Flathead Valley Community College’s theater-arts program has come a long way since the first plays were staged in the second-floor ballroom of the Elks Building in downtown Kalispell.

For more than half of the college’s 50-year history, Joe Legate has directed the school’s theater program. He was hired in 1990 as a speech and communications instructor and was told there was no theater and no theater budget.

“In those days, paying for the new campus took precedence,” he said.

Legate nevertheless stepped up to play all of the roles of a theater director — he served production manager, managing director, technical director and designer.

These days Legate has more help, with full-time instructor Rich Haptonstall, an “outstanding colleague,” he noted, plus three adjunct faculty members.

“When we first started all we had to work with was classroom space converted into performance space,” he recalled about the early days at the new campus in North Kalispell. Plays were staged in a makeshift theater forged out of four adjoining classrooms in the Learning Resources Center.

As the student base expanded, more focus was placed on developing a theater program. Ten years ago FVCC opened a technologically state-of-the-art facility in the then-new Arts and Technology Building.

“[FVCC President] Jane Karas has been a magnificent supporter of the theater,” Legate noted. “She felt it was important that we include performance space. She headed that up from the beginning.”

Support for the theater-arts program has continued to grow, so Legate and his colleagues have “made a point to make sure our educational theater was progressive and on the cutting edge of theater technology.

“We’ve almost completely switched to digital lighting and sound support,” he said. “This all comes from the support of the administration realizing this is a changing industry.”

The college offers an associate transfer degree in theater arts, geared toward transfer institutions in-state and more recently to Central Washington University in Ellensburg.

“We generally graduate two to five [theater] students annually,” Legate said. “They don’t all go to UM or Central Washington. We have sent students to the University of Montana Western in Dillon. They wanted training to teach high-school theater, and Dillon’s program is geared to secondary education.”

Legate said during a 2007 Daily Inter Lake interview that he was skeptical at first of accepting the job at FVCC.

“I was a university professor, and to become a community-college instructor seemed beneath me,” he said in that interview. “But the instructors’ and the administrators’ dedication to teaching and the community was something I had never encountered. I was astounded and impressed.”

Legate also was interested in the challenge of building a program from the ground up.

In the beginning, the students prodded Legate to help them with a couple of plays each year; the FVCC company currently stays busy staging around four shows annually.

There’s an addictive quality to theater, he admits. Sixty-hour weeks before a production are routine.

“Once you get involved, it will steal every minute of free time you have,” he said.

That’s as Legate likes it.

“I haven’t been bored a single minute,” he added.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.