After more than 110 years, Marin County’s beloved Mountain Play Association is taking a short vacation. And as anyone who’s ever attended one of the award-winning productions on Mount Tamalpais knows, a year without a Mountain Play is a big deal.
Apart from a four-year stretch in the early 1940s, when the U.S. Army used the mountain’s Cushing B. Memorial Amphitheatre as a base for World War II operations, and a two-year pause in 2020 and 2021, when theaters large and small closed during the pandemic shutdown, a summer without a new Mountain Play production has been a fairly rare occurrence. A group of local actors first staged the biblical epic, Abraham and Isaac, on the mountain in 1913.
Following last year’s lightly attended production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, the nonprofit Mountain Play Association announced there would be no new full production until 2026. Instead, it would spend those months in deep reflection of how to best serve the community, to potentially develop a new vision for the Mountain Play and to raise the funds required to bring that vision to life.
“This is a critical year for the Mountain Play,” said Eileen Grady, executive director and artistic producer of the association for the last seven years, and a leading participant in the organization since 2006. She quickly pointed out that while postponing a new show for 2025 was certain to raise alarms for those who look forward to taking the trek up the mountain every year, certain murmured rumors of the Mountain Play’s impending demise are wildly premature.
“It was a merely strategic decision to take a break, a deep breath, from doing our signature production on Mount Tamalpais, so we can spend the year doing market research and careful planning, getting out into the community to make sure that the decisions we are making as leaders of the organization are in line with what the community wants from us,” she said.
In a time when arts funding is being drastically cut across the nation, and the NEA is abruptly terminating promised grants for local theater organizations—including Marin Shakespeare Company and the San Francisco International Arts Council—Grady believes that the current public conversation about art’s role in society is only just beginning to heat up.
“I keep reminding myself how important the arts are,” she said. “It’s so easy to be swayed into thinking that the arts are just frosting, because that’s how we get treated a lot. But art inspires change and good things. It’s the reason we have to keep fighting for all of our organizations, and fight for our playwrights and our artists and our musicians, to keep everyone working during this difficult time. Because art is necessary.”
That includes everything from politically charged works by America’s most outspoken new playwrights to splashy productions of frothy musicals like Mamma Mia and Grease, the last two shows to be staged by Mountain Play before the pandemic.
“The important thing to remember,” Grady continued, “is that sometimes we need a break from the harshness of reality, and we need to have a deep breath, because that’s what recharges us to do the hard work. I think that every piece of art, and different type of art, has its place.”
Though the organization is now taking its own “deep breath,” she said that the Mountain Play Association is hardly on vacation. The significant group energy that would normally go into producing a play for thousands of visitors is instead being channeled into a number of other projects.
“We have two big things happening,” Grady said. “As we do the work to come up with a sustainable plan to keep the Mountain Play going through its next 100 years, which is actually incredibly exciting to be thinking about, we are working toward funding those plans in a couple of ways. The first is the $100,000 Challenge Match.”
Thanks to what Grady calls “a small group of legacy donors,” a major fundraising campaign is now under way to collect donations from the community, with those legacy supporters promising to match 100% of that money up to $100,000.
“Those funds are critical to allowing this year of deep conversation and community outreach to happen,” she said. “As we’ve launched that work, the community has been telling us how important the Mountain Play experience is to them. It’s something that Marin is proud of.”
In addition to the Challenge Match, with the potential to raise more than $200,000, the organization has just announced that on Sunday, June 15—the day that would have marked the closing of the show had it produced another musical this year—it will present a major, one-day musical celebration of the Mountain Play.
With a nod to Fiddler on the Roof, which has been staged three times on the mountain, but not since 2006, the event has been dubbed “TRADITION! a Musical Benefit for the Mountain Play.” It is being described as “a tribute to 112 years of the Mountain Play, featuring your favorite actors from past productions.”
Because picnicking on the mountain has always been a major part of the Mountain Play experience, box lunches from Debbie Ghiringhelli Catering will be available for pre-order for $22. The menu will include Ghiringhelli’s classic chicken Caesar salad with fresh berry cup dessert; a turkey croissant sandwich with cranberry mayo, potato salad and berry cup; a honey-baked ham croissant sandwich with potato salad and fresh berry cup; and a vegetarian lavash combo with hummus spread, fresh baby spinach, heirloom tomato, cucumber and avocado, a rice dolma and berry cup.
Parking spaces can be reserved at the nearby Air Force Parking Lot for $40 per car, with free shuttles to and from the theater provided. Shuttles from Mill Valley will also be available for a $10 adult fare and a $5 youth fare, with two pickup locations at Tamalpais High School and the Shoreline parking lot near Highway 101. Shuttles will start at 9am.
As Grady said, “The Mountain Play has rich historical significance for so many of us. It’s a celebration of all that history, a rich example of Marin’s long history of supporting the arts.”‘Tradition! a Musical Benefit for the Mountain Play’ begins at noon, Sunday, June 15. Tickets are $25 to $50 (and will be mailed to purchasers’ physical address). For more information and to reserve tickets, box lunches, etc., visit MountainPlay.org.
the best way to save the theater is to put on plays!!!