Forest Theater

The Forest Theater is an outdoor amphitheater in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Founded in 1910, it is one of the oldest outdoor theaters west of the Rocky Mountains. The facility hosts events produced by the Forest Theater Guild, Pacific Repertory Theatre (PacRep), Monterey Symphony and other arts organizations, and films and civic events. It also includes a smaller indoor theatre and a school.

Herbert Heron helped to build, and began to produce, plays at the theater beginning in 1910. These included original and contemporary works and classic ones, such as Shakespeare plays. Another early playwright and director was Mary Austin. Between 1915 and 1924, the theater staged 50 plays and musicals. In 1924, the Carmel Arts and Crafts Club, which purchased the land, formed the Forest Theater Corporation to produce the plays. During the Great Depression, the theater accumulated debt. With repairs needed, in 1937, the Club deeded the theater to the City of Carmel-by-the-Sea to obtain Works Progress Administration (WPA) funds for renovations. The WPA rebuilt the theater and created an indoor facility beneath the outdoor stage.

The site re-opened in 1942 as The Carmel Shakespeare Festival, with Heron as its director. Except for the World War II years of 1943–44 and 1946, productions continued. In 1949, Heron and villagers started the Forest Theater Guild, a community organization to produce plays and help the city maintain the theater. In 1958, the city council instituted an Arts Commission to operate the theater. Heron continued to direct, write and star. The Guild disbanded, and Forest Theater ceased most operations, in 1961. The city used the site for such purposes as Boy Scout camps. From 1968 to 2010, Marcia Hovick's Children's Experimental Theatre (CET) leased the indoor theater to train young people. In 1969, Hovick formed the Staff Players Repertory Company to stage classic drama in the Indoor Forest Theater. In 1971, a second Forest Theater Guild was established and soon began to produce summer musicals and community plays on the outdoor stage.

In 1984, PacRep started producing classics, children's theater and musicals on the outdoor stage. PacRep reactivated the Carmel Shakespeare Festival in 1990 and continued to stage productions every September and October, expanding into August in 2000. Over the last decades of the 20th century, the Forest Theater Guild also produced over 20 plays. In 1997, the Guild began Films in the Forest, a film series. In 2011, after CET ceased operations, the school was leased to PacRep for its School of Dramatic Arts. In 2014, Forest Theater was closed for renovations. In 2016, the theater began performances again, but in 2019, the site's manager cancelled the Guild's 12-week theatre season, offering only 12 dates for film presentations. In 2021, the theater reopened with a seven-week season produced by PacRep. The next year, PacRep became the manager of the facility.

Herbert Heron located a picturesque concave property in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and approached James Franklin Devendorf, co-founder of the Carmel Development Company, about purchasing it for an outdoor theatre. Devendorf offered to let the theatre use the property without charge and assisted in the clearing the land and building the wooden proscenium stage of the 540-seat outdoor amphitheater. From 1910, Heron staged plays by authors from Carmel with local residents as performers, under the name Forest Theater Society.

The first theatrical production, David, a six-act biblical drama written by Constance Lindsay Skinner, under the direction of Garnet Holme of Berkeley, inaugurated Forest Theater on July 9, 1910. More than 1,000 theatergoers attended the production. Heron produced and acted in the play as David, Helen MacGowan Cooke played the character Michal, with Joseph Hand as Hushai, in a cast of Carmel area residents.

Before electricity was installed at the theater in 1912, limelight floodlights were brought by covered wagon from Monterey to light the stage. Two bonfires were also lit in semi-circular stone firepits on opposite ends of the proscenium, a tradition which continues today. In July 1911, William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night opened the second season at Forest Theater. Garnet Holme was the producer. Forest Theater Society produced several other plays in the next few years, including the 1911 production of the play The Land of Heart's Desire given by the Carmel Arts and Crafts Club, and the 1912 production of The Toad, by Carmel resident Bertha Newberry, the wife of Perry Newberry. That year, the first children's play was staged at Forest Theater, Alice in Wonderland, adapted by Newberry and painter Arthur Honywood Vachell.

In 1913 the theater produced four new productions: a Robin Hood drama, Runnymede; Newberry's play for children, Aladdin; Mary Austin's Fire starring George Sterling and directed by Austin; and Takeshi Kanno's poem-play Creation-Dawn. A split in the ranks of the Forest Theater Society caused Sterling and Heron to found the California (or Western) Drama Society, which produced plays in competition with the Carmel Arts and Crafts Club; the factions were eventually reconciled. In 1915, a season of 11 productions included Newberry's Junipero Serra premiered, a historical pageant about Father Junípero Serra with Frederick Bechdolt as Serra. Joseph Hand had his farewell appearance on August 7, 1915, in the play The Man from Home, by Harry Leon Wilson and Booth Tarkington. In 1916 two of the productions were Yolanda of Cyprus and The Piper, for which the scenery was painted by Carmel artists William Frederic Ritschel and Laura W. Maxwell, who also appeared in the plays.