Jenifer’s  Shelter Island Journal: Playtime, Part I

One of the very first people I met when I moved here full-time some 43 years ago was Jeannie Lawless. The first thing she asked me, after we’d exchanged names, was if I “did theater.” I guess I said “yes.”  She told me about the Shelter Island Players, the community theater group she’d joined a decade before — in the mid 70s — when she’d first arrived on the Island.

She now tells me that her dog had gotten a part first in On Borrowed Time by Paul Osborn and starring Island great, Sidney Beckwith — and subsequently they cast her in what remains, to this day, her favorite role: Aunt Dimitria Riffle.

For the next nearly a decade, the Players became the center of my social and creative life anyway (along with the Shelter Island School Drama Club [SDC], which I founded in 1982 and which, happily, is still going strong). Throughout the 70s, with productions of Arsenic and Old Lace, Separate Tables, George Washington Slept Here and The Mad Woman of Chaillot, among many others, the Players were already a very active group, but by about 1983, it seemed to become supercharged — with so many talented, motivated people — longtime residents and new ones — living together on one small island — maybe such synergy was inevitable. We began producing two shows a year; many of our kids got involved (or were pressed into service). And what shows!  Big, crowd-pleasing classics like The Man Who Came to Dinner, You Can’t Take It With You and The Philadelphia Story, etc., along with newer, edgier plays like The Lion in Winter and Butley, etc., not to mention a slew of one-act gems. 

It was a heady time. There’s nothing like working hard, having wonderful fun with great, talented people, and all the while collaborating on a product which, hopefully, brings laughter and/or tears and entertainment to an audience.

But then, for many reasons, I guess, the Players began to lose steam.  People like the redoubtable Dorothy Bloom attempted to keep the group alive with a couple of her original comedies, and several others produced some excellent shows under the Players banner but, in this year of 2025, The Shelter Island Players as a living, breathing entity, like Puck’s “visions,” seems to have disappeared. 

This is not to say that “theater” has disappeared on this Island — hardly. The SDC, Sylvester Manor, the History Museum and, just last evening, the iconic Friends of Music, have presented quality theater from Shakespeare to The Soldier’s Tale to hungry Island audiences. But still, the Players are missed.

Last month, longtime resident (and my co-mother-in-law), Maria Loconsolo, asked me about the history of the Players. Though people often ask “whatever happened to the Players?” Maria is the first person who, strictly as an audience member, has expressed her sadness about the group’s long absence. She wrote me the following text: 

“I’m not a “fan” of theater — more of a hippie who morphed into a disco lady who prefers any and all forms of informative literature. For my first date with Alan [Shields] decades ago, he treated me to a SI Players performance of, as I recall, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” After that, I attended many SIP productions which truly never disappointed me in any element,  including the skilled acting, stage presence and the amazing sets.

My reason for hoping to chronicle the SIP journey — especially the 70s and 80s “hey day,”— is that I feel strongly that it is worthy of preservation as part of our SI community’s history.”

Maria is nothing if not a woman of action. She let me tag along when she visited the History Museum last week. Per her request, they’d made all things “Players” available for our perusal. Maria is a born researcher, a true historian — I’m more the histrionic type — but even I was flabbergasted by the wealth of information, texts and photographs, that we found — most of which had been gathered and beautifully curated by a woman whose name will be familiar to many older Islanders:  Helen Lamont. I had been told long ago that she’d actually produced a Shakespearian play many decades before — supposedly pre-dating the birth of the Players. It’s amazing what facts will do: I learned that not only did she produce and direct three Shakespearean plays between 1964 and 1968, with all-Island casts, but that she did so under the auspices of the brand new, shiny Shelter Island Players that she’d founded — nearly a decade earlier than was thought. There’s much, much more to learn — about the Players and the history of theater on-Island that pre-dates them. 

Maria thinks the Museum might start with creating oral histories of the Players while some older members can provide them. There are many possibilities — it’s all about “playtime.”