By Cole Wimberly
The Salem Community Theater Board Thursday night approved a motion to replace all the seats in the theater’s auditorium. The seats are two inches wider than the current seats. This will result in the current seating of 384 being reduced by 50 to 70 seats.
In order to get the seats from an Oklahoma high school, they will have to purchase all 1200 seats available for $20,000. That cost is well under the cost of purchasing new seats. The seats will be delivered from Oklahoma by Meador Boy Trucking in March. The demolition and replacement of the seats is expected to occur after July 20th. Any missed shows will be moved to 2026.
Salem Community Theater Board President Drew Johnson is hopeful the community will come through to help pay for the cost of the improvement.
“We have had a wonderful situation over the years with our patrons really grassroots funding a lot of efforts,” Johnson said. “We are taking this risk of a large project in hopes we will have some community sponsors get behind us and want to be part of it.”
Members of the board are looking to find volunteers to help in the project and plan to assist in the labor themselves. Johnson has asked students who are a part of the drama club program at Salem Community high school to assist, but additional help is still needed.
“One of our main goals is to get a group of volunteers ready for demolition of what is currently the theater seats. We have a lot of hand work needing to be done because we will be removing all of the plaques of the seats that have been adopted for transplant onto their new location in the theater, so we can honor those people that have sponsored us in the past by adopting a seat.”
After all the new seats are installed, the City of Salem will assist in storing the remaining seats for up to 6 months until they can hopefully be sold. This initial renovation is the beginning of a much broader vision of future projects for the theater that would also include painting the ceiling and installing new flooring.
