Taylor Young as Baptista, Chris Schenning as Hortensio and Simeon Kondev as Lucentio talk while Richard Stephan III as Petruchio and Susan Creech as Katherina share a rare tender moment. Paul Laurence Dunbar High School presented its 1950s version of William Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew" as part of the Southeastern Theatre Conference's high school play festival. Photo by Rich Copley | staff.
The Southeastern Theatre Conference and Central Kentucky took notice of each other a couple weekends ago.
Conference organizers were wowed by the accommodations and hospitality Lexington had to offer when SETC brought 4,000 conventioneers to town for the first time in more than 30 years. And conference officials noticed Lexington artists, giving a career achievement award to Larry and Vivian Snipes, naming Balagula Theatre runner-up in the Community Theatre Festival and Paul Laurence Dunbar High School student Susan Creech to the High School Theatre Festival all-star cast.
Casey Snipes, who grew up in Lexington and now attends Northern Kentucky University, auditioned at the Southeastern Theatre Conference.
And Lexington noticed the conference, particularly anyone who went near Lexington Center for the three days the conference was in full swing.
As conventions at Lexington Center go, the center’s president and CEO, Bill Owen, says SETC was “one of the largest ever in Lexington and the largest in the past decade.”
Lexington Center leaders think SETC is the biggest convention since the Worldwide Church of God’s gatherings in the late 1980s to early 90s and rank it up there with gatherings of the Rural Letter Carriers and Daughters of the Nile, an international fraternal organization, this decade.
The Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau does not have final figures and an estimate of the SETC convention’s economic impact yet, but does agree it’s one of the largest gatherings in Lexington.
Roseanne Mingo, destination sales account executive with the Lexington CVB, said SETC might have had an even higher profile because many of its activities, such as auditions and a job fair, prompted people to wait and congregate in public areas of Lexington Center.
Still, there is one way SETC could have raised its profile even more.
On the Friday morning arts chat I do with Charles Compton at WEKU-88.9 FM, he said he guessed this would be an opportunity for people to see a lot of shows, echoing a notion many people I talked to had.
There certainly were several theaters in full operation during the festival with the children’s, high school and community theater festivals going on.
But if you wanted to see those shows, you had to register for the convention, not something many people except serious theater folk would be inclined to do for $250 a pop.
But there are theater fans who might might be inclined to pay a few bucks to see some of the shows, most of which are reduced versions of full-length plays.
This might not be something that would really fly in a city like next year’s SETC site, Atlanta, where a convention of 4,000 might not make a blip on the radar. But in mid-size cities like Lexington or last year’s location, Birmingham, creating some kind of public ticket for shows might give the organization a chance to draw people in the cities it visits into the larger world of Southern theater.
As they visited our fair city, SETC organizers sounded anxious to make sure another three decades didn’t pass before they came back. And that would be fantastic. You bring the crowds, we’ll bring the hospitality, and could you crack the door for the locals, a little?
