Big changes at Little Lake Theatre
McMURRAY – As the calendar flips from May to June at midnight, Little Lake Theatre will undergo a profound change.
Yes, the small theater and big barn on Lakeside Drive, just a stone’s throw from Route 19, is still nestled by Canonsburg Lake and has not been uprooted from its longtime home. But for the first time since Little Lake Theatre was founded in 1949, when it was surrounded by farmland rather than shopping centers and subdivisions that are now its neighbors, it will not have someone with the surname of Disney at its helm.
As of Monday, Sunny Disney Fitchett is retiring as Little Lake Theatre’s artistic director, walking away from the theater her father, Will Disney, created, built and guided for more than 40 years. She and her husband, Rob Fitchett, who was Little Lake’s managing director, are heading to the small California community of Rescue, located in the northern part of the state near Folsom, so he can work in wine sales and be near his father, and she can work on writing children’s literature.
They are handing off the reins to newcomers Roxy MtJoy, a Greene County native who is coming to Little Lake via New York, and Bob Rak, a Peters Township resident who is becoming the managing director after being a board member and performer at Little Lake for several years.
Though the Fitchetts are walking away from something that has been part of all of her 59 years, they won’t be cutting the cord entirely – Sunny was named to Little Lake’s board, and said she would like to occasionally come back and direct a production.
And Sunny admits she will still have a healthy curiosity about what is happening at Little Lake when she is on the other side of the continent.
“Maybe I could peek in every once in a while on Skype,” Sunny joked last week.
The changing of the guard between the old and the new has been the defining characteristic of the 67th Little Lake season that is now under way – all of the plays that will be presented between now and December were chosen by Sunny, and she directed the season’s inaugural production, “Our Town,” Thorton Wilder’s enduring tale of small-town love and loss. Rak had a role in it as Dr. Gibbs. But the second selection, “The Best of Everything,” a comedy that opened Thursday, is being directed by MtJoy, who also will be helming the area premiere of the comedy “Last Gas” in July, and the romance “Prelude to a Kiss” in October.
The Fitchetts announced their departure last fall, and MtJoy and Rak were hired in March. For the last two months, the Fitchetts stayed to show MtJoy and Rak the ropes and ease the changeover from one regime to the other.
“The roles they’re stepping into are not so easily defined,” Sunny explained. “There’s quite a bit that’s not covered by the job description.”
Rak had an inside track for the managing director’s job not only because he had a background in numbers-crunching and administration for other nonprofit organizations, but also because of his deep ties to Little Lake, which were first forged when he attended an acting class there in 2006. Among the Little Lake productions he has appeared in are “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Lost in Yonkers,” and “Brooklyn Boy,” and he also acted in productions with Old Schoolhouse Players and South Park Theatre. Little Lake is on a sound financial footing, something both the Fitchetts and Rak emphasize, and Rak believes the primary mission he and MtJoy are undertaking is “making sure we’re meeting the needs of the community. We need to continue that.”
Rak is handling social media – “We’re trying to communicate with folks where they’re at,” he said – and he also worked with the Fitchetts two years ago to introduce electronic ticketing to Little Lake.
MtJoy’s links to Little Lake are perhaps not as deep as Rak’s, but they extend back further in time. The first time she attended the theater, MtJoy said, is when she and her family took in a production of “A Christmas Carol” at Little Lake when she was 5 years old. After graduating from Jefferson-Morgan High School, MtJoy was initially a pre-med major at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Va., but the pull of theater proved too strong, and she eventually changed her major.
“I’m the opposite of a responsible adult,” MtJoy noted. “I go to science lectures for fun and the theater for work.”
After receiving a master’s degree in theater from Sarah Lawrence College in New York and directing some productions in Los Angeles and New York City, MtJoy decided to pursue the job at Little Lake so she could be closer to her family, who continue to reside in Greene County, and be part of a theater company with a passionate following.
“I missed the feeling that I was making theater that mattered to anyone other than me and my cast,” MtJoy explained. “Little Lake clearly matters to the community.”
Now that MtJoy and Rak are about to be fully in charge at Little Lake, they will find that there are “10 things that go right, and 10 things that go wrong” on any given day, according to Rob, and that it will “never become a systematic sort of environment or routine.” Nevertheless, he and his wife are departing Little Lake feeling like they have been successful when it comes to one long-term goal – making sure Little Lake can survive and endure without someone from the Disney family leading it.
“We have confidence in these two,” he said.