Debbie Reynolds champions little theater
A theater production is like a family, Debbie Reynolds said, and she’s willing to work to get her family back.
Reynolds came to Bella Vista in 2000 after she lost her husband. She had been involved in community theater in the Dallas area, beginning when her daughter got involved in high school. She started painting sets and remained a “behind the scenes” person.
As a young adult in Pine Bluff, Reynolds often worked on creative projects like building floats for parades. She painted murals for the Sahara Shriners Center. She was working for a bank when a racehorse named Pine Bluff was entered in the Triple Crown races. She made a giant good luck card which moved from bank lobby to bank lobby so everyone in town had the chance to sign it, and it reached Pine Bluff, the horse, about the time he raced at Belmont — the third race of the triple crown. She doesn’t know what happened to the card, but Pine Bluff didn’t win the Triple Crown, so possibly she ended up making the world’s largest pooper scooper, she laughed.
In Bella Vista, she decided to try acting with The Village Players instead of remaining out of the spotlight.
“That acting bug hit me hard,” she remembered, “It was so much fun.”
The Village Players finally disbanded in 2013. The group had been struggling to find venues for their productions, Reynolds said. Riordan Hall had a small stage and was expensive to rent. They used auditoriums at NWACC and Bentonville High School, but they really needed a home.
Reynolds did some work with the Art Center of the Ozarks in Springdale but she missed the Bella Vista connection. Village Players had helped her through a difficult time, she said.
In 2018, Reynolds was playing Bingo at St. Bernard Catholic Church when she realized the parish hall could be a good venue. The church agreed and helped by building a platform that would become their stage. In return, Reynolds chose the musical “Nunsense,” and became the director. They produced it once at St. Bernard’s, as a fundraiser for the church, and then went on the road to Pine Bluff’s Sahara Shriners Center. The Shriners also used the production as a fundraiser.
Some of the cast members of “Nunsense” became members of the new group, Playwerks, and in 2019, they did a mystery dinner theater at St. Bernard’s called “Murder at the Banquet.”
Last spring, they were getting started on their latest project, “Knickers, A Brief Comedy,” when the coronavirus shut the production down. They had been planning to use Riordan Hall for that and there’s no way of knowing when Riordan may be available again. So the production was put on hold.
Reynolds has been home with her dogs, Eddie Fisher, her “right-hand dog” and
Bailey, a mini dachshund who thinks she’s a queen.
“People are hungry for this. They want this,” Reynolds said of the theater group. “We’re going to get out of this pandemic and have fun again,” she promised.
Playwerks is a nonprofit, and admission fees to the show go to cover the cost of the venue, the script, props and costumes.