An Impressive Repertoire
Horse Cave Theatre continues to build national reputation

Shakespeare, Moliere, Wilde, Beckett. The work of these famous playwrights has graced stages from London to Paris to New York to Horse Cave. Yes, Horse Cave, Ky., to be exact. Horse Cave Theatre has a reputation for sophistication and producing challenging works that attracts about 25,000 theater-goers from across the country each season.

There is good reason for that, according to producing director Warren Hammack, who wrote these words two weeks before the opening of the theater’s first performance in June 1977: “Live theatre takes place in the present time; it is always now. When the house lights come up at the end of a play, all that remains is in the minds of those who were there; a memory of an experience shared.”

The Horse Cave Theatre has thrived under his guiding hand, gaining national recognition for outstanding performances and being named the State Theatre of Kentucky in 1996.

Its recently-renovated building is unique in the theater world as well, with its modern lobby of glass and steel positioned so close to Horse Cave that the Hidden River flows beneath the theater’s brick building. The current theater’s 346-seat auditorium is built on the location of an opera house that burned in 1909 and was rebuilt two years later.

Sixty years later, Bill and Judy Austin, descendants of the family that rebuilt the original opera house, came up with the idea to use the building to house a professional repertory theater.

Hammock, a Kentucky native with Hollywood connections was recruited to serve as producing director. The theater’s first production, George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, set the course for more than 20 years of ambitious productions.

A Sturgis, Ky., native and Georgetown College graduate, Hammack studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the Dallas Theater Center. His early career included movie and television roles as well as the part of Polonius opposite Jon Voight’s Hamlet in a Los Angeles stage production.

Hammack and Voight were involved in a short-lived production company. Voight encouraged Hammack to lead the Horse Cave Theatre, offered some financial support and attended the theater’s opening in 1977.

Hammack continues to act in several roles each season and prefers performing to directing or producing. His wife, Pamela White, is the theater’s associate director and also treads the boards several times each year.

“I came to Horse Cave to do good work. I stay because the possibility of doing good work continues to be attainable,” Hammack says.

Through the unique play series called Kentucky Voices, begun in 1981, Horse Cave Theatre develops new plays by or about Kentuckians and produces one of these plays each season. The recent addition of a full-time education director allows the theater to offer schools workshops on a number of theater-related topics. Every summer since its inception, the theater has also offered a three-week student theater workshop and has since added acting and playwriting classes for adults during the winter.

In its 24th season, the theater is planning 135 performances of six major productions.
 

Deanna Mascle is a staff writer for The Lane Report.
deannamascle@lanereport.com

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