Cambria’s Pewter Plough theater company will need a new home in 2017

Starting next year, the theater company that has performed at the Pewter Plough Playhouse in Cambria for 40 years will have to start staging its productions somewhere else.

Rebecca Buckley, the building’s owner and the widow of playhouse founder Jim Buckley, won’t be renewing the nonprofit theater company’s lease. The company, the Pewter Plough Players, hopes to find another place to perform, preferably in Cambria, though company board member Jeff Walters said Monday the door remains open to a more limited role at the playhouse.

“It’s not out of the question or off the table” for the company to perform at the Pewter Plough Playhouse in the future, just not as a full-time tenant, Walters said. He added that the company has looked at locations such as the now-vacant library building on Main Street and the former Brambles Dinner House on Burton Drive as possible venues for next year.

As for the playhouse itself, Rebecca Buckley said she’ll begin leasing it in 2017 to Harmony Cafe owner Giovanni Grillenzoni, who will then operate the entire building. Grillenzoni currently leases the restaurant portion of the building, at 824 Main St. in Cambria’s West Village.

“I will give Giovanni a year’s lease to see how he and I work together,” Buckley said Monday by phone from Utah, where she is vacationing. She added that she will be leasing the theater to Grillenzoni for a little more than $2,000 a month — $27,000 in all — during 2017. (His lease on the cafe is separate.)

Buckley said the theater company is paying $1,000 a month for the theater space this year, but that “would have increased in 2017 if the lease would have been renewed.”

Grillenzoni moved his cafe to the building from its previous location in Harmony about a year ago.

Buckley said she and her husband discussed the move before he died in September at age 102.

Buckley said she expects the Pewter Plough Playhouse to host “all sorts of events ... just an assortment of things to reach all sorts of people in the community,” including musicals, concerts, children’s theater and films. She added that the films would be “good movies, not just the old movies,” and that events wouldn’t just be held on weekends, but throughout the week, as well.

“To accomplish my vision, the existing configuration will not work. So I gave the players a final year’s lease,” she said. “Giovanni will be helping with building maintenance and repair, which is a big plus in his favor.”

Buckley said she is not selling the venue and will remain in the community, with plans to move into an apartment over the theater as soon as her Cambria home sells. In fact, she said, she will be producing/directing two shows a year at the playhouse: the annual holiday show and a midyear comedy.

Grillenzoni, contacted at Harmony Cafe on Monday, declined to go into detail about what he had planned for the site beyond this year.

“The lease right now is about the playhouse until 2017,” he said. “We have a schedule of all the performances right now. The theater is still there.”

The players are in the midst of their 40th season, dating to the playhouse’s founding in 1976. The theater company has been the playhouse’s tenant on a year-to-year lease in recent years, theater company President Anita Schwaber said.

In the meantime, she said, the company is looking for a new venue for its productions beyond this year.

“We’re actively beginning to look for a lease,” she said. “There’s two things: There’s the playhouse, and there’s the players. We’re staying together as a 501(c)(3). We’re regrouping because we’d like to stay together, and we’re looking for a place. We’d like to stay in Cambria.”

Buckley said the players would be allowed to take whatever theater props they want, with the exception of her husband’s antique collection.

The theater company has six shows plus a holiday musical scheduled for this year, along with five Readers’ Theatre productions. Its staging of “Nuts” just concluded Sunday, with a Readers’ Theatre production of “The Vagina Monologues” set for Friday and Saturday. Its next full production, “The Dinner Party” by Neil Simon, runs from March 4 to April 3.

The theater company’s move will affect many people.

“There are probably 50 active or semiactive people who do shows at various times,” Schwaber said, “and we have a mailing list of probably 2,000 people.”

This story was originally published February 8, 2016 at 4:27 PM with the headline "Cambria’s Pewter Plough theater company will need a new home in 2017."