Comedy pays homage to Giving Tree Theater’s late co-owner

Giving Tree Theater’s new Andrea Series is designed to not only make audience members think a little deeper, but also to reflect the heart of late co-owner Andrea Henley, who poured her heart into the Uptown Marion playhouse.

She chose most of the scripts during the nearly five years she owned the for-profit theater with her husband, Jamie Henley. Even as she grew ill last summer and fall, she continued to look for the right shows to bring to the community.

A language arts teacher at Regis Middle School in Cedar Rapids, “She was the one that loved to read,” said Jamie Henley, 49, of Robins. “She would just read shows all the time and say, ‘I think this is the show we should do.’ She loved the shows that had a meaning — a little deeper than just kind of on the surface.”

Andrea died unexpectedly Sept. 5 at age 47, from complications of Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease she had been living with for 25 years.

She actually had chosen the first two shows for the series that she had no idea would eventually honor her memory. The first was “Radium Girls,” staged in mid-February, telling the story of the young women who suffered a mysterious illness while painting radium dials on watches in the early 20th century.

But Andrea also loved to laugh, reflected in the next show in her series, “The Hallelujah Girls.” Onstage from April 12 to 28, this Southern-fried comedy revolves around the “feisty females” who gather at an abandoned church-turned-day spa, Spa-Dee-Dah!

From one of Andrea’s favorite play writing teams, Jones Hope Wooten (Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten), Giving Tree has produced one of the trio’s plays every season, including “Savannah Sipping Society” and “The Dixie Swim Club.” Andrea directed them all, and Jamie plans to continue staging one of the trio’s plays in every Andrea Series moving forward.

Looking back, after buying the theater in May 2019, the Henleys found themselves with a little time before launching their first show, “The Mousetrap,” in August 2019. So they filled that space with a mid-July script reading of the Jones Hope Wooten comedy, “Always a Bridesmaid.”

“We absolutely loved it, audiences love it,” Jamie said, adding that the team’s scripts are “all really funny. They’ve got great characters. There’s usually some costume kind of bits … that make people laugh. They’re a lot of fun, and she loved those.”

This time, Jamie is stepping outside of his comfort zone by directing “The Hallelujah Girls.”

“This certainly is not the shows I usually direct,” he said, so he’s been trying to “figure out” how to direct this one. He’s finding his way toward the fun, with bittersweet moments tucked inside.

“It makes me think of (Andrea) as we're doing this, and several people who are in the show have been in several of the Jones shows, so it’s just really fun. And it’s been a fun, fun show, to direct this phenomenal cast, and really through the whole thing, trying to think about her.”

Andrea is never far from their minds, as most of the cast members — male and female — were her closest friends, and the “underlying premise” of this show is that the ladies’ best friend has just died, Jamie noted.

Dealing with that as a grieving spouse and director is “obviously tough,” he said.

“There are times when I sit in the theater and listen — just me and my theater, and just kind of listening to what she would want. What would she do? How would she end on this? And that's been really therapeutic in a way. And again, then sharing this with a good chunk of the cast who were really good friends with Andrea, so sharing this with them.

“And the nice thing is, (a friend’s death) is part of the show. That’s kind of the push of the characters, but it doesn’t dwell on it. It’s what’s catapulting the characters forward in their lives, just like Andrea’s death is what's catapulting all of us. It’s not this heavy piece of the show, because the show is just full of laughs.

“Andrea would want for us to enjoy the show, to enjoy the laughter and the characters, in the way that they grow and move forward. Because that's something that Andrea always wanted for herself, for her friends, for the theater, for people who came and saw shows: to take that performance and learn and grow and enhance and enjoy it. What theater is really about is joy, enjoying that story, whether it’s a happy story or a sad story or whatever it needs to be.”

He’s learning a lot in the process, as well.

“I see why Andrea loved doing these shows, because they’re so funny,” he said. “It’s just fun to put it all together and to see it each night, and see the growth of the actors as they come into their characters and really bring them to life. It’s just been a lot of fun to see.”

And now he’s decided to embrace “the fluff” of handing out compliments, as well as director’s instructions for improvement. He said it became a joke around the theater that he doesn’t do fluff, but in the wake of Andrea’s death and the fleeting nature of time, “I think everyone will say I’ve become a little more fluffy.”

The final chapter in this inaugural Andrea Series will be “Enchanted April,” from June 21 to 30. Another female-driven show, it’s the story of two London housewives who recruit two upper-crust ladies to share the cost and experience of renting an Italian villa for a girls’ getaway during the postwar haze of the 1920s. They work their ways through the ups and downs — “until men once again upset the balance.”

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