Old Greenbelt Theatre celebrated its third birthday on Sunday, May 6 by looking to the past and then to the future. The first performance of the evening was the play Danger, a drama set in a Welsh coalmine after a cave-in. The play, originally commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation, had been performed in Greenbelt on May 6, 1938, according to Chris Cherry, coordinator of the city’s 80th anniversary celebration. The show was designed as a radio play. Since the actors would have been in the darkness of a mine, the cast stayed behind the screen and the audience stared at a large 80-year-old radio for the 20-minute production. Only when the cast came out for a curtain call was the danger, and the suspenseful drama, truly over.
With much applause, the audience shifted to a more lighthearted mode: The premiere of an experimental movie made by 17 children who attended a workshop called Let’s Make a Movie! The workshop was funded with a grant from the Greenbelt Community Foundation. Children, ages 6 to 12, attended the April 29 workshop and used blank or discarded filmstrips to draw, paint and write words. Some of the filmstrips had images embedded on them, so there was a delightful recurring giraffe. After the short feature, the filmmakers addressed the audience and gleefully explained their motivation and techniques.
The young movie-makers and the rest of the audience ended the evening with cupcakes to celebrate the theater’s third birthday. “It was a great success,” said Caitlin McGrath, Old Greenbelt Theatre executive director. “There was a lot of interest in having another. We will work at getting another grant.”
