialogue between artists and audience. My optimistic nature is greatly anticipating that moment.

Please help us re-start your playhouse by making a year-end donation at this critical moment. Doing so will allow us to share the gift of exceptional, live, professional theatre with you again in 2021.
​
In the meantime, know you are missed. Be well. I look forward to welcoming you back to your Peterborough Players next summer.

With great gratitude,

Beth Brown
Advancement Director

PS – Have you seen the plaques listing all the seasons for the first 66 years, hanging under the shed roof outside the old entrance to the theatre? I was a teenager before I realized 1943 1944 1945 GONE TO WAR, was not a ‘hit show’ we did for three years!

Dear Friends,
 
Thank you for your support of the Players over the years.  You make the Players possible.  In these challenging times, we recognize that things other than theatre may be at the front of your mind.
 
I’m sitting safely alone in the empty house of the Players looking at the dark stage as I begin to write this, and I am struck by the fact that I’m not thinking about the productions we aren’t able to do this year (as painful as that is).  I am thinking about dinner tables. 
 
I’m thinking that this summer, when you would have been clearing up dinner to come to the Players, you may linger a little longer at your table instead.  And perhaps, there will only be those sheltering with you at that table.  What stories will you tell together then?
 
There is a table in Beth Brown’s dining room that was her mother’s, and her grandmother’s before that. When Sally Brown ran the theatre, it was where people would gather after performances to let off steam, tell stories, and “pour Scotch over wounded egos”.  Often after everyone else left, former Artistic Director Charles Morey and Sally would sit and plot the future of the Players until late into the night.  I have had the privilege to sit at that table, have dinner with fellow Peterborough Players, trade stories, and do a little good plotting ourselves.
 
            That table hums with the energy of all the artists who ever gathered around it. 
 
There is another dinner table at the Morison House, where Gus and Kraig have lived every summer for 24 years.  Around it on opening nights we stand, eating and drinking and laughing, relieved that the barn has afforded us yet another Peterborough miracle.  The play opened.  We said most of the words.  People applauded.  No one got hurt.
           
                                              That table will be silent this summer. 
 
When I was a boy, it was my (loathsome) job to set the table.  I come from a family of 7 children, so it took forever, it seemed, to my little brain.  I would put it off in every way possible until my father would find me wherever I was in the house, come up behind me, and startle me with, “That table won’t set itself, chum”.  (I could have sworn he was out mowing the lawn.  I could have sworn I still heard the mower running.  But that’s a different story.)
 
Our playhouse will come back, and we with it.  The theatre will be a welcome escape, a destination for healing, and a place of inclusion.  Historically, theatres that are able to survive difficult times often come back stronger.
 
                 But only if we can keep the table set, and that table will not set itself. 
 
Your donation to the Annual Fund at this critical time when we have no revenue will make that possible.  It will help us keep the lights on and allow us to use this forced intermission to re-examine and reimagine what your Peterborough Players will be for the next generation.  If we can do this together, the season Gus and Keith put together for us next will be a feast we will never forget. 
 
In the meantime, we miss you. Perhaps some evening this summer around 7:30pm, if you’re still at the table, you could share a good Peterborough Players story.
 
With deep gratitude,

Tom Frey
Associate Artistic Director
 
PS -- Stay safe and healthy. We’ll get through this together, apart.  We are strong people.  We are Peterborough Players.  All of us.  Peace to you.

Dear Peterborough Players,
 
"Walk right in, sit right down.” The voice of Bridget Beirne – or was it Patsy Cline? – still rings in my ears weeks after the last note sounded on stage. How often that is the case with what we see and hear at Peterborough Players, themes and language and characters returning to pose questions or revive the pleasures of a performance.

And you can “let your mind roll on” throughout the year, through the familiar sequence of the seasons of the theatre, with live theatre, and screenings from The Met:  Live in HD, and the National Theatre Live keeping us warm through the winter.

But behind the scenes, nothing beats the excitement of finalizing a plan for the summer  – this year including a musical and a mystery, along with a range of plays known and new – and readying for the arrival of astonishingly gifted college students and recent graduates to form the second company.
 
The ground hasn’t thawed from winter, but our Artistic Director Gus Kaikkonen and Managing Director Keith Stevens are putting all the pieces together to launch the first play in June. Gus and Keith have been doing this for 25 years!!! Selecting plays, auditioning hundreds of actors, hiring technical staff, setting the season in motion so that each production emerges – from just two weeks of rehearsal – polished and compelling. We shall want to applaud Gus and Keith for their 25-year run especially this season, but they will only want to know what you enjoyed in the most recent production.
 
We can all play a role in readying for another outstanding summer season. Preparing for the season entails deposits and royalties and purchases and contracts. Donations early in the year make these commitments possible. I hope you will join me in making a gift to Peterborough Players that will help launch a sparkling 2020 summer season.
 
Please consider making a generous donation today.  Your gift at this time will make a difference.  
 
With warmest thanks,
 
Jacqueline Smethurst
President, Board of Trustees
 
PS -- Your contribution is vital to keeping the Players vibrant.  Thank you! 

​Dear Peterborough Players,
 
As Gus and I prepare for our 25th summer season here at Peterborough Players, I want to say thank you!
 
The Players has certainly accomplished much in the last quarter century. 
 
With your help, the Players now offers something in every season.  The Players has expanded from five plays in the summer to twelve plays throughout the year, augmented by the Arts on Screen series featuring high definition screenings from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the National Theatre in London, and more.  The Second Company has grown to a nationally recognized summer internship program that has had great success in contributing to the careers of many theatre professionals.
 
The common thread through all of this has been you.  Your attendance at the shows and your generous contributions have been the key to everything.  The Players is your theatre.
 
A vibrant Peterborough Players contributes to the quality of life here in the Monadnock Region.  A producing theatre with loyal audiences is a strong economic driver for the community. Thoughtful productions spark conversations.  Entertaining shows provide an escape from the everyday.  A strong internship program not only ensures the next generation of theatre artists, but also provides quality plays for children and families.
 
As I look back over 24 years, I don’t have a favorite production specifically, but I do have a favorite moment that repeats itself.  I like sitting in the back of the house watching the audience watch the performance.  While it is gratifying to hear you laugh at comedic moments, and to experience the cheers at the end of the show, I live for the silence.  When everyone is on the edge of their seats and the room is so quiet you can hear a pin drop, I know we have made a real connection with you.
 
Theatre is a shared experience among the audience, the performers onstage, and everyone working backstage.  In this electronic era, it is possible for all of us to be both wired to the world and to be totally isolated from each other.  If you believe as I do that human beings are meant to connect with each other to share experiences, the Peterborough Players provides a very special place for people to come together. 
 
Please make a generous contribution to the Annual Fund today.  Ticket sales cover only 60% of our operating expense.  We need your support.  There is much still to do to secure the future of the Players.
 
You may return a check or credit card donation in the envelope provided.  Or, if you prefer, call the Players’ office at (603) 924-9344, or visit www.peterboroughplayers.org and click on DONATE to make a secure online donation. Contributions are tax deductible as allowed by law. 
 
Fellow Peterborough Players, your donation will help us continue to provide the high-quality, meaningful entertainment that has enabled your theatre to keep on going and growing.  We are deeply grateful for your support. 
 
With gratitude,
 

 
Keith Stevens
Managing Director
 
PS -- Your contribution is vital to keeping the Players vibrant.  Thank you! 
 
 

​Dear Peterborough Players Family,
​
Thank you so much for your support of the Players.  Your generosity has helped us make award-winning theatre, right here in the Monadnock region in this beautiful setting. 
My dad, who was a great, steady, quiet and unassuming dad, only had a 4th grade education.  His father took him out of school in Kaleva, Michigan in 1915 so he could help support the family by working in a lumber mill. As an adult he worked 36 years in Chrysler’s Lynch Road plant in Detroit, raised four children and had been married to my mom for 50 years when he passed away in 1980.

I also started working when I was in 4th grade—in the theatre.  Nobody forced me to go—in fact, exactly the opposite, and it would be several years before I made my first salary: $10 a week (which I got to keep) at the American Drama Festival, at Dearborn’s Henry Ford Museum.

Was my father supportive?  He didn’t say.  One time I said to him, “You know you never come to see me in any of my plays,” and he said, “And you don’t come to watch me work.”  It hit my ears as more of an embrace than you might think, because he dignified what I was doing with the word “work.”  A lot of the actors you see at the Players have been working in the theatre since we were children. Working at making meaningful art.

But the art of theatre requires you.  Art happens in the air between the stage and the audience. When the hours of work invested by the playwrights, directors, actors, designers and technicians combine to take the audience on a collective journey.

Last summer one of our volunteers approached me after a talkback.  “Gus, I’m so sorry not to have been around as often as usual.”  Before I could say it was all right, we all get busy, she continued: “My husband’s been ill and just passed away, so I haven’t been getting out. But I’m so glad I came today because it was the first time I’ve been able to laugh.” We forget the power the theatre can have. 

I just counted, and Keith and I have produced 214 plays in the 24 years we have been at the Players.  It has been an honor to bring so much work here.

To perform a good play, to bring light and laughter to an intelligent group of people who want to reflect on the world, is absolute heaven to us. Tickets pay for only about 60% of what it costs to operate the Players. We rely on you to help us make up the rest.
And so, this is a love letter. To all of you. I want to tell you how grateful we are that we found you. That we found each other. That five or six—or ten times a year we get to share the experience of making art. Together.

My dad was onstage himself for a short run.  Only a couple of years before Mrs. Stearns started producing plays in Peterborough, my dad was in a bar in Detroit, when a fellow “in a suit” turned to him and said, “I need a hick who can sing.  You look like a hick, can you sing?”

My dad had just come out of the Army Air Corps, was unemployed and said he thought everyone could sing.  He spent the next two weeks doing six shows a day in vaudeville at the Capitol Theater (now the Detroit Opera House).  The act was a hit, but after two-weeks the man “in the suit” disappeared, no one got paid, and my dad found a job at the Briggs plant.  (Who knows, had my dad run into Mrs. Stearns instead of a fly-by night producer, I might have been born in a theatrical trunk!)

In our 86th summer, we are producing 9 plays by American playwrights, including two deeply connected to the Monadnock region (Russell Davis and Charles Morey.)  Off-season we present an array of HD events, bringing the Metropolitan Opera and National Theatre to Peterborough, and now we’re proudly producing a three play Winter Season too.

We hope to provide an escape and provoke many hundreds of discussions. Please help us continue, dear Players, with a donation to the Annual Fund today.  Your gift makes a significant difference in our ability to bring you the best plays with the best talent we can find from the Monadnock region and all over the country.

Thank you for your generosity in making this theatre, your theatre, possible.
​
With deep appreciation,

Gus Kaikkonen
Artistic Director
 
PS – We look forward to welcoming you here to the Players this summer!