About three years ago Marlowe Ferguson and Karen Semones brought their Star City Playhouse to the lower level at the Metropolitan Community Church of the Blue Ridge in Southeast Roanoke. Soon they could be headed back to the Williamson Road area where the couple first started producing plays – most often well-known classics – in 2004.
An actor that used to work with them in New Jersey has died and left money to purchase a building and then renovate it for use as a theater. Joe Mulholland left them enough “to build us a theater anywhere we wanted,” said Ferguson, a Louisville, KY native and an Equity actor for 49 years. Williamson Road is their preferred choice, close to where they live, said Ferguson.
“He was a wonderful actor, a World War II veteran also,” Ferguson recalls, “and in the home where he was living for the last year or two all the girls called him Twinkly Eyes. He was just a charming old fellow.” Ferguson chuckles that Mulholland had a bevy of widows and divorcees that followed him from production to production for years.
Ferguson built plays sets in New York and also worked on the Muppets TV show, where he recalls one of his “proudest moments” was the set he built for the “shootout at the Chicken Ranch.” He always liked set building and directing more than acting and gravitated in that direction.
The new Star City Playhouse will have plenty of parking promises Ferguson, who is grateful to Pastor Joe Cobb at the Metropolitan Church for taking him in when things got tough for a while financially. Woody Allen’s Play it Again Sam, which closed last weekend, was the last play the Star City company will put on until their planned move.
“We have always concentrated on the best plays of the last 150 years,” said Ferguson, “and we look forward [to returning in the fall].” Ferguson says plays written recently and Shakespeare are studied in college, while the works Star City focuses on “are pretty much ignored.” He plans to bring that focus back when Star City Playhouse returns.
Gene Marrano