Around this time 102 years ago, North Dakota State’s Little Country Theatre staged its first productions.
Since 1914, the Little Country Theatre’s performances have entertained, impressed and challenged several generations of NDSU students and area theatergoers.
The original location of the Little Country Theatre was a chapel in Old Main, NDSU’s administrative building and first permanent structure.
Until 1902, daily meetings, mandatory for all students, were held there. As NDSU’s student population began to increase, these compulsory meetings were abolished and Old Main’s modest chapel fell out of use.
The chapel was renovated in 1914 and became the home of the Little Country Theatre.
The Theatre troupe’s popularity with students and community members expanded rapidly and, by the early 1960s, it had staged almost 650 performances for an estimated 150,000 audience members.
Soon, the Little Country Theatre became the main classroom of the speech and drama department. The original theater was relatively small, with no dressing rooms for actors and a maximum seating capacity of 283.
As the 1960s approached, administrators and faculty of the speech and drama department began to discuss constructing a new permanent location for the Little Country Theatre.
The space had become unsuitable — its seating could no longer accommodate large audiences. Additionally, the speech and drama department had expanded, and many of its newly available courses had been relegated to temporary classrooms.
These difficulties were addressed in 1967, when enough money had been raised to construct a new building, Askanase Hall.
In 1968, the newly built Askanase Hall became the home of both the Department of Theatre Arts and the Little Country Theatre. Since then, hundreds of performances — from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to Arthur Miller’s “The Death of a Salesman” — have been staged there.
The Little Country Theatre’s established tradition of entertaining and inspiring local audiences will continue this year with “Peter Pan,” “The Goldilocks Zone,” “Songs for a New World” and an adaptation of Homer’s “The Odyssey.”
For more information on current NDSU Performing Arts events, please visit their website here.