By Eileen Moon
ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS – Outside the First Avenue Playhouse, this little town on the bay is alive with the pleasures of a summer Sunday. Strollers on their way for ice cream at Nicholas. Boat owners motoring toward the marina, tugging their vessels behind them. Bicyclists leaning in as they pedal in the sunshine toward the next leg of the Henry Hudson Trail.
But the audience sitting in the cool semi-dark of this small theater is far away, transported to a small cabin in Maine where an elderly couple listens to the loons call out on the water as they navigate the often-choppy waters of family relationships and the specter of old age.
“On Golden Pond,” a 1979 play by Ernest Thompson and the July offering at First Avenue Playhouse, has been selling out all month, with final performances set for this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, July 29-31.
Most are familiar with the 1981 movie adaptation with a cast that included Katharine Hepburn, Jane Fonda and her father Henry Fonda in his Oscar-winning final role.
While there is no Oscar to be had here, there is plenty of applause for the actors, none of whom are paid for their appearances. Yet they are theater veterans, members of a community of performers who do what they do for the love of their art – and many have decades of credits on their résumés. Even the youngest member of the cast, 13-year-old Johnny Saiz, has been performing for six years.
This month’s play is one of a dozen or so live theater performances the playhouse presents each year, with openings on the first weekend of each month and closing performances the final weekend of each month.
The small theater with table seating provides coffee and cake before each performance. Many audience members are regulars who often travel from around the state to enjoy the shows.
What is now the First Avenue Playhouse began more than three decades ago as a traveling murder mystery troupe performing in hotels and restaurants.
Eventually the constant moves from venue to venue began to wear and the theater’s founders started looking for a permanent home. At the start, the small not-for-profit was a joint enterprise undertaken by three couples: Norman and Gilda Poesner, Gary and Louise Stern, and Joe and Donna Jeanne Bagnole.
Today only Joe and Donna Jeanne remain from the original partners and the small nonprofit is overseen by a board of directors.
Bagnole, who is now 87, met Donna Jeanne when he was a salesman peddling beauty supplies and Donna Jeanne, an actress and singer, was working as a hairdresser. “She was a Lucille Ball lookalike,” he said.
Soon, Bagnole was drawn into the world of community theater, learning stage lighting and theater management along the way. “It was very interesting,” he recalled.
They set up their first theater in a small venue a little further down First Avenue but began searching for a new location when they found themselves regularly turning away ticket seekers because the space was so small.
Through a series of fortunate events, they found their current home, which was then a gym, just down the street from their original venue. Thanks to the benevolence of then-property owner (and later Two River Times film critic) Joan Ellis, who offered them half the purchase cost as a donation to make the deal possible, they were able to buy instead of rent the space. It was an effort that Ellis wanted to see succeed. “She donated $100,000, which made it very workable,” Bagnole said. “She was a big plus.”
There was room enough in their new location to expand their offerings and soon the First Avenue Playhouse included a puppet theater and children’s performances as well.
While the puppet theater is on hiatus because the puppeteers moved out of state, the theater regularly offers classes and performances for school-age kids.
Thirty-four years have passed since those early days – years that circle like a carousel, each one carrying a play, a production, a memory. And meanwhile, on the stage, all of life went by.
First Avenue has featured plays by both local and well-known playwrights, hosted blockbuster musical comedies like “Nunsense” and touching sagas like “On Golden Pond,” illuminating for its audiences those feelings and experiences that hover over daily life, offering brief visions of other ways of being – of laughter, love and struggle – scenes to be embraced before and after we start the car, collect the groceries, pay the bills.
First Avenue often features plays by Neil Simon – always an audience favorite, Bagnole said. Another winner was the theater’s performance of “Driving Miss Daisy.”
But Bagnole noted, as much as the theater prides itself on its deft performances of well-known plays, it has also welcomed the work of unknown playwrights.
Joe Simonelli, a once-aspiring local featured at First Avenue, now has his plays performed all over the world, Bagnole said proudly.
It has not ever been easy, but, he said, they have been fortunate. Audience members have sometimes responded to their request for donations to support the theater with very generous and most welcome contributions.
Once, Bagnole said, a man in the audience for one production handed him a check for $10,000. He thought at first it was a mistake, but the man insisted it was not.
And he is grateful for the help the theater has received from a few famous names.
Both Joe and Donna Jeanne appeared in director Kevin Smith’s groundbreaking first movie “Clerks,” roles they are still occasionally recognized for. “We got so much attention from being in his movie,” Bagnole said.
And when they ran into some financial challenges a few years ago, Smith stepped in to help them save the theater, hosting a fundraiser that brought in $27,000. “Kevin did a reading of ‘Clerks III,’ ” Bagnole said. “It helped us a lot.
“We had a very bad leaking roof and we put the money up there. I took some of the money and went down to Atlantic City,” Bagnole noted, but not to gamble: He used the cash to purchase chairs from a casino that was going out of business. The chairs now grace the seating area where attendees enjoy First Avenue performances.
Shows generally open on Friday nights and continue weekends through each month with evening shows Friday, Saturday and Sunday as well as weekend matinees.
Theater-and-dinner deals are available by arrangement with a few local restaurants.
Once the curtain rises, the audience is off on an adventure that is almost, if not exactly, as incredible as life itself.
First Avenue Playhouse will debut its next production, Neil Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” the first weekend in August.
The show is directed by Long Island native Armand Marino, who also directed “On Golden Pond.” Marino, who also writes and performs, has his own regional theater troupe, Chaos, based in Toms River, but frequently directs at First Avenue.
The actors, directors and supporting staff who make community theater endure are members of a tribe that is dedicated to keeping live theater accessible close to home, Marino said.
It’s a community at its best when it collaborates, exchanging actors, costumes and wisdom across the lines of county or culture or cutthroat competition.
Directing “On Golden Pond” at First Avenue was a labor of love, Marino said, adding that it’s a work that pulls at the heartstrings, including his own. “It’s been amazing,” he said of its recent run. “People have told me it’s the best show they’ve ever seen.”
Following the run of “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” the theater will be featuring “Color and Light,” a musical tribute to Stephen Sondheim, in September.
Information on First Avenue’s upcoming offerings is available on its website firstavenueplayhouse.org.
The article originally appeared in the July 27 – August 2, 2023 print edition of The Two River Times.
