LARAMIE, Wyo. (AP) - Nearly 90 years ago, an auditorium was added to the then-Laramie High School. After several transformations, the building is now called the Laramie Plains Civic Center and houses a popular local venue.
While the building itself was completed in 1878, the Gryphon Theatre has only been open four years.
Dave Soules started as a part-time theater manager in 2010 and immediately started work on the old auditorium, the Laramie Boomerang reported (https://bit.ly/1TKr3w4).
“When I first saw it, it was in horrible disrepair,” he said. “I wouldn’t even stand on it.”
After about two years of work and funding, the theater opened in 2012.
“We got some major money from the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund, the Wyoming Arts Council, the Albany County Recreation Board - we basically got enough money to make it safe again,” he said.
“Making it safe” meant replacing the rigging above the stage, reworking electrical circuits and other basic repairs to windows and chandeliers.
In 1973, the building became the city’s junior high school and was vacated by the district entirely after 1979.
“After it stopped being a school, the theater went into disrepair,” said Melissa Daniele, executive director of the civic center. “In 1979, the school left, and the community was trying to figure out what to do with the building. It was a slow process and a bold-headed effort to fix it.”
However, since opening in June 2012, nearly 23,000 tickets have been sold for the hundreds of very different shows performed, Soules said.
“We do everything from rock to classical,” he said. “We do kids shows the day after a burlesque show.”
The civic center works with Ticketfly to manage shows, and the theater needed a name before it could open. Originally called the Laramie Plains Civic Center Auditorium Center, the stage was renamed the Gryphon Theatre based on the gryphons in the archway on either side of the stage.
“Some people think somebody named Gryphon gave a lot of money to the theatre,” he said. “That’s definitely not the case.”
The theater as it is today is young, but many community members still remember when it was part of Laramie High School, Daniele said.
“The school just used them for assemblies,” she said. “You get people to come and buy tickets and say, ’I want to see that show in the auditorium.’ I say, ’Do you mean the Gryphon Theatre?’”
The seats still harken back to the days of the high school - the rows of seats are stamped with “LHS.”
Refurbishing the hundreds of chairs is on Soules’ to-do list. Original to the old LHS days, the 850 chairs would cost about $25-$50 a seat to restore.
“If we changed the footprint of the seats, that drops our capacity significantly to meet current codes,” he said. “We’d drop from an 850-seat house to about 300-400. So, the plan is to refurbish the seats rather than replace them.”
There are a couple other items more directly needed by the theater, Soules said.
“On the tech side, our wish list is a personnel lift so we can reach the grid and start boosting our capabilities,” he said. “We’d also plan to use it in our gymnasiums and other parts of the building”
“I still think it needs work,” he continued. “There are things I’d still like to do, and every dollar we make goes back into the theater.”
Despite all the work and physical changes to the theater, the biggest change Soules has seen during his six years at the center is community involvement, he said.
“People know there’s a theater here, we have people come to shows actively,” he said. “I would say the perception has changed from a run-down, ’We didn’t know this was here’ venue to, ’What’s happening this weekend?’”
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Information from: Laramie Boomerang, https://www.laramieboomerang.com
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