Joan Shepard, last founding member of legendary CT theater company River Rep, passes away

With the passing of Joan Shepard last week, a vibrant era of Connecticut theater history has vanished.

Shepard, who died March 3 at the age of 91, was the last surviving founding member of River Rep, a small theater company that ran a summer theater season at the Ivoryton Playhouse from 1987 to 2005. “We did 96 productions, and she must have been in 65 of them,” said Shepard’s daughter and frequent Ivoryton co-star Jenn Thompson. She performed in heavy dramas, ridiculous farces, musicals and classic American plays, “Barefoot in the Park” to “Something’s Afoot,” from “Into the Woods” to “Lost in Yonkers.”

The River Rep was in a grand tradition of American summer stock theaters that could do anywhere from five to over a dozen shows in a single summer, usually with the same group of actors. There were dozens of summer stock theaters in Connecticut in the mid-20th century, but most of them were long gone by the time River Rep started in the late 1980s. The Ivoryton Playhouse, built as a recreation hall for factory workers in 1911, had been a summer theater from the 1930s into the 1960s, featuring Broadway and Hollywood stars in hit plays of that time. The River Rep helped revive the space after it had been dormant for years. Jane Stanton, a renowned children’s theater writer/director, was vacationing the area and saw the building. Stanton started River Rep with Shepard, Evan Thompson and two other accomplished actors, Warren Kelley and Martha Farrar. All five founding members are now gone.

Many theater companies may behave as if they are families, but the core of River Rep really was one with Shepard, her husband, Evan Thompson, and their children, Owen Thompson and Jenn Thompson.

Jenn Thompson said when her parents helped start River Rep, they were about to become empty nesters and thought it would keep the family together. After they’d all worked there together as actors for six or seven years, Jenn and Owen Thompson became producing partners in the company.

“It really was a repertory company,” Jenn Thompson said, and that’s how River Rep, Joan Shepard and the rest will be remembered.

At the Ivoryton Playhouse and other theaters around the state now, theaters cast each show independently. At the old repertory companies, the cast typically lived and worked together for the whole summer, each appearing in most of the shows and planning seasons based on the strengths of the company.

In the case of Joan Shepard and her family, they lived in a house just a short walk from the theater. Having the house near the theater was crucial because Shepard never learned to drive.

Actress Joan Shepard, right, appeared here with Katherine Houghton, left, during Matthew Lombardo’s theatrical depiction of Houghton’s aunt Katherine Hepburn in “Tea at Five.” They also co-starred together in the River Rep production of “Lettice and Lovage,” at the Ivoryton Playhouse.
Photo: The River Rep at The Ivoryton Playhouse
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Published: 07/02/2002Jenn Thompson has special memories of working with her mother at the Ivoryton Playhouse in shows like the Lanford Wilson drama “Fifth of July” and the Stephen Sondheim musical “Into the Woods.”

Shepard and her family all worked steadily year-round as professional actors, directors and producers. Evan Thompson and Shepard ran a children’s theater company, Fanfare, that toured throughout the East Coast for over 40 years. Evan Thompson died in 2015.

Shepard was a child actress as well as a “Quiz Kid” on the popular 1940s radio game show. “She did nine Broadway shows before she was 22,” Thompson said. “She was directed by Elia Kazan and Oscar Hammerstein. She was in the original cast of ‘Member of the Wedding,’ directed by Harold Clurman. The first show she was ever in was Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ [in 1940, when she was 7 years old]. She was besotted, and basically made theater her religion.”

Her father, a jazz trumpeter in the famed Paul Whiteman Orchestra, had hoped she would become a classical pianist.

Shepard spent most of her life in New York City but spent a few years on the West Coast. She met Evan Thompson in Los Angeles. “My dad had gone to Berkeley and was part of a writer’s cabal there,” Jenn Thompson said. “It was a ‘50s San Francisco sort of a beatnik thing.”

The couple worked together in a troupe called Harlequintet. The comedian Lenny Bruce saw Harlequintet and hired Shepard for a comedy revue he was putting together. She also spent time in London studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and in Los Angeles where she appeared in numerous TV and theater shows. She missed New York and moved back there in 1962.

Shepard continued acting well into her 80s. In 2010, she developed a one-woman show about her life called “Confessions of Old Lady #2,” and took it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, then to the New York Fringe Festival and even the Ivoryton Playhouse. Four years ago, she took part in a one-act festival at the Polaris Theater Company in New York.

After nearly two decades of summer shows, the Ivoryton Playhouse became a year-round theater in 2006, displacing the River Rep company which attempted to carry on at a space in Chester and was looking at other venues when the company decided to close for good in 2007.

Jenn Thompson remains a major presence in Connecticut theater. She has directed regularly at the Goodspeed Opera House and at TheaterWorks Hartford. Her production of “Bye Bye Birdie” at the Goodspeed reunited her with Kelley, who was cast as the dour dad. She is about to start rehearsals for the musical “Gypsy,” which opens the 2023 Goodspeed season in April.

Thompson now lives with her husband and fellow River Rep veteran Stephen Kunken of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Showtimes’ “Billions.” They live in the same house in Ivoryton she spent all those summers acting in plays with her family. The house had been sold in 2011 but came back on the market last year. Her brother Owen, now the co-artistic director of the Schoolhouse Theater in New York’s Westchester County, lives in the same New York apartment the family shared for decades.

A memorial service for Shepard will be held in New York City in May.