Background

The Schoharie Creek Players was established in 1997 with the production of Our Town sponsored by the Economic Development Committee for the Hamlet of Lexington in Greene County, New York. Art Awareness, which provided residencies for avant-garde artists, provided the Mountain Theatre for the production. Our Town was presented as a Celebration of Town Life and included an exhibit of pictures and memorabilia from the Town of Lexington circa 1904, the year depicted in that play.

The success of this play led to petitioning the Lexington Town Board to set aside funds for a town celebration for the following year. An application was submitted to the Catskill Watershed Commission to support a town effort to create a Lexington Festival: A Celebration. An application was also submitted to the Greene County Council on the Arts using the Windham Rotary as a conduit for funds to support another production. In the summer of 1998, The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder was presented as a part of the Lexington Festival. In 1999, the group performed The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge, and received a $12,000 grant from the Catskill Watershed Commission to present a dance/theatre program for children called “Manituwak”, exploring the three Native American tribes that inhabited the Catskill Watershed region. Through the success of Playboy and “Manituwak”, the Schoharie Creek Players was formally incorporated as a not-for profit organization. In the summer of 2000, once more through the assistance of the Windham Rotary, SCP acquired a grant from GCCA to perform a production of William Saroyan’s Love’s Old Sweet Song. SCP also presented a week long dance/theatre program for children called “Tir na N’Og” based on Irish faery tales. In 2001 Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! was performed.

The Schoharie Creek Players successfully expanded its operation to produce the musicals Godspell and You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown at the Windham Ashland Jewett High School, The children’s program the “Medicine Wheel Way” at the Catskill Mountain Foundation; The Diary of Anne Frank at the Where It’s @ Youth Center; and A Christmas Carol at the Centre Church in Windham. In 2005 SCP produced The Miracle Worker by William Gibson; in 2006 Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, and in 2007 Vanities by Jack Heifner. All these endeavors were highly acknowledged and appreciated by those participating, as well as by those attending.