By Ned Warwick for the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia

It always seems that when essayists render views on how we as Americans live, the suburbs get hammered as intellectual and artistic wastelands; long on safety, short on stimulation. Tell that to the people who came and sat on the Philly Theatre Casting Couch when it put in its appearance last month at the Taste & Tour of the Countryside tradeshow at the Drexelbrook Corporate Events Center, in Drexel Hill.

If you listened, you heard a lot of suburbanites who have had a long and regular relationship with suburban theatre; people for whom theatre has a certain inevitability to it.  Several recalled on the couch that they were FIRST CAUGHT BY THE MAGIC OF THEATRE THROUGH (impressed by) the remarkable Upper Darby Summer Stage program for kids, and then either became involved with theatre in the suburbs or who regularly went and saw productions at such places as Media Theatre, Hedgerow, Bristol River Theatre Company, The People’s Light & Theatre Company and the Players Club of Swarthmore.

And if you are ready to jump in and challenge what local suburban theatres produce with yet another stereotypical charge of it being heavy on old and safe standards, come to Act II Playhouse in Ambler on a Friday evening.

The theatre marquee can be seen from a distance, bold and welcoming on Ambler’s main drag, no theatre tucked on a back street here; people pouring in from every direction.  And what was this old standard they were coming to see?

None other than that cross-dressing, costume-changing, wild and irreverent Mystery of Irma Vep.  And the capacity crowd loved it.  On the stage was a fine set and very big-time performances from pros Dito Van Reigersberg and Luigi Sottile.  It is hard to imagine there is a stage this performance could not have graced.

“This notion that the suburbs are where only safe theatre gets done is absolutely untrue,” said Harriet Power, the artistic director of the performance, and a professor of theatre at Villanova.  “The suburbs do an interesting array of work, not safe, sweet and easy.”

Indeed, one of the big winners at October’s Barrymore Awards was Theatre Horizon, of Norristown for its production of The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.  It received nine Barrymores.

Back on the Philly Theatre Casting Couch, Jackie Serratore, recalled how it was a performance at the Upper Darby Summer Stage that she saw as a little girl that started her down a path to theatre.  So excited by the theatre’s Disney production, she enrolled in the summer program and soon she was singing and dancing, which in turn led to her appointment as a musical director at Upper Darby.  Now she is performing at the Players Club of Swarthmore.

“What you have here are Broadway-styled shows at the price of  movie tickets,” Jackie said. “It’s just that quality.”

The Philly Theatre Casting Couch, supported by an arts challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is part of an audience engagement initiative aimed at doubling the number of theatre goers by 2020.  This popular program was first launched by the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia in April of 2010 with appearances of the Philly Theatre Casting Couch throughout Center City.  This year it is reaching into other parts of the city and into the suburbs to engage audiences and practitioners from all sectors of the theatre community.