Barter Theatre

Kentucky

On opening night in 1933, the audience paid for their tickets with cakes, fruit, poultry, and one live pig.

culturehistoricalpeople

A theatre in Abingdon, Virginia opened in the middle of the Great Depression with a strange price of admission. Thirty cents, or the equivalent in food. Robert Porterfield had been acting in New York, where the theatres had gone dark and actors were out of work. Back home in Virginia, farmers were stuck with crops nobody could buy. So he brought about twenty fellow actors south and let people pay at the door with whatever they grew. His pitch was blunt. With vegetables that you cannot sell, he said, you can buy a good laugh. The first production was a play called After Tomorrow. A wire story reported that it played to a packed house that arrived laden with cakes, fruit, vegetables and poultry. Someone also brought a live pig. Six years later, Life magazine called it the craziest idea in the history of the American theatre, and noted that it was by then a booming success.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
was played to a capacity audience that came laden with cakes, fruit, vegetables, poultry

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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