Rainbow Company Theatre (courtesy photo)

by David McKee

Every February brings the latest installment in Rainbow Company Youth Theatre’s Nevada History cycle, which plays downtown before hitting local elementary schools. Lurking behind didactic titles like Unsung Heroes of Nevada’s Past and Sagebrush Stories are colorful, fun and creatively told pioneer sagas, featuring the playwriting and direction of Karen McKenney, and the whimsical songwriting of J Neal. “We have adults that only come to this show because they love it so much. Good childrens’ theater is good theater” is McKenney’s explanation of the plays’ crossover appeal.

Unfortunately, when the City of Las Vegas abandoned the Reed Whipple Center, Rainbow’s history play was bumped from Whipple’s 80-seat studio to the 350-seat Fifth Street School auditorium and cut to a single weekend. “There is no need to run the touring play as long to accommodate everyone who may wish to see it,” said Cultural Administrator Patricia Harris last August. “More people can be seated at each performance, so the play does not need to be performed as many times. There may be even higher attendance [because] so many more people can be seated.”

“I loved that [studio] space,” McKenney laments, adding that she’s not going to put more that 100-120 chairs out for Fifth Street School performances, preserving the intimacy which enhances her plays’ charm. Since the new location doesn’t have theatrical lighting, performance conditions will match those Rainbow encounters when it goes to classrooms.

Uncovering Nevada’s Past is 2012’s history play and, yes, it’s about archeology. It takes the viewer back to 1924, when M.R. Harrington, with the aid of Paiute tribesmen, conducted the second-ever excavation of Lovelock Cave, in the Lake Lahontan region. McKenney’s hook for making such a literally dusty subject both substantive and entertaining is her need to satisfy her own curiosity. She wanted to know who Las Vegas’ elementary schools were named after and why, resulting in Unsung Heroes. Driving to Reno to see her son at UNR, McKenney would pass through the defunct metropolis of Goldfield, and was “enchanted. I’m a real nut about ghost towns.” Hence, Sagebrush Stories.

McKenney marks her script outlines with potential song cues for Neal. When she discovered that the two biggest nuisances in early Las Vegas were flies and marauding wild burros, she told her Unsung Heroes co-author, “You need to write a burro song.” Neal initially balked “but he ended up loving it.” Audiences did, too.

Uncovering Nevada’s Past Friday-Saturday, 7 p.m., Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m., Feb. 17-19, Historic Fifth Street School, 401 S. Fourth St., 229-3515, $3-$7.