Actress Gives Chilly Performance Outdoor Benefit For Theater Sells Out

It was outdoor theater, Montana style.

With December temperatures hovering in the upper teens and the mournful baying of wolves in the distance, about 200 people huddled under woolen blankets on bleachers and watched a nearly hourlong Christmas play, staged on the back porch of an old schoolhouse.

The production was a benefit for an unusual children’s theater in Missoula, about 30 miles east of this town on the western edge of the state.

The star of this home-grown play was a woman who is known nearly everywhere else as Andie MacDowell, the film actress, but who is called by her real name, Rose Qualley, by everyone in this mountain valley.

The play, “The Gift,” by a local writer, Hanneke Ippisch, revolves around a mother who reads stories of Christmases around the world to her children. In this production, MacDowell, playing the mother, read the stories to her own children, Justin, 10, and Rainey, 7. Actors played out the stories as MacDowell read them.

MacDowell, who lives full-time in Ninemile Valley, said the benefit performance was her way of giving something to a community of which she has become a part. The play was performed for three nights and raised nearly $30,000 for the Missoula Children’s Theater, an institution that brings theater to more than 600 small towns throughout the United States and in parts of Canada.

“It’s one of Missoula’s treasures,” MacDowell said of the theater. “I’m glad they’re here for selfish reasons. I love having that option for my children.”

MacDowell said she, her husband, Paul Qualley, and their children moved here after Qualley read the novel “Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry and was captivated by its descriptions of Montana.

The Missoula Children’s Theater, which operates out of a rambling, remodeled public school in Missoula, is a 20-year-old institution that sends 21 two-member teams to small towns, where they spend a week at a school teaching people how to stage a play.

“Most of the towns we go to don’t even have a full-time music teacher,” said Jim Caron, founder and executive director of the theater. For children who live in such towns, there are only two arenas in which to excel: sports and academics. The theater, Caron said, adds a third one.

Caron’s group was a regular community theater until 1973, when it became a children’s theater while touring with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” It used children to play the dwarfs, but could not take them out of school for the tour to Miles City, Mont., a town of about 10,000 people some 500 miles to the east.

“We thought, ‘What if we came to town and trained some new dwarfs?”’ Caron said.

The theater advertised in the Miles City paper, and when theater personnel arrived at the audition, 450 children were waiting to try out.

The theater’s new mission - to give children a venue - was born.

“We found children were more creative and disciplined by far than the adult members,” Caron said. “And we found that the opportunity to be in a play not only gives them better performance skills, but also better life and social skills.”

This year, for the first time, the theater toured Japan, staging “Jack and the Beanstalk” in five communities.

In North America, the theater also performs plays for elementary pupils and high school students on issues like AIDS, substance abuse and parental rejection.

An unusual aspect of the theater is that it is 90 percent self-sustaining, relying on grants for only 10 percent of its financing. Fund-raising events are crucial, and that is why “The Gift” was born.

The author also wrote “Sky,” a book recently published by Simon & Schuster, which recounts Ippisch’s role as a teenage member of the anti-Nazi resistance in the Netherlands.

The three performances of “The Gift,” which included a dinner of hot beef burgundy in a bowl made of bread, sold out at $75 a ticket. Ippisch, who lives in the converted schoolhouse where the play was staged, said that Montanans were a hardy lot, and that she never doubted they would brave the weather to watch the play.

“If people will turn out to watch a football game for four hours in this weather,” she said, “I knew they would come for the play.”

After collaborating with Caron, she asked her neighbor, MacDowell, whether she would participate. And thus Hollywood glamour came to a makeshift stage in rural Montana.