Director Kathy Bowers comes full circle with Ignite!’s production of ‘Life Support’

Kathy Bowers fell in love with theater at the age of 3 while living in Spokane.

Her mother sent Bowers, her older sister and their teenage neighbor to see a local theater’s production of some Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales.

“I was bitten by the bug at age of 3 watching these people on stage,” she said. “I was just mesmerized.”

Two years later, Bowers moved to Central Oregon. When it came time to pick a college, she decided to return to Washington and graduated from Washington State University.

Four years later, she took a vacation to Hawaii to visit her brother.

“I was supposed to be there for 10 days, and I stayed for 41 years,” Bowers said.

Her love of theater followed her from place to place though. She was on the board at her local theater in Honolulu and directed two plays there.

That love has followed her back to the mainland where she’ll direct Ignite! Community Theatre’s production of “Life Support,” which opens Friday and runs through Feb. 24.

In George Tricker’s “Life Support,” Alan (Tom Sanderson), a house painter who dropped out of school, is in the hospital as his wife undergoes exploratory surgery.

Carol (Patricia Marvel), an educated and wealthy woman, has brought her husband to the emergency room as a precaution after an incident at a restaurant.

Despite their different social and economic classes, Alan and Carol find themselves bonding after learning that their spouses are critically ill.

Over the course of the play, that bond grows from one of offering moral support to a physical and emotional relationship.

But when it’s revealed that Alan’s wife is worse off than originally thought and Carol’s husband will be OK after all, the pair must come to terms with what’s transpired between them and what it means for their future.

Bowers wasn’t initially familiar with “Life Support” or Tricker’s work, but one read of the play and she knew she wanted to be part of the production.

“The story is very well written,” she said. “It’s a very serious topic, but it’s also very funny. A lot of times we deal with tragedy in our life with our sense of humor and that gets us through and that’s what happens with these characters.”

When it came to casting “Life Support,” Bowers was looking for actors who not only looked the part but also had chemistry, which she found in Sanderson and Marvel.

“They’re good foils for each other,” Bowers said. “When things fall together like that, it’s really exciting.”

After returning to Spokane, Bowers wasted no time getting involved with local theater. She was hoping to find a small theater (her theater in Hawaii seated 60) and was excited to find out that Ignite!, which seats about 100, was “six-tenths of a mile from (her) house.”

She’s now on the Ignite! board and is looking forward to more productions with the theater, productions that will perhaps inspire a youngster to pursue theater themselves.

“It’s the full circle,” Bowers said about directing in Spokane. “It really is.”