The story below is from our September/October 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Photos Courtesy of Salem Historical Society
For three summers in the 1950s, the Roanoke Valley was home to the nation’s only outdoor religious drama.
Jim Goodwin was a man of vision. In 1928, he and a friend purchased a tract of land between Roanoke and Salem to create an upscale resort. With a view of the Alleghany Mountains to the west and the Blue Ridge to the east, the men believed they could fashion a retreat that would become a tourist mecca. But there was one problem. The tract did not have an adequate water supply. Undeterred, Goodwin then decided to turn the land into a cemetery, and Sherwood Burial Park came into being.
As Goodwin’s cemetery developed, he still maintained a passion for creating something that would be a commercial and cultural benefit to the Roanoke Valley. So in the early 1940s, Goodwin conceived the building of an amphitheatre within Sherwood. The venue, created to mimic Roman architecture, contained an expansive stage with a multi-column and stone concaved backdrop made of limestone and granite. The terraced seating accommodated 2,000 patrons. Goodwin’s desire was that his amphitheatre would host religious dramas, Easter sunrise services and sacred concerts. In a 1958 interview, Goodwin said, “Because this is a sacred place to so many persons, they would have to be plays or dramas of a religious nature.”
The 1950s was a decade when outdoor dramas were at their zenith. Almost all had themes dealing with American history. Set in mid-sized and even small communities, the plays provided opportunities not just for wholesome entertainment but for attracting visitors and their dollars. The first such tableau was “The Lost Colony at Roanoke Island,” which debuted in 1937. Others quickly followed, such as “The Common Glory” at Williamsburg, “Unto These Hills” in Cherokee, NC, and “Horn in the West” at Boone, NC, among numerous others. The outdoor dramas provided training for aspiring actors and technicians, usually college students, and conveyed narratives on a large-scale with dance, music and spectacle.
Goodwin believed Sherwood’s amphitheatre was the perfect setting for the Roanoke Valley to have an outdoor, symphonic drama of its own. Being true to his conviction that Sherwood was a sacred place, he connected with Kermit Hunter of Hollins College about writing the script for a religious production. Hunter was indeed the right man for the job. Hunter had written the scripts for the very popular “Horn in the West” and “Unto These Hills,” but he had also written numerous other plays, some religious, and would become the nation’s most successful and prolific writer of outdoor dramas. Having arrived at Hollins in 1955 as a drama instructor, Hunter took up the challenge to craft a sweeping religious pageant for Sherwood’s setting, and the end result was an epic based on the life of the Apostle Paul titled “Thy Kingdom Come.”
To finance and promote the production, the Roanoke Valley Drama Association, a non-profit, was created that sold shares in the play. By the spring of 1957, Hunter’s play was complete and tryouts were launched for the nearly 100 openings for the cast and crew. Some sang in a chorus, others had minimal speaking parts, and a select few were awarded the more considerable roles in the depiction of the Christian apostle’s life. In addition to the cast, technicians, seamstresses and backstage crew were secured. Casting calls were held locally but also in other communities throughout Virginia and North Carolina. One who garnered a role in the play, though not the lead, was David Huddleston, who would go on to a prolific career in film and television and received an Emmy nomination. “Thy Kingdom Come” premiered in June of 1957 for its first summer season. Patrons parked along the serpentine drives within Sherwood and watched under a starry sky. The play ran through the end of August, and by closing night over 22,000 persons had attended the nation’s only outdoor religious drama. Most had been locals.
The drama, with its clear moral tone and commercial draw, was touted by local civic organizations for its second season. Lions Clubs throughout the Roanoke Valley helped sell tickets, and churches promoted it within their respective denominations. Preparation for the second season was much like that for the first with multiple audition sessions and small tweaks to the script and staging. By the end of the second season, however, attendance had dropped slightly. Most locals who had seen the production in the inaugural summer did not return for the second. Thus, the Roanoke Valley Drama Association knew they needed to do more to attract beyond the region in order make Thy Kingdom Come to Roanoke what Horn in the West was to Boone.
The third season opened in June 1959 for the normal 10-week run, but the show was plagued by rain during the first four weeks. Thunderstorms cut short many of the productions, and tourist attendance did not materialize. By early August, only ten percent of the 2,000-seat amphitheatre was being filled, and most of the ticket-holders had purchased the cheaper seats on the top, back tier. In an effort to salvage the season, the crew went on a tour of the state, making day trips to perform vignettes of the play to lunch-time audiences with the hopes of attracting them to the full-scale production. The strategy did not work. Thus, by mid-August, the drama association announced with much regret that Thy Kingdom Come would not complete its season and closed for good. The cast and crew did, however, perform one last time on August 31 before a packed amphitheatre, as Kroger had bought out that night’s production for its annual employees’ summer picnic.
The story above is from our September/October 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
