By Vivienne Calloway
Every town has a place where it tells itself its own story. In Carmel-by-the-Sea, that place is a clearing among the pines at Mountain View and Santa Rita, a few blocks uphill from the shops and galleries, where wooden benches descend a natural bowl toward an open-air stage and two stone fire pits that have been warming audiences for more than a century. The Forest Theater is one of the oldest outdoor theaters west of the Rocky Mountains — founded in 1910, six years before the village itself was even incorporated — and it remains what it has always been: proof that Carmel’s first industry was imagination.
An Idea Among the Trees
The theater was born of the same bohemian ferment that produced nearly everything worth keeping in early Carmel. The driving force was Herbert Heron, a young actor and poet who arrived in the village and saw, in a concave hillside thick with pines, a natural amphitheater. The idea of an outdoor theater is often credited to a suggestion from Mary Austin, the celebrated writer who worked in a treehouse study she called her “wick-i-up” and who moved at the center of the colony of poets and painters then gathering by Carmel Bay. Heron brought the proposal to James Franklin Devendorf, co-founder of the Carmel Development Company and the village’s great patient benefactor. Devendorf, characteristically, did better than sell: he offered the land without charge and helped clear it, and a wooden stage rose among the trees.
On July 9, 1910, the Forest Theater opened with David, a six-act biblical drama by Constance Lindsay Skinner, directed by Garnet Holme of Berkeley. Heron himself played the shepherd king, with Helen MacGowan Cooke as Michal, in a cast drawn from Carmel-area residents. More than a thousand people came — this in a village whose entire population was a fraction of that number. From the beginning, the audience was the town, and the town was the cast.
The years that followed read like a roll call of Carmel’s golden age. In 1913 alone, the theater mounted four new productions, among them Mary Austin’s Fire, which the author directed herself and which starred the poet George Sterling, the charismatic center of Carmel’s artistic colony. Original plays, Shakespeare, pageants: the Forest Theater became the village’s commons, and a proving ground for the notion — radical then, cherished now — that a town of a few hundred souls could sustain serious art.
The Village Keeps Its Stage
Institutions survive on devotion, and the Forest Theater has required it more than once. In 1937, the theater was deeded to the City of Carmel-by-the-Sea so that Works Progress Administration funds could underwrite a major renovation — new benches, a concrete foundation for the stage, a proper grape-stake fence to replace the barbed wire — with the stipulation that the grounds remain a public park and continue to host outdoor performances. It was a very Carmel bargain: the New Deal, in service of amateur theatricals under the stars.
Heron, remarkably, was still at it four decades after the founding. In 1949 he and his fellow villagers formed the Forest Theater Guild, a community organization to produce plays and help the city care for the grounds — an organization that thrives today and that, since 1997, has run the beloved Films in the Forest series, projecting movies into the night air where David once played.
The modern era brought a new resident company. Pacific Repertory Theatre — founded by Stephen Moorer and known in its earliest years as GroveMont — began producing on the outdoor stage in the mid-1980s, fittingly opening its Forest Theater tenure with Medea in the searing adaptation by Robinson Jeffers, the poet who built Tor House of Carmel granite a mile away. PacRep has been the theater’s principal producer ever since, filling the summer and autumn calendar with Shakespeare, musicals, and theater for young audiences.
Devotion was tested again in living memory. In April 2014, after years of deferred maintenance, the theater was shuttered over health and safety concerns, and the city council declared what it called a “cultural community emergency” — surely one of the few municipalities in America to recognize such a category, and exactly the right town to do it. Carmel answered as it always has. The theater was renovated and reopened in 2016, and in recent years the volunteers of Carmel Cares have restored its weathered benches by hand — the latest link in a chain of civic stewardship that runs back, bench by bench, to Devendorf clearing brush in 1910.
Blankets, Firelight, Fog
What has not changed, in one hundred sixteen years, is the experience. You arrive early, carrying a blanket and perhaps a picnic. You claim your stretch of bench in the bowl beneath the pines — the amphitheater seats about 540 — and as the light drains out of the trees, the two bonfires are lit in their semicircular stone pits flanking the stage, a tradition as old as the theater itself. The fog may come over the hill midway through the second act; veterans consider this an enhancement. There is no roof, no proscenium arch worth the name, nothing between the players and the night. Children fall asleep in laps. The firelight moves on the trunks of the trees.
It is tempting to call this rustic, but that misses the point. The Forest Theater is not theater despite the outdoors; it is theater made of the outdoors, in a town that has always understood its landscape as a collaborator. The same instinct that set the Bach Festival’s chorales ringing in the Carmel Mission and sent painters to the dunes with their easels put a stage in this grove and kept it there through two world wars, a Depression, and a cultural emergency or two.
This season, as every season, the pines will fill again — PacRep’s outdoor productions carry through the summer and into fall, and the Guild’s films flicker on warm evenings. Bring the blanket. Sit where a thousand people sat in July of 1910, watching their neighbors perform a play by firelight, and consider how few things any American town has done continuously for 116 years. Carmel has done this: kept a stage in the forest, and kept showing up.
The Forest Theater is located at Mountain View Avenue and Santa Rita Street in Carmel-by-the-Sea. Schedules for Pacific Repertory Theatre’s outdoor season and the Forest Theater Guild’s Films in the Forest are available at pacrep.org and through the Guild.
