Arts & Entertainment Community

Ghostlight gets the green light for new theater home on Fox Island

Posted on October 28th, 2024 By: Carolyn Bick

Rex Davison is not a full-time actor. He’s actually a real estate agent.

But this gives him a lot of flexibility, he explained while unwinding after a long day of moving boxes from Ghostlight Performing Arts’ old space in Bremerton to the small company’s new home at the Nichols Community Center on Fox Island.

“I think most community theaters dream of something like this happening — ‘I just need someone who wants us in their building and appreciates us,’” Davison said.

Nichols board OK’s the move

Davison said Ghostlight got the green light for the move at a mid-September meeting of the Nichols Community Center board. Board members “were so supportive during the board meeting.” The troupe has since signed the lease with the community center.

The board is also being particularly generous, he said, and not asking Ghostlight to pay rent until January. Davison said the board wants to make sure the troupe and the community center are a good fit for each other.

Ghostlight plans to regularly rent out the place much like a tenancy. It will schedule rehearsals and performances around other groups’ scheduled rentals of the community center, so as not to impact the community center’s needed revenue streams.

The Nichols Community Center on Fox Island in Washington State, seen here on Oct. 25, 2024. Photo by Carolyn Bick. © Carolyn Bick.

“We publish our calendar online and so (Rex is) thoughtful enough to go around whatever we have scheduled,” Candy Wawro, the Nichols Community Center board chair, said. “He’s really only using it when other people are not, so it hasn’t caused any friction at all.”

Ghostlight formed in shadow of pandemic

Davison formed Ghostlight at the tail end of 2019. Against what seemed like impossible odds that forced many performing arts groups to disband — including Gig Harbor’s Paradise Theatre — the nonprofit survived the early years of the pandemic.

“We kept fundraising through (the early years of the pandemic), anyway,” Davison said. “We would do all the festivals, and the Maritime Festival, and the Trunk-or-Treats, and everything we could.”

Starting in 2022, Ghostlight teamed up with PenMet Parks to offer two weeks of summer camps for kids. The first year found the camps at Rosedale Hall, but they have since moved to Sehmel Homestead Park. The first week is a camp for kids ages 7-10, and the second week is for older children and teens ages 11-15.

For the little kids, Davison had AI write five “really short plays.”

“Their attention spans are like gnats,” he said with a laugh. The troupe lets them get all their energy out with games like Red Rover and name games, before settling them down to read through the short scripts. The second day is much the same, Davison said, except kids will get assigned parts in the plays. They perform the play at the end of the week in costumes they and the troupe members have decorated together.

This year’s play theme was superheroes, and each play carried a message about how to treat one another. For instance, Davison said, one play focused on bullying.

“It was a little superhero kid always talking to a bad kid who wanted to be good,” Davison said of the plays. “Each one had a moral and a lesson.”

Rex Davison, Mykahla George and Lauren Foley perform part of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in Ghostlight Performing Arts’ production of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) revised, (again)” at Sehmel Park on Aug. 10, 2024. Photo by Marsha Hart

Scripts on a budget

For the older kids, the troupe buys the rights to a play — which, Davison learned, don’t come cheap, if the plays are from big names, or are popular and routinely performed. Davison remembered one of the troupe members looking up the rights to You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

“And it was $65,000,” Davison said. “And it was only to do like two or three weekends. It’s still licensed and it’s still popular and they’re still doing it in big places, so it’s a big production. … You not only pay for the scripts, but you have to pay for the score and the tracks — you have to pay for everything. And it’s really expensive.”

Since Ghostlight doesn’t quite rake in that kind of cash, Davison said he opts for more condensed or lesser-known plays, both for the older campers and for the troupe itself.

This fall’s performances

This year, he said, the company will be performing A Taffeta Christmas, which is a 1950s-style musical revue that takes place in one room.

“It’s four sisters, adult sisters, who moved to (Los Angeles), and they became kind of quasi-famous,” Davison said. “And so, in this play, they come back home to Muncie, Indiana, and do a radio show for Christmas Eve for everyone in their hometown. So the play takes place in the recording studio.”

As it so happens, the playwright, Rick Lewis, lives in Portland, Oregon — and the night before Gig Harbor Now spoke with Davison, Lewis messaged Davison to tell him he would be attending a performance.

“And I’m like, ‘Oh no. Please don’t hate me for what I’ve done,’” Davison said. “I go, ‘Rick, this is my first time directing. Please be kind.’”

Performance in lieu of rent

Wawro said that in addition to making sure Ghostlight and the center are good fits for each other, A Taffeta Christmas is part of the reason the center will not be charging Ghostlight any rent until January.

Last year, the board put on a musical performance for folks who weren’t interested in the other Christmas activities on the island. It wanted to do the same this year.

“Well, it just so happens that the play that he’s doing is a musical performance,” Wawro said. “And so this was a nice trade for us. We don’t pay for it and he doesn’t pay rent [until January].”

Ghostlight will debut their performance of A Taffeta Christmas at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 29. There will be another 7:30 p.m. performance on Saturday, Nov. 30 and a 2 p.m. performance on Sunday, Dec. 1. The following weekend, Ghostlight will perform A Taffeta Christmas at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 6; 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 7; and 2 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 8. Interested theatre-goers can buy tickets online.