Old Creamery Theater brings culture to Eastern Iowa

The Old Creamery Theater is celebrating its 40^th anniversary in Iowa this year. They started in Garrison, Iowa in 1971.  The first Old Creamery Theater play was Spoon River Anthology at an old dairy farm.

Since then they have performed around 385 plays and musicals including Christmas themes, mysteries, kids plays, and romantic plays. They have many different plays for people of every age and interests.

One of the Christmas plays that went on in December was “Wooden Snowflakes”. “Wooden Snowflakes” is the story of two people with tragic pasts who are joined together on Christmas Eve by a huge blizzard.

“Wooden Snowflakes” is performed by Deborah Kennedy, who plays Eve, and Tom Milligan, who plays Simon.  “The play is a good view on how people deal with tragedy,” Deborah Kennedy said.  The short play was a good reminder on how you can always find love.

“Wooden Snowflakes” was performed on a studio stage in the Old Amana Middle School. A studio stage is a smaller stage where the audience is closer to the performance and the set is usually smaller. “I like being closer to the audience,” Tom Milligan said. Milligan and Kennedy like performing on the studio stage. “Because of the closeness of the audience, it makes it easier to connect the dots of the relationships between characters,” Kennedy said.

The Old Creamery Theater plays are very popular all across Iowa. “The plays are always very well done,” Wendy Ziegler, Kennedy librarian, said. “They plays are small and the actors interact so well with the audience.”  Ziegler used to live in Amana and go to many of the plays in her free time.

Wooden Snowflakes is only the eighth play The Old Creamery Theater had done at the old middle school. Their old studio stage was damaged by the floods of 2008 and they were forced to move into the basement of The Ox Yoke for some of their smaller performances.

The middle school grades moved out of the old middle school leaving the elementary grades and many extra buildings. The school gave The Old Creamery Theater the opportunity to move into the extra rooms the middle school students had been using.  They use the rooms for prop and costume storage. The studio stage actually doubles as the 5^th grade band room.

The Old Creamery Theater had many outreach programs for the students in the school such as giving advice for lighting, sets, and their acting for schools plays and events.  They also offer camps for children  ages seven and up in the summer. At the camp they learn to perform a play directed by some for the actors who work for The Old Creamery Theater.