When GPS directions instruct first-time visitors to the Lofte Community Theatre in the southeastern Village of Manley to take a white rock country road, it’s understandable some might hesitate. The path that winds through corn and soy fields looks like the place GPS goes to die.

But after following the road around a curve and over railroad tracks, the sight of the theater and its glowing windows shining high atop a hill reassures visitors that they’ve navigated correctly. The deep red post-and-beam performing arts center, built in 2006, pays homage to the theater’s roots.

Unlike the Lofte’s first location in a renovated hog barn, the current facility offers the comfort of climate control and plush seating. The sound of laughter and chatter leaks from the lobby’s twin double doors until ushers advise audience members to take their seats.

The Lofte draws cast and audience members from rural and urban Nebraska, puts on six shows, special events and a weeklong children’s theater workshop each year, and serves as a second home for its Born-in-a-Barn Players. It is a place of creation, belonging and connection.

Jean Colbert is 89 years old but moves with an easy grace. Her voice possesses the quiet command of a practiced stage mom. She’s been with the Lofte since its inaugural performance of Godspell in 1977. Her son Kevin starred as Jesus. Today he is the theater’s director. One afternoon last fall, at a free performance of patriotic songs, Jean, a Weeping Water native, welcomed the audience and introduced herself this way:

“Hello. My name is Jean. I’m a member of the board, and I clean the bathrooms.”

Laughter rolled through the theater.

No one can deny that Jean, a retired teacher and dairy farmer’s wife, has good comic timing. She’s also good with figures. She manages the box office, in addition to her janitorial duties. She has never starred in a production, but she’s always played a central role for the theater, beginning with making handmade tickets from construction paper during those early years. She’s also crafted volumes of scrapbooks memorializing 45 years of performances. Flipping through them on a recent evening in the lobby, Jean reminisces about Lofte friendships made across generational and geographical divides, couples who have fallen in love while performing together and people who have used the power of art to work through personal difficulties.

When Jean gets to the very first scrapbook she made, she smooths her hands across the cover and beams. The smile lines alongside her eyes deepen. Inside, the book, she pasted sepia-toned photos and local newspaper writeups that applauded the efforts of a young drama teacher in Weeping Water named Diane Bjornborg (now Reece) who became convinced that her community had the talent to start a local theater. The teacher found the perfect place in a farmer’s barn, just outside of town on Nebraska Highway 1. 

Farmer howard rathe scraped and power washed decades of poop and dirt out of his weathered hog barn to provide that first space for a theater. Initially reluctant to lend his building to the project because he didn’t want to move all his machinery out just to move it right back in, his wife and daughter convinced him that it was worth trying. Along with his son Les, he poured a concrete floor and installed electricity.

The community pitched in, too, washing windows and erecting a stage. A local funeral home lent folding chairs. High school kids made lights from coffee cans.

“I saw people pounding nails that didn’t even know what a hammer was before that,” Jean said. “It really brought the community together.” 

The newly formed theater company expected 350 people to attend three performances of Godspell. The first show was standing-room-only – 850 people came. The barn served the Lofte’s needs for the first 29 years. Howard Rathe never did put his machinery back in it.

Choosing Godspell as the theater’s first performance was risky, because although it tells a traditional story – the life of Jesus according to the Gospel of Matthew – it does so in a flashy bohemian way that calls for Jesus to dance around in a pair of yellow underwear.

That bit got axed. Instead, Kevin had his mom dye him a pair of yellow underwear to wear under his costume. The show was a success – even years later when the cast performed it on road. That is, until one evening performance, when Kevin didn’t wear the yellow underwear. “All the microphones cut out, and the bread we were supposed to eat was moldy,” Kevin said.

It set him up for a lifelong superstition of wearing yellow underwear for every show.

Even with its rudimentary amenities, the old theater held many wonderful memories for its players. During the earliest days, there was no men’s restroom, so the men relieved themselves in the surrounding cornfields. One evening, during intermission of a performance of Damn Yankees, the actors re-emerged from the corn still wearing their 1910 baseball uniforms. They took audience members in the parking lot by surprise – it was straight out of the film Field of Dreams.

In the summer, because the building didn’t have air conditioning, they had to keep the side doors open. Sometimes a barn cat wandered on stage. Other times, the crickets wouldn’t quit chirping.

By 2001, the board knew they were outgrowing their old space. So they did what they’d done before – they reached out to their community for help. Lofte players sat in patrons’ living rooms and appealed for funds to erect a new building. A class of Weeping Water fourth graders rallied for the cause and emptied piggy banks. Neighbors chipped in what they could – $5 here or $10 there. They found corporate donors, too.

The board raised more than half a million dollars this way. They were set to build at the Cass County Fairgrounds, right across the road from the old theater, but the deal fell through. They were back to square one. Zoning laws made finding a rural spot a challenge.

Kevin decided to ask his grandma if they could buy 10 acres of her land in Manley. He also had to get the OK from his brother, who farmed it. Both family members supported the sale.

In the time that had passed between losing the original location and finding the new one, building costs and materials had gone up – way up. Board members gathered and redrew the blueprint. They took their plan to the United States Department of Agriculture. Because it was a barn serving a rural community, the USDA agreed to carry the loan. The agency gave the theater a 40-year fixed rate and construction began. Despite adversity, the Lofte remained faithful to its rural roots. It has also remained true to its mission to provide an artistic outlet for youth in rural Nebraska, like Lucas Hrabik of Louisville.

The music played, but 12-year-old Hrabik froze during dance rehearsal. The choreographer peered at him expectantly. The boy tried to form words, but they got lost in the sludge of blood surging to his cheeks. The lights were too bright, too hot. Time felt like it had slowed to a stop. His feet were cement blocks.

Even though it had been his idea to sign up for his first Lofte audition in 2018 and he got a part, after his first two rehearsals, Hrabik rode home in the car crying. He told his mom he couldn’t do it anymore. It was too hard. He didn’t know what he was doing. He wanted to quit.

Fine, his mom told him. You can quit, but if you do, you have to tell Kevin to his face that you’re done. In this family, we finish what we start, she said.

Hrabik elected to stick it out. He learned he could do things he never imagined – singing on stage, dancing in front of strangers and working toward a common goal with a group of adults. Plus, it’s an escape for him from the chaos of life in a family with six rowdy boys. He likes how people at the Lofte all work together,
“because, you know, sometimes with brothers, not so much,” Hrabik said.

Four years after his first performance, now 16-year-old Hrabik speaks with the poise and self-assurance of someone much older and even laughs about how painfully shy he was when he began. A high school junior, he won’t make plans to attend a college that takes him farther than an hour’s drive from the theater. He’s committed to being a “Lofte lifer,” he said.

He’s one of many. Seventy-year-old Reece, the drama teacher who started it all, still regularly attends performances.

Not only does the theater appeal across generations, it also draws people from different parts of Nebraska together. A scan of the parking lot at any given performance reveals license plates from nearly a dozen different Nebraska counties.

The Lofte provides a unique opportunity for actors from different parts of the state to meet and become friends, too. Last fall, audience members watching the comedy The Savannah Sipping Society felt like they were spending an incredible long weekend with four gal pals, in part because the four actresses formed incredible bonds in real life.

The humanity on display at the Lofte isn’t limited to its staged dramas, musicals and comedies. Melinda Mead of Plattsmouth had a role in Jake’s Women when her sister suddenly died. Mead was there to hold her sister’s hand as she passed. Then she went to a rehearsal.

It might be difficult for non-theater people to understand why Mead carried on, but she needed to be with her Lofte family. To be able to walk on stage and occupy a different life and create art was an escape from her all-consuming sadness. Her love for the stage and the support of her Lofte family carried her through that difficult time.

“That’s who I want to be for the next new person who walks in the door,” Mead said.

The theater company also celebrates life’s happiest occasions together. Kevin and his wife Betty, the retired music director for the theater, met acting in the original Lofte theater’s production of The Music Man. They later married on stage. Their daughter Sam grew up in that theater and she acted on stage at the new one. At the beginning of 2020, Kevin walked Sam down the aisle to take on a new role as wife to Amaury Colvarro.   

At the end of Sam and Amaury’s ceremony, a friend dressed as Doc Emmett Brown from Back to the Future sprinted down the aisle and proclaimed with gusto, “Sam, Amaury, your future is starting but you have to come now!” The bride and groom looked at each other in mock surprise and fled the stage.

More comedy is in store at the Lofte this year. The theater’s 2022 season begins in April with the play Harvey, which follows a man who insists on taking his invisible 6-foot-3 rabbit friend with him wherever he goes. The classic play explores the power of the human imagination.

That power thrives in the handsome theater down a white rock road in Manley. This year, the Born-in-a-Barn Players will also perform dramas and a musical. They invite audiences to come as they are, to laugh loudly, to cry and to reconnect.