When Forrest Hejkal started the Carriage House Theatre four years ago, he searched for a venue that would be “interesting and a draw in its own right.” With hammer, nails, and imagination, the recent Rudolf Steiner High School grad turned a neighbor’s carriage house on Third St. into a thriving summer theater.
“I wanted to make the building itself the set,” he recalls, taking advantage of exposed studs to suggest a rustic cabin for one play and putting boards between the studs to create bookshelves for another. Hejkal pored through volumes at the library to find little-known works with settings that reflected the warmth and intimacy of his venue. “You couldn’t put a play in there that had a very cold feel,” he says. But to Hejkal, play choice was less important than building a community. “A lot of neighborhood people walk to the theater, and some people who live on the same block met [for the first time] here.”
After CHT’s first season Hejkal left for Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, returning each summer to produce and design every CHT show and to direct or act in most, too. Now a college graduate, he’s currently home for one last season before moving to western Massachusetts. There, he plans to support himself doing carpentry while starting both a touring company that performs in people’s living rooms and barns and a dance or theater company stationed in his new hometown.
Before he leaves, Hejkal is doing the lead in the last production CHT will do under his supervision, a work of gritty magic realism, Phenomenon of Decline.
A children’s theater, Spinning Dot, will use the carriage house part-time next summer. And Hejkal is meeting with former actors and directors to see if they can continue CHT there, too.
