At 91, she looks darn good. Barter Theatre, the official state theater, is among America’s oldest theaters and one of the nation’s few remaining professional repertory companies. While many a regional theater are cutting back on productions or even shuttering their doors, Barter appears unstoppable, setting new records for success. From 2022–2023, tickets purchased for Barter productions by audiences living outside the theater’s 100-mile radius increased by over 40 percent. The theater’s most recently completed season seated more theatergoers than its town of Abingdon’s entire population.
“We bring between 125,000 and 145,000 people through a town of 8,200 every year,” says Katy Brown, Barter’s producing artistic director. “So much of the economy of Abingdon is built around the fact that we have so many tourists coming through.”
Ham for Hamlet
Barter Theatre’s roots come from the Great Depression, when a young actor from Southwest Virginia named Robert Porterfield convinced some of his New York thespian friends to set up shop and raise the curtain in Abingdon. Named “Barter” after its earliest pricing structure, the theater opened its doors June 10, 1933, with the mantra that “With vegetables you cannot sell, you can buy a good laugh.” Really—theatergoers bartered if they couldn’t afford the 35-cent admission fee. Legend has it that four out of five patrons paid their way with vegetables, dairy products, and livestock. It was trading “ham for Hamlet,” they said, and it was a success.
Located just 15 miles from the Virginia-Tennessee border, the little-theater-that-could is
the nation’s longest-running professional theater. And it helps that Abingdon, its hometown, is repeatedly named one of America’s most charming small towns, earning the recent moniker, “The England of the Blue Ridge Mountains.”
“People were kind of knocked out, asking what are they doing in this rural area doing world-class theater?” says Brown, pointing out framed New York Times articles on the theater’s walls from generations ago.
Barter has been a launching pad for the careers of many iconic actors and actresses—Gregory Peck, Ned Beatty, Patricia Neal, Ernest Borgnine, Frances Fisher, and John Spencer, to name a few. Brown notes Peck went door-to-door in Abingdon in hopes of borrowing props for Barter productions.
“He wasn’t famous yet, but he still looked like Gregory Peck, and people tended to say yes,” Brown says about the Academy Award–winning actor.
Next Level Theater
With a contagious passion, Brown played a pivotal role in securing the theater’s current success. After taking the helm in 2019, just before the pandemic closed down performance venues, her formidable leadership steered Barter’s team to avoid catastrophe. Photos on Barter’s walls show pandemic-era theatrical productions she spearheaded at a nearby abandoned drive-in movie theater, the Moonlite.
When practically every other theater in America was closed for business, Brown kept her repertory team gainfully employed by holding outdoor performances for eager auto-bound theatergoers. She is the first woman to lead Barter Theatre in its nine-decade history, and she’s supremely driven to steward the historic cultural treasure—and keep everyone busy.
“All of our resident actors and designers and technicians, everybody is working on a lot of different things at the same time,” says Brown. “So people can come and see multiple shows at the same time—it’s really exciting.”
Brown inspires her team to keep a staggering pace. On one balmy August weekend, she juggled overseeing simultaneous productions of The Shawshank Redemption, Wizard of Oz, and Cry It Out. The classic ruby slipper tale was presented as a matinee on the main Gilliam Stage, then the vibrant yellow brick road transformed into an austere penitentiary for an evening presentation of the New England prison saga, followed by an immediate tear-down and set up of the Emerald City for the following day’s performances.
Leading by Example
Bringing up Brown’s name to her colleagues garners zealous responses.
“She’s one of the finest leaders I’ve ever worked with, because she leads by example, she’s got a clear vision, and she believes in everybody being a part of it,” says Nick Piper, Barter’s associate artistic director.
Actress Zoë Velling is in her fourth year with the theater and has found a mentor and friend in Brown. “She does this amazing thing when she’s trying to get to know somebody where it’s like she X-rays your soul,” Velling says. “It feels like you are seen more clearly than anybody has ever seen you—it’s unbelievable.”
For her part, Brown, a Birmingham native, first served as an acting intern decades ago, working her way up Barter’s theatrical ladder. The theater’s mission, she professes, is to provide service to others.
“How do you make every choice about the audience and about other people?” Brown asks. “I feel so strongly that we are tending this theater for the people that live here and wanting to make sure that in the next 91 years, it continues to belong to them.” BarterTheatre.com
This article originally appeared in the February 2025 issue.
