Recently, I signed up for my 22nd season with the
Ramona Outdoor Play. 'Ramona' is the story of a half-Native American, half-Scottish girl named Ramona and the full-blood Native American she falls in love with, Alessandro. It's based on the 1884 novel
Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson. The novel was supposed to show the plight of the Native Americans, but instead people were enthralled by the romance, and it produced a tourist industry in SoCal that lasted for more than a century.
The play is held on a 5-acre outdoor stage in a canyon near Hemet, CA. It has a cast of hundreds (200-300 is typical), and also features animals, mostly horses, but sometimes also dogs and sheep (and, of course, wildlife; many's the time the actors have been upstaged by a covey of quail or a snake). The seating area can hold thousands, but there hasn't been a sell-out crowd in a long time (I believe the last time was 1989).
I've never had a speaking role, but I've been in the chorus/atmosphere for over two decades. I started acting in the play the same year the current director, Dennis Anderson, started directing it, 1995. I have now been there longer than almost everyone. The play itself was around long before I was, starting in 1923 and being performed every year since then except 1933 (no money) and 1942-1945 (World War II). It almost went under in 2009 due to the recession, but the Ramona Bowl received a nice bailout from the Soboba tribe, many members of which participate in the play.
There have been members of my family in the play since the 1960s, when my grandfather joined the cast (also as chorus). My grandmother joined him in the 1980s after she retired, and then I joined them in 1995, when I was a student at the local community college (Dennis Anderson was one of my instructors). I got my dad to join me in the show for a couple of years, but then he decided he didn't want to do it anymore.
The script was re-written last year after years of declining attendance. I don't think it increased attendance (in spite of the advertising slogan "The New Ramona. See It Again for the First Time.") Some of the changes were controversial, to say the least, though overall I think the new script is good, if a bit rough in parts.
Funny fact: Last year, one of my co-workers looked a picture of one the scenes I was in and asked which one I was. When I pointed myself out, he said he didn't recognize me without my glasses.
