Summmer Circle Theatre has had so many origins it’s hard to tell when it started and why or where. In 1961, Dr. JohnDietrich, making good on a promise he’d made to Dean Gordon Sabine and President John Hannah ordered professors Rutledge, Andreasen, Byers and Eek to set up a summer theatre "like the Stadium Theatre" at Ohio State.

The Original Summer Circle Sign - 1961
Under construction in Demostration Hall

The university donated Demonstration Hall which was one half of the Ice Rink and these guys recruited a team of students and designed and installed an arena theatre. The major problem was that Demo Hall was an empty gymnasium used for indoor ROTC drill and the entire theatre seats, lights, costume shop, scene shop and lobby had to be installed from the floor boards up.

Actors Jack Herr and Bob Winters painting the Dem Hall Marquee
Summer - 1961

Frank Rutledge Co-Founder of SummerCircle

They opened with Blithe Spirit. Giddy with the promise of a new thrust stage theatre and bored with the arena, in 1964 Rutledge, Andreasen and Brandon et al converted the stage to a thrust with a permanent balcony. The excuse was to practice thrust staging. They started with A Thurber Carnival.

In 1968, determined to upgrade once again, John Baldwin received a grant from the Wolfram Foundation to pay a full company of student actors to perform in rotating repertory – a different show every morning for children and a different show every night for adults so that six plays were being mounted each day for the final three weeks. They opened with Treasure Island and J.B.

The First Summer Circle Play - 1961 Director Corliss Phillabaum rehearses Judy Nichols, Ann Crow, Bud Spangler, Helen Shaw, Kay Ingram and Ben Hickock in Blithe Spirit

The following summer was all comedies and musicals to offset the previous summer of high brow rep. By April, 1970 Summer Circle as a separate entity within the new Department of Theatre (created in 1968) was bankrupt and a special Provost’s Summer Subsidy was returned to pay the indebtedness.At this point, the faculty (still Rutledge and also Geist and Baldwin) moved Summer Circle into the Kresge Sculpture court and reasoned thusly (follow closely and catch the foolishness of it): since wehave no money, we’ll make the plays free; if the plays are free, the public can always leave; if the audience can leave, we can do what
ever we please. Is this the way to attract people???

We opened with Welcome to the Monkey House adapted from the stories of Kurt Vonnegut and the people came in droves and trampled the petunias and made the Grounds Department unhappy which led to bleacher seating from which the audience could not escape let alone walk away so we had to pick better plays and so on . . BUT there has remained a residual urge to present the unknown offbeat play ever since 1981,

Gretel Geist Co-Founder of Summer Circle

Grounds declared they could no longer supply bleachers in a form that would fit the Kresge Court so we moved to the fold plain of the river bank. We opendwith Androcles and the Lion and wallowed in the damp grass and the backstage mud until wiser heads prevailed and we moved the whole operation to higher ground in 1993 (can you imagine it took us twelve years to realize it can rain in Michigan in July?) Along the way (in the swamp) we experimented with two other ideas: we used to recap the three plays of the season by repeating them in rotating rep for a fourth week – this led to a revolt of therunning crews; and we tried focusing the plays on American Theatre with accompanying seminars taught jointly with American Studies. We have also presented new plays.

There is one basic premise of Summer Circle which has remained constant: it is still a student-community town-gown program utilizing the best available talents of both communities.

John Baldwin Co-Founder of Summer Circle