Rivertime Players stages Arsenic and Old Lace in Parsons

Rivertime Players brought Arsenic and Old Lace to the Shane Bridges Theatre inside The Hangar Performing Arts Center, giving Parsons five performances from April 10 through April 18 and reinforcing the troupe’s place in Decatur County’s arts life.

The production fit neatly into the company’s long-running identity. Rivertime Players describes itself as a volunteer-based community performing arts organization, and it has built its reputation around preserving the repertory tent theatre experience. Its show page for Arsenic and Old Lace leans into the play’s mix of sharp wit, macabre humor and the tension between appearances and hidden truths, a theme that still lands for modern audiences.

The setting mattered as much as the script. The Hangar is a renovated former airplane maintenance hangar at the closed Scott-Gibson Airfield, now configured as a 237-seat proscenium theatre. That gives Rivertime Players a local home with enough intimacy to feel community-sized, but enough scale to draw a solid crowd for a recognizable title that has become part of the troupe’s rhythm.

Arsenic and Old Lace is only one piece of a larger tradition in Parsons. Rivertime Players formed in 2006 after Dr. Dawn Larsen donated the last remaining repertory tent show to the Parsons Arts Council in November of that year. Since then, the group has kept the Toby Tent tradition in view, and the Decatur County annual events calendar says people travel from miles around each fall for the Toby Tent Show.

That broader history is what makes a spring comedy run notable in a county where live entertainment is limited and local institutions matter. The Tennessee Arts Commission has described Parsons’ Toby Show as a modern-day revitalization of 19th- and early-20th-century folk theater, placing Rivertime Players inside a rare regional arts tradition rather than a one-off stage schedule. Even a familiar dark comedy, staged in a converted hangar on West Ninth Street, becomes part of how Parsons presents itself: a town where volunteers still make room for serious performance, shared memory and a night out close to home.