The firehouse theatre: Civic Theatre, 1957

1957 - 2007

The company: The South Bend Civic Theatre was founded in 1957, and it bills itself as the oldest continuously operating community theatre company in the South Bend and Mishawaka area. Its date deserves a pause: 1957 is six years before the Studebaker closing, in the factory's long twilight, and the company has now outlived the factory by more than sixty years. From 1968 most of its productions played The Firehouse at 701 Portage Avenue, a converted fire station on the near northwest side, the kind of borrowed room community theatre has always made do with. The company's productions and people stand in the theatres material; the cultural story is the company's growth out of its borrowed room.

The move: Under Executive Director Jim Coppens the Civic outgrew the Firehouse, and in January 2007, its fiftieth anniversary year, it opened a permanent home at 403 North Main Street in the former Scottish Rite Building downtown: the 209-seat Wilson Theatre and a 90-seat studio theatre. Read against the city's century, the move is the community theatre version of the Morris story. South Bend's culture repeatedly takes the same form: a volunteer institution in a borrowed or rescued building, a firehouse, a Masonic hall, a carriage house, a palace sold for a dollar, until the institution and the building have grown into each other. The Civic at fifty did what the Symphony and the museum had done before it: it stopped borrowing and took a landmark of its own.

Sources:

1. BroadwayWorld, regional theatre profiles carrying the South Bend Civic Theatre's own history (founded 1957; the oldest continuously operating community theatre company in the South Bend and Mishawaka area; The Firehouse at 701 Portage Avenue from 1968; Executive Director Jim Coppens; the January 2007 opening at 403 North Main Street in the former Scottish Rite Building; the 209-seat Wilson Theatre and the 90-seat studio).