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New Historical Video Screening about the Backyard Players
April 21 @ 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
New Historical Video Screening about the Backyard Players
Sunday, April 21, 2 pm
The Maturango Museum will present a new historical video about Steve Lee and the Backyard Players.
Steve Lee worked on the base for 39 years (1954-1993), and while working here, he also wrote, produced, directed, and acted in nearly 40 plays and sketches. From this effort, he started “The Backyard Players” in the 1960s, a very popular acting group in which each performance pretty much sold out. Literally, all of their plays were staged in someone’s backyard. For one stretch — eleven plays in a row—from 1967 to 1982 were performed in the same backyard on the base. It was often difficult to see the plays because you had to be invited by one of the cast members to attend. If you couldn’t get an invitation, you couldn’t see the play. These plays became legendary in their use of local people, customs and situations, and current events, dumb jokes, puns, simile’s, metaphors and fractured English.
Steve retired from the base in 1993 and left the desert. About 15 years after his retirement, Steve returned to the desert to give one last performance and to recount the history of the Backyard Players. During this performance, a few of his actors who still lived in the area performed several skits from his earlier plays. Some of those skits will be shown in tonight’s video, which was written, produced, and directed by Mark Pahuta.
The video, which runs a little over an hour, will be screened in the Coso Gallery, Sunday at 2 PM, April 21, 2024. Mark Pahuta will be present to talk about the making of the video.