Elvis Reenters the Building

Sitting nearby, Paszke stroked the scarf, tears welling in her eyes. “I wasn’t sure if I should come today. I felt a little guilty. I’ve only gotten the first vaccine shot, and so many people are still hurting,” she said. “But do you know what my doctor said? He told me I needed to come. He said it would be good for my soul. He said I need to get happy to get healthy.”

Presiding over the historic public square of Nelsonville, a city of some 5,000 people, Stuart’s Opera House is three stories of brick and nostalgia—a monument to a time when workers and families flocked to Appalachia, when an opera house could thrive in a small town because the locals were financially secure and starved for culture.

The venue opened in 1879, and what ensued is a story common to scores of opera houses around rural America: a couple of generations of prosperity, followed by sudden collapse.

More than 50 years after Stuart’s curtain fell in 1924—when the end of the coal-extraction rush coincided with the advent of mass cinema—a local group decided to revive the theater. But a fire in 1980 nearly destroyed the building. Rebuilding and reopening took 17 years. From 1997 to 2015, Stuart’s thrived as a cultural novelty in a region ravaged by the forces of deindustrialization and outsourcing and automation. And then the opera house nearly burned down—again.

“The story of this place is survival,” Melissa Wales, the theater’s executive director, told me as we walked its corridors. Tracing the brickwork backstage, I could see three lines of ceramic demarcation—masonry from the original opera house, from the rebuild after 1980, and from the rebuild after 2015. “This place has survived a lot,” Wales said. “And now it’s survived COVID.”

During my visit to Nelsonville, I heard that word—survived—over and over, from Naseman and the other Blue Hawaii Ladies, from Wales and her colleagues, from the bartender at the Mine Tavern next door. (“How’s business?” I asked. “We survived the worst,” he said.) The mood was less celebratory than quietly relieved, the joys of reopening and reconvening inextricable from the grief and trauma not yet fully behind us.

“My leg is shaking. I’m nervous. This is a huge, huge day for us,” Tim Peacock, the longtime artistic director at Stuart’s, told the crowd before Icenhower’s show. “Thank you all for coming.” Backstage, he’d guzzled Pabst Blue Ribbon as a tranquilizer. It all felt surreal. Twenty years at this venue, Peacock told me, couldn’t have prepared him for Elvis leaving the building last March. He’d worried that Stuart’s was finished.

“We were the first industry to get shut down, and we’re the last industry to reopen,” he said. “And honestly, this place couldn’t have survived without some very generous donations.”