Brian Slattery Photos
A woman holding bolts of fabric approached the checkout counter set up in the lobby of Long Wharf Theatre. She had plans, she said, to make clothes for her relatives.
“In my generation, everybody knitted or sewed,” she said.
Now, she continued, “when a shirt loses a button, they take it to the dry cleaners.”
Making clothes yourself is a “lost art,” a Long Wharf employee agreed. But with the help of Dock Deals — a series of sales of stock Long Wharf is holding as it clears out its space on Sargent Drive — the woman would find it again.
The customer’s agenda was in keeping with the idea of Dock Deals, a series of sales events in which the theater is selling everything from office supplies and furniture, to shoes, books, and belts, to glass and kitchenware, to tools and trinkets.
The sales — running Tuesdays and Thursdays through the end of the month, as well as this Sunday — aren’t born just of the raw necessity of moving out. In keeping with the overall direction of the theater, it’s also a chance for a little reinvention.
Even as the theater is downsizing, “we’re keeping the majority of our stock,” said Katrina Lewonczyk, Long Wharf’s operations manager, who has organized the sales. That includes costumes, props, and scenery, including objects that the theater has built and sometimes rents out to other productions. “We’re getting rid of mostly supplies or things we haven’t used in a very, very long time” — especially as “we won’t be running shops in the same way” with the theater’s transition to its itinerant model.
But as Long Wharf staff has began clearing the theater’s shops, “we didn’t just want everything going to a landfill,” Lewonczyk, even though “the easiest thing would just be to fill dumpsters.” Other theaters in the area couldn’t absorb the supplies Long Wharf was shedding, either. So Lewonczyk hit on an idea, which she texted to the theater’s production team: something like a yard sale, except encouraging people to take things just to experiment with them. “What if we just did everything by the bag?” she thought, even if “we’re not trying to make money. We’re just trying to get things to have a new home.”
There is now a group of about eight people who are “breaking things down and packing things up,” Lewonczyk said, “and I’ve been working with them to see what’s coming over here, what we’re offering to other theaters, and what is just trash. Because you put a lot of theater people together for 57 years, and you have a lot of junk,” she said with a laugh. Some of it dates from before Lewonczyk started working at Long Wharf 12 years ago. “Now it can see the light of day.”
In addition to the production shops Long Wharf housed within the theater space, the theater rented storage space in the same terminal complex. It plans to maintain at least some of that space to house the stock it wants to hold on to, as it weighs its options for how to keep running the shops it needs to put on future productions.
In sum, Lewonczyk said, “we’re not selling our history. We’re just getting rid of stuff. Our history is still here. We’re maintaining all the things that make Long Wharf, Long Wharf.”
Meanwhile, while this reporter was there, a woman perused the large selection of shoes and belts on offer. A man was busy collecting odds and ends of housewares. Another man, taking direction from someone on his cell phone, was gathering up more fabric. Taking a bag myself, I took packets of stencils, bookends, clamps, a small collection of interesting metal boxes (I confess I’m not sure what exactly I am going to do with them yet). I may have also walked out with two coat racks and an end table.
Lewonczyk is pleased by the the way Dock Deals is going, and as a steady trickle of people have come by since the sale started, Long Wharf has added more dates.
“I don’t think there’s anyone who’s come and not gotten something,” Lewonczyk said. “There’s just so much.”
Dock Deals continues at Long Wharf’s space at 222 Sargent Dr., Aug. 11 from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., Aug. 14 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Aug. 16 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., Aug. 18 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., Aug. 23 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., and Aug. 25 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Air conditioned; masks are required. New items will be added every day.
