It’s an origin story straight out of one of those old movies about kids putting together a show in their neighbor’s barn. But this one is true. The year was 1963, and some residents in Lanikai wanted to secure land for a neighborhood park and community center. That they did, but how would they pay for it? The group got creative, and the Lanikai Mortgage Players theater group was born. With each performance, they chipped away at the balance of their land purchase.
Sixty years later the mortgage has been paid, other Lanikai community projects have also been funded and the Lanikai Mortgage Players continue to present two fundraising productions each year. Their next show, “Disorder in the Court,” written in style of a traditional melodrama, opens a three-weekend run Oct. 27 at the Nelson and Lucille Shreve Theater in Lanikai.
The theater is named in honor of the late Nelson and Lucille Shreve who arrived in Hawaii in 1975 and revived the group after it had been dormant for a decade. Nelson Shreve wrote more than 20 new melodramas for the group; his wife, Lucille, directed 59 productions.
Melodrama, a style of theater where drama is exaggerated to the point of comedy, has been the group’s speciality for decades. The group’s members enjoy playing the comically overwrought characters, and voluntary audience participation is a traditional part of the performance. A cast member gets the audience warmed up with cheering and booing practice before showtime, and the actor playing the villain expects to be greeted with boos.
“Melodrama is very specific,” explained playwright and director Andy Merriam during spring rehearsals in May. “You’ve got a bad guy, you got a good guy, you’ve got the heroine, you’ve got some kind of situation where the heroine is in peril because of the bad guy, and the good guy saves her in some way. Every melodrama has those elements in it. The variation is, just what kind of peril is it? What’s the setup for it and how is it resolved?”
Merriam wrote and directed the spring production, “ ‘Bedlam in the Badlands’ or ‘The Lucky Penny,’ ” in which villainous land baron Dervish Bedlam (played by Merriam’s husband, Keith Merriam), had his eye on a ranch whose owner had “disappeared in the war.” When the missing man’s daughter, Penelope Pringle (Brenda-Lee Hillebrenner), arrives from back East to claim the property, chaperoned by her haughty aunt, Harriet Hammerspoon (Carol Nichols), Bedlam begins scheming — should he marry Penelope, or have his henchmen dispose of her?
Keith Merriam has played the villain in some previous stories and the hero in others, and volunteers that his credits also include “a goofy bailiff in a courtroom scene. I play whatever the director wants me to play.”
Merriam is the president of the group and also one of the old-timers. He joined the group in 1975 and did “all the shows” until he moved to southern California in 1989. Fifteen years later, married and a father, he returned to Lanikai and picked up where he’d left off.
His involvement with the Players drew his wife, Andy Merriam, into the group. The proximity to melodrama got her thinking about participating as a member of the production crew or as a playwright.
“I was coming to the shows and seeing lots and lots of shows,” she said. “At various times, I’m like, ‘None of the shows has the girl (tied) on the railroad tracks. Isn’t that a melodrama staple?’”
Another moment of inspiration gave her the name for a character.
“My son had this little toy hammer and this little toy spoon, and at one point, I was just looking at them and thinking ‘hammer’ and ‘spoon’ and (imagined a character named) Harriet Hammerspoon ‘of the Boston Hammerspoons’ … and eventually there was a play running around in my head, and I wrote it down so that I wouldn’t go crazy.”
When Merriam had the script ready for the stage, it included a reference to tying the heroine to the railroad tracks.
She also ended up with a nonspeaking walk-on role in the spring production.
“We all do everything,” said company member Carol Nichols. Nichols took the stage as Harriet Hammerspoon in May. She also designs the playbills and fliers, handles reservations and ticketing. She also shared costume design credits with her sister, Courtney Nichols, who also had a major role in the spring show as Stella Wells, the proprietor of the Midnight Star Hotel and Saloon.
An evening with the Lanikai Mortgage Players includes an olio, a vaudeville-style musical revue that follows the show, with cast members and other members of the Players ohana performing anything from pop standards to classic hapa haole music.
“There’s usually a musical trio,” Carol Nichols said. “I’ve been the leader of the trio because I sing and dance. I’ve been the villain, but in the spring show I wasn’t really the villain, I’m sort of taken advantage of by the villain. So once again, whatever the director says, ‘That’s what I want you to do,’ that’s what we do.”
And they do it for a $10 admission that includes popcorn and parking adjacent to the theater. Audience participation — some cheer and boo when the hero and villain appear onstage — is welcome.
Kaneohe resident Mary Mench applauds the sense of community she found at the theater.
“One of the things that appeals to me is that this is community,” she said after watching the spring show with two friends. “This just feels good, getting together laughing and singing. … You need to laugh at our age, and music is really important. It’s like magic.”
“I love show business,” her friend Dewey Keohohina III said succinctly.
Keohohina and Mench sung along as the novelty trio Wiki Waki Woo performed hapa haole standards.
As Andy Merriam looks ahead to future shows, she says anyone who wants to do theater should get in touch. The spring cast included two first-timers. More are welcome.
“We want new people, and if they don’t want to be onstage, we’ve got backstage jobs, we’ve got supporting jobs that they can do. But if they want to be onstage, absolutely!”
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“Disorder in the Court” and “The Olio”
>> Where: Lanikai Mortgage Players, The Nelson and Lucille Shreve Theater , Lanikai Community Center
>> When: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 27; continues at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays through Nov. 11
>> Cost: $10, includes popcorn and parking
>> Info: lanikaimortgageplayers.org; lanikai-mortgage-players.ticketleap.com
