INSIDE BOB FOREMAN'S BRAIN PART 2: RURAL FELICITY: THE BARN DINNER THEATRE (PONCE PRESS)

Once upon a time when cattle outnumbered cars, there was a magical kingdom, located slightly north of the Chattahoochee on US 41, where Atlantans of discriminating taste could travel back in time to Johnny Reb’s Dixieland or Aunt Fanny’s Cabin, or for the children, there were twenty living fairy tales over at Story Land. Up the road a piece was the first dinner theatre built in Georgia, namely the Marietta Barn, which opened to raves in April, 1965.

The newest addition to a circuit which included identical theatres in-the–round in Richmond and Greensboro, Barn Dinner Theatres were the brainchildren of quirky inventor Howard D. Wolfe who devised and patented the 16 by 16 foot “magic stage,” an open elevator platform upon which the actors would descend into the auditorium deus ex machina to begin the play, then rise at act’s end.

A buffet offering of genuine country victuals occupied the stage space pre-curtain, surrounded by 288 patrons at deuce and four-top tables. The whole affair was conducted in a new building made to look old by Wolfe who wanted a barn to look like a barn. The profits from the Marietta operation paid off building costs within less than a year, when a dinner and show ticket cost six dollars.

Jointly owned by longtime Mariettans Ed and Helen Talley and managed for years by their son Douglass, the local Barn was strictly a family affair. During the first years the monthly stage offerings were cast and rehearsed in New York City under Wolfe’s supervision and trouped around a circuit which grew like Topsy. Eventually there were twenty-seven Barns, located exclusively in the Confederate states and New Mexico, the exception to prove the rule.

Actors were originally given communal housing above the auditorium, and the players served as humble “waitrons” before taking their places onstage. Later the Marietta Barn became the regional tour producer, with twelve annual productions playing a wheel of barn and non-barn venues alike.

The Talleys constructed a spacious actor house behind the Barn creating a sort of perpetual summer stock, and attempts by Actor’s Equity to bust up a system which provided year-round employment to a hundred plus non-union actors proved unsuccessful.

Marietta outlasted all competition including a second barn constructed adjacent to Greenbriar Mall in 1967; the Tally-Ho of Sandy Springs; the Buckhead Harlequin; and Portman’s disastrous circular folly, the Midnight Sun, an Equity star house.

Add into the Barn’s equation for success New York trouper Mel Glass, the self-proclaimed “best dinner theatre director in the country” who staged the lion’s share of Doug Talley’s productions.

“The most important thing for dinner theatres is a supply of good light comedy,” mused Glass who presented a steady diet of the same as well as light musicals, ranging from “How Success Spoiled Rock Hunter” to “Lock Up Your Daughters.”

Nevertheless, Glass beat out the artsy in-town crowd in 1978 when the Barn was awarded three coveted ACDC awards for “The Good Doctor,” a Neil Simon paean to Anton Chekhov.

In September, 1980, Glass who had hoped to remain in Atlanta until he went to “that great dinner theatre in the sky” got his wish when he dropped dead onstage while playing the title role in “Fiddler on the Roof” at age 60. Four doctors in the house could not halt his theatrically excessive exit which Glass had precisely predicted to a reporter the day before.

The Barn shuttered three months later, immediately demolished to make way for a much-needed vacant lot.

---Bob Foreman