Lew Alessio is a retired educator and former public health professional who lives in
Greene. He is also a former actor in Theater at Monmouth productions at Cumston Hall.

1901.

I imagine the Stetson family extinguishing the kerosene lanterns lighting the house that is now my home, hitching the horses to their wagon, and setting out over six miles of dirt roads. In the central Maine village of Monmouth, they leave the wagon in the shed behind a magnificent new Victorian opera house: Cumston Hall.

Financed with a $20,000 gift from Dr. Charles M. Cumston, who then gave the completed building to the town for $1, the hall had been formally dedicated only the previous summer. It was the first building in Monmouth lighted by electricity, generated by its own private plant with power from a nearby shingle mill. In this year of Queen Victoria’s death, the Stetsons join their neighbors inside a jewel box of a theatre unlike anything rural Maine has seen.

Plaster filigree frosts the walls, boxes and proscenium arch. More than 100 stained-glass
windows glow throughout the building. Above the stage, three enormous panels painted by Maine artist Harry Hayman Cochrane contain four allegorical women: Music and Oratory flank the central figures of Comedy and Tragedy.

Tragedy holds a dagger — a fitting emblem for the countless kings, brothers, lovers and rivals who would later be stabbed, poisoned, drowned and beheaded beneath her gaze, only to be restored to life for the curtain call.

What wonders must have awaited those citizens when the stage lights came up! And what wonders continued to appear on that stage for more than a century.

In 1953 — within living memory — the American Savoyards began bringing 10-week seasons of Gilbert and Sullivan to Cumston Hall, performing eight times a week and presenting a different operetta each week — from “The Mikado” and “H.M.S. Pinafore” to “Patience” and “The Pirates of Penzance” — an extraordinary abundance of professional theatre for a small Maine town.

Paved long ago, the road from my house to Cumston Hall is still six miles long. I have traveled it in nearly every role a theatre can offer: audience member, teacher, director, actor, board member, donor and devoted admirer.

***

My partner, Peter Lystad, and I first came from New York as summer visitors, intent upon restoring this old house. When I was offered a position at Monmouth Academy, we moved here permanently in 1974.

Each school day, I traveled those same six miles to teach English and theatre. On a few occasions, I rode my horse, Midnight, to school and pastured him in a student’s field during classes.

I directed “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Carousel,” “The Matchmaker” and other productions on the Cumston Hall stage. To my students, it was an extraordinary place in which to discover theatre. To me, it became inseparable from showing young people what theatre could be.

In 1970, Richard Sewell and Robert Suddards Joyce founded the Theater at Monmouth. Five years later, the Maine Legislature named it the Shakespearean Theater of Maine. It became a professional classical repertory company in which an actor might play a leading role one night and a servant the next, then help move scenery for tomorrow’s play.

For several seasons, I was privileged to be one of those actors.

To an audience, Cumston Hall is a jewel box. To an actor, it was a dream. It could also be an obstacle course.

In our 1979 production of “Henry V,” directed by Richard Sewell, I played the Duke of Exeter. A sharply raked stage suggested the battlefield at Agincourt. It was visually arresting and physically punishing. Night after night, we fought bloody, sword-swinging battles on so steep an incline that our aching bodies required a chiropractor on site.

That same summer, in “Richard III,” I played George, Duke of Clarence, brother to King Edward IV and an inconvenient obstacle to Richard’s ambition.

Shakespeare required that Clarence be stabbed and drowned in a butt of malmsey wine. Our director, Ted Davis, evidently felt Shakespeare had not gone quite far enough.

James Walker and Tim Wheeler, playing the First and Second Murderers, impaled me upon a spring-loaded spike emerging from the ornate stage-right box — the sort of private theatre box forever associated with Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre — and then hurled me into the malmsey cask.

The audience saw castles, armies and kingdoms, royalty, lovers and peasants. Behind them was a backstage scarcely larger than a dining-room table, where actors and stagehands frantically changed costumes and scenery.

An exit on stage left might be followed almost immediately by an entrance on stage right. To get there, we raced in any weather over the creaking boards of an outdoor crossover behind the theatre. Even that was an improvement. Earlier actors had made the crossing by lying flat upon a small wheeled trolley that transported them beneath the stage.

Audiences seldom see the labor, bruises, ingenuity and inspired absurdity required to create an illusion. They see the finished world, but they do more than witness it. They complete it.

In the prologue to “Henry V,” Shakespeare asks whether a small “cockpit” can contain “the vasty fields of France.” He asks the spectators to “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts”:

“Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth.”

Cumston Hall made that compact with its audiences every night. A few boards became a battlefield. A handful of branches became the moonlit forest outside Titania’s Athenian bower. Whole kingdoms unfolded from tiny stage wings.

Local folk and summer visitors climbed the tower stairs and entered worlds created by actors, artisans, technicians and their own imaginations.

In 1980, I played Hortensio in “The Taming of the Shrew,” one of three suitors pursuing Bianca, played by Maryann Plunkett, who would later win a Tony Award for “Me and My Girl.”

My courtship of Bianca was not so dignified. I crawled beneath a bench on which Maryann sat downstage right and emerged from underneath her skirts. It got the expected laugh.

What I did not expect was to lose a contact lens somewhere beneath Maryann Plunkett. The performance continued. During intermission, our stage manager, Michel Kinter, found the lens. I put it back into my eye and finished the play.

***

At Monmouth, the show did, indeed, go on. Then.

Some of that vanished theatre survives in my house: a prop severed head modeled upon the face I had nearly half a century ago — I no longer remember why I was decapitated — and the commedia dell’arte masks Evan Jeffries and I wore as Truffaldino and Brighella in the 1980 production of “The Servant of Two Masters.”

The Theater at Monmouth also gave young people a place to begin. Among its young interns was a local teenager named Patrick Dempsey. I encountered him later, as artistic director of the Maine Acting Company, and offered him the role of young Billy Ray Jr. in our dinner-theatre production of “On Golden Pond” — his first professional acting role.

During rehearsals, he unsuccessfully wooed the waitresses, who regarded him as something of a nerd. I invited him back the following season to appear in “Butterflies Are Free,” which would open our new performance center on Lisbon Street in Lewiston. One evening, Patrick drove to my home for dinner in his new Mercedes-Benz to tell me he had to decline: he had been offered the national tour of “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

Showing me the car, he said proudly, “All my life, I wanted a Mercedes.”

“Patrick,” I said, “you’re 17. What all your life?”

Patrick and Maryann were not alone. Bronson Pinchot became known as Balki on “Perfect Strangers”; David Harbour as Chief Jim Hopper on “Stranger Things”; Timothy Simons as Jonah Ryan on “Veep”; and Lynn Cohen as Magda on Sex and the City — evidence of how far the influence of that little Maine stage could travel.

Their fame makes the names memorable, but fame is not what makes the Theater at Monmouth important. Theatres such as Monmouth welcome young artists before the world knows what they may become.

Nor did the company’s influence remain inside Cumston Hall. Through education tours, it carried Shakespeare and other classic works into schools throughout Maine, particularly rural schools, reaching thousands of students each year. Over 55 seasons, it made professional classical theatre part of the cultural life of a state in which geography and limited resources too often place such experiences far from children and families.

For more than half a century, actors arrived in Monmouth with suitcases, scripts, anxieties, ambitions and impossible summer schedules. They squeezed into tiny dressing rooms, raced along that outdoor crossover, changed characters overnight and made the Bard’s words live.

Then, this summer, the actors did not arrive.

***

In June, the Theater at Monmouth’s Board of Trustees announced that the company would not present its 2026 summer season. Rising production costs and revenue that had failed to keep pace had brought the organization to a point where mounting the season could endanger the institution itself. The board is considering different models and paths forward, but cannot promise what the future will bring.

No rehearsals. No regal banners hanging from Cumston Hall, announcing another summer repertory season. No Theater at Monmouth audience climbing the tower stairs, ready to envision Shakespeare’s “cloud-capped towers” and “gorgeous palaces” within that intimate room.

The Theater at Monmouth and Cumston Hall are separate institutions. Cumston Hall remains the property and gathering place of the town, and others continue to use its stage. But the Theater at Monmouth has inhabited that room since 1970.

Its absence is not merely an empty space in a summer entertainment calendar. It is the possible breaking of a chain connecting those who first entered the electrified hall, the students who discovered theatre there, the young interns, the actors and artisans who created whole worlds upon its tiny stage, the Maine schoolchildren who encountered Shakespeare through its tours, and generations of audiences willing to complete the illusion.

And it includes me.

I mourn not merely a canceled season but the possible loss of a living accumulation of memory: stories and skills passed from one generation to another, and a company that dared to prove that professional classical theatre could flourish in a small Maine town.

The board has not declared the Theater at Monmouth dead. I cannot write its obituary, and I will not speak of it entirely in the past tense.

In 1901, I imagine the Stetsons returning home over six miles of darkened country road, still carrying something of the evening’s performance with them.

More than a century later, I travel the same road in the opposite direction — back toward Cumston Hall, toward the silence where words should be, and toward the hope that its actors and audiences will gather there again.

For the Theater at Monmouth, the stage is dark. I desperately hope this is only an intermission.