Newsreaders and culture mavens all around the South Fork were delighted this week to learn that our dear old neighbor across Main Street, Guild Hall, has announced that after two years of planning, debating, banging, and hammering, the arts institution will swing open the doors and raise the curtain on a fully renovated and modernized John Drew Theater in early July. The new John Drew will recognizably look like the old John Drew, with the 1930s-era circus-tent stripes and whimsical ceiling, but with improved sightlines, seating, and technical systems — and for that, we say the Guild Hall staff and board deserve a thunderous round of applause.
It’s been two years since a proposal for a different sort of theater redo became a flashpoint here in town. Emotions ran high as the merits were debated of preserving the theater’s old look or moving in a new direction that would allow grander-scale productions and higher-profile concerts, and for a hot minute the theater kerfuffle was one of those microclimate tempests that exposes the usual fault lines in our community: local versus “from away,” nostalgia versus progress, money versus, well, not so much, access versus exclusion. On the one hand, Guild Hall was working hard and with great savvy to secure its financial future and define its mission into the future, and on the other hand, much of the public felt something of the soul of East Hampton would be lost with the loss of the original theater interior — and we heard all about it in the Letters to the Editor and on social media.
The fact that Guild Hall heard the public criticism and pivoted to a John Drew plan that everyone can embrace unreservedly is not just impressive but a lesson that might wisely be heeded by Town Hall. Let it serve as a blueprint for other nonprofits who have to wisely manage multimillion-dollar budgets, too.
East Hampton Village is blessed, indeed, to have a constellation of civic institutions of high caliber clustered here around the flagpole on the village green: the East Hampton Library, the East Hampton Historical Society, The Star, and Guild Hall. This is our town’s nexus of culture, and all are — to borrow a phrase — by the people and for the people,. With the reopening of John Drew this spring, Guild Hall has proven that it will blaze forward for another 100 years as a true community bedrock.
Those who’d like an early sneak peek at the new John Drew Theater have been invited to pitch in to support Guild Hall by May 1 with a variety of possible donations, from a simple membership to the naming of a dressing room or (“wider, comfier”) seat. The executive director, Andrea Grover, has even offered to pick up the phone and take your advice — literally — for $1 a minute. The phone number is 631-324-0806, extension 101. Now that is how you run a public institution.