Rochester Community Players

The Rochester Community Players (RCP), the oldest community theatre in New York State, is a local theater group in Rochester, Monroe County, New York, in the United States.

Incorporated in 1923, its first production, Wedding Bells, by playwright Salisbury Field, opened January 19, 1925 at the German House on Rochester's Gregory Street.

The Rochester Community Players, Inc. has produced over 600 plays since 1925. For a list of productions, see Rochester Community Players production history.

Most of RCP's earliest productions were staged at the German House on Gregory Street, although one was staged at Rochester's old Lyceum Theater, built in 1903. In 1926, RCP purchased the Playhouse, located at 820 South Clinton Avenue in Rochester. The Playhouse was built as a church, but had been used as a machine shop for the eight years prior to RCP's purchase. The first RCP production at the Playhouse was Captain Applejack by Walter Hackett, opening November 1, 1926. The last RCP production at the Playhouse before it was sold in 1984 was Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, which opened May 11, 1984. RCP staged approximately 500 productions at the Playhouse. From 1984 to 1992 RCP's productions were staged in an intimate cabaret style theatre housed in the Holiday Inn at 120 East Main Street. In the fall of 1992 RCP moved to the Orcutt-Botsford Fine Arts Center (adjacent to St. John Fisher college)on East Avenue and remained there until 1995. Since 1995 productions have been staged in many venues throughout the city of Rochester.

For its first fifty years, RCP was considered the premiere theater in Rochester. Early productions were not often dramatically challenging. One reviewer, David L. George, theater critic for the Democrat and Chronicle from 1911 to 1956, described the 1931 production of Old Lady 31 by Rachel Crothers as "a type of play which is seldom written now, when novelty and frank treatment of sex themes are demanded by the paying patrons. It is as wholesome as an old fashion, home made apple dumpling and as sweet as some of grandmother's best jam." Another reviewer, Amy H. Croughton, described the same play as "an out-moded, lavender and old lace sort of thing heavily loaded with sentimentality and deriving its comedy chiefly from charicture and exaggeration."

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