Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 25, 1993 TAG: 9306250216
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RICK LINDQUIST STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Medium
"The Long Way Home," which opened its 23rd season Thursday, long ago outstripped its amphitheater's capacity, but it hasn't outrun its entertainment and emotional appeal.
"I think the catalyst to draw everything in here is `The Long Way Home,'" said Lewis Ingles "Bud" Jeffries, who has business and family ties to the Earl Hobson Smith play.
"The Long Way Home" tells of Mary Draper Ingles' courageous escape from the Shawnee warriors who took her captive from Drapers Meadow (now Blacksburg) in 1755.
"She [Ingles] was my great-great-great-great-grandmother," said Jeffries, who lives near the amphitheater in Ingleside, the Ingles family farm on the New River.
During the last 30 years of her life, Ingles lived nearby in a one-room cabin, now the site of "The Long Way Home." She died in 1815 at 83 and is buried nearby, but the grave's exact location is unknown.
Jeffries' mother, Mary Lewis Ingles Jeffries, collapsed and died shortly after a performance as Eleanor Hardin Draper - Mary Ingles Draper's mother - in 1988.
"It's more than just a production," Jeffries said. " `The Long Way Home' needs to bring people to the area."
He and others view "The Long Way Home" as a major player in plans of the new Radford Heritage Foundation to establish the city and surrounding area as history-based tourist attractions that would include museums, tours and annual festivals.
Board Chairwoman Frances Farmer says the play always grappled with debt. "We struggled through 23 years."
Substantive changes in the production could follow, but Jeffries and Francis believe the basics are there to enhance the local economy.
Even so, everyone agrees that there's a long way to go before tourists from Atlanta or Cincinnati flock to the New River Valley to take in the play. That will take more money and more marketing.
Of course, that also would mean more seats at the aging amphitheater, which now can handle about 500 people, or just under 5,000 a season. The board's goal is 20,000 a season by the year 2000.
Finances are the major focus right now, and "The Long Way Home" board wants to establish an endowment fund and bring aboard a full-time marketing director by the end of this year.
Jeffries and Farmer agree it will take hundreds of thousands of dollars - instead of the tens of thousands the board deals with now - and even tighter management to bring the board's long-range ideas into reality.
Those plans include a professional cast with salaries to match. Right now, principal players get $20 a performance, others less.
Jeffries is enthusiastic about the play's potential as a tourist attraction and points to the thousands of tourists who have never heard of "The Long Way Home" but pass close by each summer.
"If you can capture some of that going by and keep it here for three or four days, it would have a real impact," he said.
by CNB