ELKHART, KANSAS
"The play's the thing," wrote Shakespeare, the resident playwright of merry old England.

But in the southwest corner of Kansas, the play is the only thing, thanks to the fledgling Morton County Community Theater Group.

Organized in 1997, the talented High Plains thespians' group provides the only live civic theater within a 100-mile radius of Elkhart, the county seat.

Drama coach Temple Reed says the theater group has found an audience with local arts enthusiasts who routinely drive 150 miles -- or more -- to take in road show performances of popular Broadway-style entertainment, such as "Cats," and "Riverdance."

"You stop and think about it," Reed said last week. "To have very much culture out here you have to drive to Amarillo or Wichita, and a lot of people here go to Denver for shows like 'Les Miz.' I'm not putting us up to that quality, but it shows that the desire for culture is here if they'll travel that far."

Besides snapping up tickets to MCCTG productions, the county's leading citizens also have demonstrated their support, Reed says.

A year ago, an anonymous local donor put up the money to buy Elkhart's former movie house, the Doric Theater, as the future permanent home of the theater group -- to the tune of $15,000 as an investment in the community's cultural future.

In a subsequent gesture of good will, the benefactor lowered the amount of the theater group's loan by $2,000, Reed says.

"Right now, we don't have a home base," Reed said. "We just finished recording a radio play, which is our first venture with that. We recorded it in the back room of a barber shop in Rolla because we liked the acoustics."

A 1940s-style radio re-creation of the Jimmy Stewart motion picture "It's a Wonderful Life" is scheduled to air on Morton County's three cable TV systems later this winter, Reed says.

Although Morton County is one of the most sparsely populated counties in Kansas, Reed has no problem finding talented actors among the county's 3,315 citizens.

"Our mission statement is that we want to expose the entire community to all aspects of theater," Reed said. "And all the backstage stuff and posters and advertising, plus the acting -- and the cleanup."

Amazingly, Reed's biggest challenge as director is to assemble cast members for play rehearsals, she says.

"Most of the time, we're only able to have one rehearsal where everybody is together," said Reed. "That can be a real problem. We spend most of our time scheduling a play's scenes, so if somebody can't be there on a particular night, we don't practice their scene."

This season's schedule calls for six full-fledged productions, including a Feb. 10 premiere in nearby Ashland of Lawrence playwright Kay Kuhlmann's "How the West was Fed," a play about the 1870s-era waitresses who came West to work at restaurants along the Santa Fe Railway.

Last October, the theater group tackled another Kuhlmann stage vehicle, "Run Like the Wind," which tells the story of the late Glenn Cunningham, the Morton Countian who won a silver medal in the 1936 Olympic games' 1,500-meter run.

Until funds can be raised to renovate the old Doric Theater in downtown Elkhart, population 2,500, the MCCTG functions much like a wandering band of medieval minstrels -- performing at Elkhart's VFW hall for one production, moving on to the city auditorium for the next.

Next June, the MCCTG players are scheduled to present historical vignettes of the area's Santa Fe Trail history in an outdoor setting at the huge Cimarron National Grasslands near Elkhart.

Reed is a former English teacher and dramatics coach at Rolla High School, one of two high schools in the county. She retired in 1992. 

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