Joplin's Stained Glass Theatre to perform 'Tom Sawyer'

Roger Nomer, The Joplin Globe, Mo.
·2 min read

Feb. 15—Stained Glass Theatre's production of "Tom Sawyer" uses a large cast to commemorate Missouri history through one boy's wacky adventures. The play starts Thursday and runs for two weeks at the Joplin theater.

"It's a cute story about his life and how ornery he and Huckleberry Finn were," said Mary McWethy, co-director with Janelle House. "It's also a heartwarming story about the people in the small town."

The play is by Paul Kester, based on the book by Mark Twain. It contains all the familiar scenes people would remember, from the boys witnessing their own funeral to the whitewashing of a picket fence.

"Tom Sawyer" takes place in a small fictional town in Missouri in the early 1800s. McWethy said the play portrays Tom Sawyer, his friends and their shenanigans in town. The boys are ruffians, always in trouble. But they're ruffians who learn an important lesson in honesty and doing the right thing.

Stained Glass Theatre's production has a cast of about 40 people, a relatively big cast. The cast is also diverse in ages, from 5 years old to senior citizens. The young male leads are new to the theater. One lead actor, who has never been on a stage, had 221 lines to memorize. He had those lines memorized the first week, McWethy said.

"Working with our leads has been wonderful," McWethy said. "When we saw them read the lines, we picked out the ones that we thought would fit the part the best. Now, we've laughed about it, and people have said we could not have cast it any better. They fit the roles perfectly."

Stained Glass Theatre had 75 people, including many children, try out for "Tom Sawyer," McWethy said. It was an unusually large number for the theater. McWethy attributes the high interest to the production being a well-known story.

Directors decided to expand the background cast to accommodate the large interest, creating extra roles for schoolchildren and townspeople. This included a 5-year-old who wanted to be in the play so badly that the directors wrote a line for him.

The production is a family-friendly play. McWethy said she and her co-director chose this play because it features both humor and a moral behind it.

Because "Tom Sawyer" is so rooted in Missouri, set in a Missouri town by the state's most famous author, it's a celebration of state history, she said.

"We chose it because it depicted Missouri in good times, back in the day when things were just so clean and fun," McWethy said.