I love stories. The theater is stories. But life is stories. Thats what your life is, really, a string of stories. And then they stop, and its sad when those stories disappear because someone didnt tell them to someone else.
Tony Rivenbark passed away in mid-July of 2022. Some of the stories he wanted to tell are captured in his book, Images of America: Thalian Hall. Published by Arcadia in 2014, he dedicated the work to Doug Swink, in his words, actor, director, teacher, designer, playwright, historian, and the theatrical father of hundreds of thespians.
Many of those titles, in fact most, apply to Tony Rivenbark.
Within those titles are more stories, many of which we will never hear, his own biography and that of the Cape Fear region forever intertwined. While its likely there are private recordings done by those in his inner circle, we know of no comprehensive narrative that weaves together his biography and local history.
Tony and I had an appointment to begin such recordings, a project conceived of by his close, and, he liked to joke, oldest friend, Suellen Yates. He passed away the day before we were to begin.
Tony Rivenbarks most public-facing and prominent legacy: shepherding downtown Wilmingtons Thalian Hall from a disused building that had fallen into disrepair into one of the most beautifully restored historic theaters in the U.S. Under his direction, the Hall became a thriving center of cultural arts in the Cape Fear region. He served as Executive Director from 1979 until his passing in 2022.
He also acted in more than 200 plays, in theaters around town but mostly at the Hall, either on the mainstage or in the upstairs studio theater, now known as the Ruth and Bucky Stein Theater.
He mentored the younger generation: artists, actors, historic preservationists.
An historian in his own right, Tony Rivenbark understood previous centuries in the region in a way that few people do. Ben Steelman is another one of those special local citizens, and in fact, well hear part of a historical exploration with the two men from a 2015 CoastLine episode.
This is the part of CoastLine where I usually welcome the guest sitting with me in the studio.
Since I cant do that, a moment of silence instead.
SEGMENT 1:
My name is Tony Rivenbark and I am 73 years old.
This is from a StoryCorps interview in 2021, 10 months before his death. You can hear him speak through a mask. He talks with his friend, Travis Gilbert, Executive Director of Historic Wilmington Foundation.
TG: When was the first time you laid eyes on Thalian Hall?
TR: I had been coming to Wilmington all my life because my mother lived to shop and so all the cities we would go in North Carolina at some point or another but I had never seen or heard of Thalian Hall, so as a freshman in college here, I saw auditions for a play and I went down to where the address was, and I walked into this incredible building that I had never seen or heard of. And it was not in great shape. It had very faded, maroon carpet that was worn and threadbare. The walls were painted gray. The ornate interior was pink and white with gold paint. It had corduroy chairs. It had radiators. It was very shabby. But it was magnificent. The bones of the structure, the architecture was very much intact. The slender cast-iron columns that supported the balcony, the ornate proscenium it just blew my mind. Blew my mind.
And so I went upstairs to the balcony and watched the audition process. I had never been in had no background in theater. I had been theatrical but no background in real theater. I had seen theater. So I just sat there and watched the process, bathed in this magnificent building, never having any idea that I would have anything to do with it or change it.
The next night, the force pulled me back again and this time I accidentally got herded in with the other auditionees, mostly college students, and auditioned for the show. And Doug Swink came and said, I see on your little form that you have had dance. Would you like to dance for us?
So I went up and did the Charleston. I do a mean Charleston. And I was cast in the show and I did every show the college drama department did for the next four years, except for two, I think.
And that changed my life and thats all Ive done is theater my whole life. So walking into Thalian Hall, for good or ill in 1966, sort of set the course for the rest of my life.
Tony grew up in Duplin County and wanted to go to college at the smallest branch in the University of North Carolina system.
So he came to Wilmington.
TR: It didnt have dorms. So you didnt have to live on campus. And the idea of living with a stranger just, you know, made me very nervous. So I lived in a beach cottage, you know. Thats the attraction to Wilmington, anyway, is the beach. And I did not know anybody but by going into the theater and becoming a part, I became part of a theater family.
A show is like a theater family. It isn't the same people all the year long. It's a different family every six weeks.
I sometimes call Thalian Hall Wilmington's living room. It's the place that people bring their guests from out of town and say, oh, well this is what's in our community. It's a place you show off.
It was 1963 when the Thalian Hall Commission was chartered for the purpose of restoring the Hall as a performing arts center.
TR: The sixties were that period where Wilmington was changing in a bad way. Economically it wasn't doing very well, but old buildings were beginning to disappear everywhere. And Thalian Hall was one of the first buildings with an organization created specifically to restore it, which is the Thalian Hall Center for the Performing Arts. Further along was the Foundation looking at residential and what was happening there and how to get more people to preserve buildings and buy them and then find buyers to restore them. These were all important parts of making this town, particularly the historic district and downtown, be viable.
But in the sixties, it was a low ebb. By the seventies, it was beginning to change. And then, 1979 when I was hired was really kind of the beginning of downtown Wilmington becoming its own destination.
Although, says Tony, it was more than 20 years before Wilmington really got there.
Tony tells Travis that he went on to act in New York theater, did summer stock in Wilmington, and then had designs on Florida as a place to pursue acting.
TR: And then the job became available at Thalian Hall and I was hired on the spot. I was only asked to do two things: increase the income and stop the smoking in the building. That's all they asked me to do. And it wasn't very hard to create more income because somebody needed to understand the front of the house and the back of the house.
You need to understand the audience, the showroom, and understand the factory. And by making that work, and then actively trying to get people to use it, because I quickly came upon the realization that if you were going to fix the building and make it properly work for theater, which basically desperately needed a fly system for scenery and then the backstage needed to work, the auditorium was beautiful. It'd been restored, but the backstage was a disaster. And the only way was to make the building more important to more people.
It was important to a handful of people who were basically the theater folk and their audiences, but it wasn't important to the community in the same way. So it had to be more important to more people in town. That was one thing.
And so you had to get more shows in there that would bring in more different audiences. That was the first realization. And then the second one was, Wilmington, particularly in that period of time, kind of thought it was the only place in the world that was like it was, and in some ways that's true, but it was so isolated because the I-40 came in much later. Wilmington was like an island off the rest of the state. And they thought the way they did things was the way they had to be done. They didn't really look at how people did things in other places.
So I started going to theater conferences and looking at other historic theater restorations, and saw that there are many ways, you know, we are not that unique. There are other historic theaters and they have been successful and revitalized.
And so I started seeing that and then bringing some of those ideas back and then started bringing in people with the expertise from other places. So if you want to make a place important in your own town, bring somebody from somewhere else who says it's important. And then people will believe that.
And being that the building was owned by the city and the city hall was in, it was an advantage and a disadvantage. The city really didn't need a theater next to it, but it was already there. So they had to deal with it. Eventually I was trying to persuade the city government that the building was an asset to the community. That didn't just happen overnight or even in my head. But as time went on, we all came to the realization that reinvesting in that building was good for the community, was good for the city government, was good for the citizens.
Tony Rivenbark admits hes still learning about Thalian Hall.
TR: All of this is not as interesting all of the wonderful things that are in this town if you dont know the story behind it. I think. I find history the most exciting thing in the world. And every day we make more of it.
TG: The best history is a story. That's why historians fail because they aren't storytellers.
TR: I agree with that. Agree with that completely.
And Tony, the historian, DID tell his own and some of the regions lesser-known history through stories. Thats next.
SEGMENT 2:
When Tony Rivenbark, Executive Director of Thalian Hall Center for the Performing Arts, passed away in July of 2022, he left behind a magnificently restored cultural arts center, younger generations of thespians and preservationists, local history told in ways that are quintessentially Tony Rivenbark.
In 2015, he and Ben Steelman, a journalist and local historian, came to the CoastLine studio to explore the history of the Cape Fear region. It was just two weeks after a white supremacist gunman killed nine people in an AME church in South Carolina. That shooting raised new questions nationwide among white people about Confederate history and Confederate symbols and the appropriateness of those symbols in public spaces.
Keep in mind, as you listen to this part of the discussion, it is 2015 and while 2015 may sound like recent history, local and national opinion surrounding Confederate history has undergone a profound change in the last seven years.
TR: I mean, I'm from Eastern North Carolina. My family have been there on both sides, you know, going back to before the revolution. And so certainly I had ancestors at fault in the Confederate army. I was very interested in the civil war, you know, when I was in high school and of course that was the sixties, which was the hundredth anniversary. And I was president of the Duplin County Children of the Confederacy chapter and I came to Wilmington when they had the state conference and all this stuff. So I was part of all of that stuff.
You know, I never thought of it in terms of racially, though. It all had to do with the war and, you know, young guys love playing battles, fighting battles, whatever it is.
And we just happened to do the civil war. It was a colorful and interesting period only as time went on and when going to school and then the school was integrated by then. Particularly into college, I start seeing things in a different kind of light. And most of us, or many, certainly a great many people in the south have, you know, changed a lot of those attitudes and it has become, you know, what was not acceptable when we were kids and we never question it, is something that now we do question about those things.
RLH: And you told me earlier, Tony, that you took down a picture recently of Robert E. Lee. Tell us why you decided to do that.
TR: Well, I don't know. I think, you know, one time I was talking to somebody and they made some comment about me and they said, oh, you're just like the people that ride around in a pickup truck with a Confederate flag and a, and a gun rack on your car. And it irritated me. So I went home and pulled out all my Confederate stuff and put it up.
But gradually over the years I put it away. And the other day, this recent business of this terrible situation in Charleston, and I said, you know, I don't need a picture of Robert E. Lee hanging up. You know, it was a tiny one on the shelf. I don't really need that anymore. Plus the fact I don't have enough room for everything anyway.
So I've pulled whatever little bit there was left. Like I said, because I think it belongs in a museum now. It might be important as a piece of set decoration, but personally, I don't need it anymore.
RLH: Ben Steelman, you also grew up in North Carolina.
BS: Yeah. I can actually top Tony. I'm a sort of sideways descendant of Robert Frederick Hoke, the Confederate general who was camped out at Sugarloaf while Fort Fisher was falling. That's a whole different story.
My father's name was Hoke Steelman. So, anyway, so that was a minor point of pride. White southerners need to be reminded that not all of their neighbors feel the same way about their heritage as we might. And we have to admit that yes, slavery was, slavery is a horror and yes, the right side won the war.
RLH: There are a lot of people, many of them from Northern parts or other parts of this country, people who didn't grow up in the south, who don't really have that sense of cultural heritage internalized who look at the Confederate flag and do see the emblem of the fight to keep slavery, which is, you know, a fight for human oppression. So how do you tease that apart when you're looking at it through a historical lens versus a personal lens, Ben Steelman?
BS: Probably most white southerners rationalize it by saying by, by you hear the phrase a lot, it's, it's about heritage not hate. And they saw their ancestors as fighting to defend their homes. Most southerners did not own slaves. Certainly most of the privates in the Confederate army did not own slaves and they were defending their homes. And when their homes were occupied by the Yankees, they up and deserted to take care of their families.
So, I think that's part that's part of it, but we have to admit that yes, slavery was an issue. Alexander Stevens, the Vice President of the Confederacy wrote as much. Bedford Forrest said the same thing, although not as politely as Mr. Stevens did.
It's something we have to face.
RLH: When we talk about the reasons behind the civil war, there are people who will say this was a fight over states rights. Slavery was sort of an ancillary issue. Is that true? Is that a smoke screen? Tony Rivenbark?
TR: The underlying cause it had to do with the state's rights were important because people wanted to maintain the slavery as an institution. And it was dying out in the world. In other places, it was gradually being done away with, but you can't sugar coat it and the bottom line: that's what it was about. And that was about money and money was tied in with slavery. That was the wealth of the south was based in human, uh, flesh. Uh, and you take that away then great part of the wealth is gone. So yes, money, states rights, power, the country was divided in a sense evenly to some degree, but it was beginning to shift toward the Northern manufacturing and the southerners resented that. But still you can't take that slavery's the underlying bottom, dark side of this, no matter how you slice it,
RLH: We have some rich historical sites right here in the Wilmington area related to the civil war Fort Fisher, for instance. For folks who aren't familiar with that, Ben Steelman, can you tell us what Fort Fisher is and what it was for?
BS: Fort Fisher guarded the new inlet into the Cape Fear river and up to Wilmington. The new inlet no longer exists. It was closed in the, uh, late 1800s in a massive Corps of Engineers project led by the father of Henry Bacon. Bacon later became famous as the architect of the Lincoln Memorial. And he's actually buried here in town.
But anyway, that kept the port of Wilmington, which is usually normally a very small and significant port open, even as other Confederate ports were closed. And Robert E. Lee famously wrote that if Wilmington fell, he would not be able to keep his army in the field. And, in fact, the Army of Northern Virginia lasted barely 90 days after the fall of Fort Fisher.
So, a battle that's often overlooked when the final battle occurred in January of 1865, there are only about 1800 Confederates on one side and about four times that many Union soldiers and sailors on the other, but it was a very strategic battle. And more people recognize that.
RLH: When we talk about historic sites from the civil war, Tony Rivenbark explains why Thalian Hall is key.
TR: It was the center of entertainment in that period in Wilmington with 2000 blockade ships coming in. Most of the people sat around and waited for a ship to come in. There was nothing else to do but party. And this was the party town in the south. And one of the things people did was go to the theater. And from January 1864 to January 1865, there were over 300 different productions in Thalian Hall. That's how busy the theater was, because people had nothing to do while they were waiting for these blockade runners to come in.
BS: Wilmington was a civil war boom town. Most of the old residents moved out or moved inland for safety, but there are all these speculators, all these people who are getting stuff imported on the blockade runners. There are all of these young Royal Navy officers on reserve or half pay who are commanding or acting as officers on these blockade runners. And basically they were behaving like sailors in a port.
There's a famous letter. It's in one of Dr. Andrew Howes books, recounting a witness seeing a Royal Navy officer in fox hunting scarlets riding on the back of a poor in Wilmington, constable and whipping him with his riding crop. It was just terrible.
RLH: A listener asks about an incident in Wilmington when many Black people were killed and land and wealth was taken by white people. Ben Steelman tells the story of the 1898 coup detat when elected Black officials were forced from office at gunpoint by a white mob, an unknown number of innocent Black citizens were murdered. And a majority of African-American citizens fled the city, leaving everything behind.
Tony Rivenbark sets the scene where it happened at Thalian Hall.
TR: Out on the streets were filled with armed people to essentially enforce that will, and they could see it from that window. You can't see third street from the ballroom if you're sitting at a desk, but you can from Sterling Cheathams office.
RLH: Sterling Cheatham was the Wilmington city manager in 2015.
TR: And evidently it was a very intimidating force of all these armed people and every one of the aldermen resigned. And that was one of the few examples of an armed coup detat that held and was not treated, was not disciplined in any way by the government.
RLH: Is it true That is the only coup detat that we know of in American history?
BS: Some people say that.
TR: Yeah, I think that there's a couple of other instances of something similar to that, but this was very specific.
TR: The collector of ports of customs was a major federal position at that point, and that was an African American.
BS: Right.
RLH: And we know that the elected officials were forced out that's pretty well documented.
TR: Oh, it's absolutely documented.
RLH: What about the loss of wealth and land for local residents, people who were African American, who were forced out of their homes?
TR: I think that gets a lot fuzzier.
BS: It does. Some people, a lot of people like Alex Manley moved north and..
RLH: Alex Manley the publisher of the newspaper.
BS: And they lost their material wealth. Others sort of hung on as long as they weren't a threat to anybody. The fact is, of course, that Wilmington's economy needed Black labor to work. So, I mean, I've always sort of felt like 1898 wasn't like a massacre. It was more like a botched lobotomy or failed attempt at a lobotomy. They were trying to eliminate the Black middle class.
RLH: And they succeeded?
TR: To a great extent. You know, there were certain families that continued to stay on and still on to this day.
BS: Like the Sadgwars, for example.
TR: Yeah, and Manly was, interestingly enough, was actually a descendant of a former white governor, which I find also very interesting.
BS: Yes.
RLH: Theres a question from a listener about a series of tunnels that run underground in Wilmington. What are they? Were they ever used to move supplies and weapons during the civil war or to help enslaved people escape? Ben Steelman?
BS: There are a lot of brick-lined tunnels dating from the late 1700s and early 1800s, the most famous being Jacob's Run, which runs under the Bricks nightclub and all the way up to St. James Church. Father Abrams once showed me a little doorway you can open up and get in there.
The sad fact, though, seems to be that these were sewers. And though you get all sorts of great romantic stories that pirates had booty in there or that the underground railroad smuggled slaves out through there or anything, uh, doesn't seem to be much evidence for that.
TR: Jacob's Run actually starts up there above what used to be the law enforcement center and it runs down. And when you look at the old courthouse, you see how low the right side is between that and the judicial building. It's really very low. You go way down to the ground. Well, that was a stream that basically ran down eventually bricked that up all the way down so they could build streets and things.
Because downtown, you know, Wilmington is built on a bluff that was a very hilly area. There were seven, basically seven large hills. Bill Reeves referred to it as the seven sand dunes of Wilmington, like the seven Hills of Rome. And gradually over the years, was trying to level this off for building.
So you had this tremendous disparity between height and low, Thalian Hall stands on one of those hills. And the bottom of that hill is on the other side of the courthouse. And evidently at one point on Third Street actually was a bridge across Second. It was that low-lying area, but gradually over the years, it sort of smoothed it off.
RLH: So Thalian Hall, when was it built and why did local leaders decide that this community could support a theater of that size?
TR: Well, first of all, it had a theater right there where Thalian Hall stands for 50 years. So it wasn't a new idea, but the city had grown. The city was the largest city in the state. The city government was operating out of rented space on Princess Street. The courthouse had moved from the center of Front and Market to the corner of Princess and Third, not where the courthouse is now, but the one where that new bank building that's where the courthouse was.
The rest is here:
CoastLine: Tony Rivenbark, 1948-2022: "All I've done is theater my whole life." - WHQR
