ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 7, 1997 TAG: 9702070019
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: PULASKI
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
Bonnie Welder, who moved to Wytheville a little more than a year ago, has become the first director of planning and development for the Pulaski Theatre.
She was hired by the Friends of the Pulaski Theatre, organized to save the 86-year-old former vaudeville house when it closed as a movie theater in 1991 and was given to Pulaski County.
"It was a nice match, because I was ready to go to work and really want to make a difference here," Welder said. "Really my job right now is planning the next three months, because we will be kicking off our campaign in May."
Welder had been visiting Wytheville from her native Georgia for the past three years, looking for a vacation home. Instead, she decided to move to the area.
"For their size, I think towns like Marion and Wytheville and Pulaski have great charm," she said. "Overall, the area was aesthetically very pleasing."
She had already borrowed costumes from Marlis Ryssell-Flynn at the Upstairs Downstairs Boutique in Pulaski for a Shakespeare production in which she was involved in South Carolina. And she formed the Evansham Players theater group in Wythe County, which has already staged two full-length productions and a one-act play.
She had heard of the Friends of the Pulaski Theatre, but had not thought of the organization in terms of a job until a friend mentioned her credentials to a member of the group.
"My position is a three-year project job," she said. "When I direct a show, I look at it as a project."
She believes that her big test came when Friends President Randy Eley and Bob Henderson, one of the organization's founders, took her to see the interior of the theater building, which has not been used in six years.
Her reaction was, hey, at least there's a building to restore and renovate. It's not as though she was starting with an empty lot.
"I'm not easily put off by things like that," she said. "It's recycling at a really good level."
Eley is donating office space for Welder in his law building. Already she has dressed it up with Broadway playbills on the walls and other decorations.
"I'm looking forward to working with a lot of the people that I've met," she said. "Money is what builds the building, and the people are what make it successful, or not."
She sees a variety of possibilities for the building, from stage productions to dance programs, clown workshops, "basket-weaving, whatever." But the first task is to refurbish the building.
"I don't tend to undertake things that I don't think have the potential to succeed," she said. "It's all feasible. There are no big mysteries to it. ... But you do have to be relentless. And I'm good at that."
Welder became interested in the arts early.
"I think I was always attracted to performance. I studied dance as a child," she said. At age 14, when her father was stationed at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba with the Navy, she landed a part among the chorus in a stage production of "Li'l Abner."
"Been in a show most of the time since then," she said, mostly in amateur productions and community theater. She has been a volunteer in the arts for 30 years, and been a director, producer, performer, fund-raiser, guest curator in South Carolina and elsewhere during that time.
After a 15-year career in retail and merchandising, she got a job offer to work for a combined museum and art center. "I thought it was a great opportunity, so I changed fields," she said. She has been working for nonprofit arts organizations since then.
Although she has often performed, she prefers to direct others in plays. "I don't tend to put myself on stage," she said. "I want the people around me to learn about theater."
A play is not something you can go back and watch again on videotape or anything, she said, but it often provides pleasant and vivid memories to the viewer.
"What you really sell to the people in the arts is an experience," she said. "It's like you do this work, you do this show, and it vanishes. ... My rule in theater and the arts is that it should be fun."
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Welderby CNB