Lycoming Theater Department lair for dragons

by: Linnea Morris

Dragons always have been associated with the theater department at Lycoming College.

Today, everyone knows the Dragon’s Lair Theatre in the depths of the Academic Center, but the theater department and dragons have a longer standing history.
As the legend goes, according to the 1966 Lycoming Bulletin, the first dragon appeared during the 1947-1948 school year. The students of the Frill and Frown dramatic club apparently were inspired to paint the dragon by the acquisition of hand carved Chinese furniture.

The furniture set consists of a love seat and two arm chairs that have decorated many until it came to rest in on stage in theater productions. Around 1964, one of the dragon chairs was found in six pieces by the technical director Mike Welch. A year later, the restored arm chair became the queen’s throne in “Under the Sycamore Tree.”

After the Bulletin article was published, the chairs again disappeared and have not been found in the theatre department today. These chairs have been long gone.
Fortunately, the dragon’s legacy remains. The dragon was painted on the wall in the basement in Bradley Hall in 1947. Bradley Hall was one of the adjoining buildings to Old Main, where the Recreation Center now stands. In an oral history interview done by Julia Dogherty, one of the workers in the College Archives, talks to Dr. Otto Sonde, both graduate from 1947 and former professor at Lycoming.

Sonder remembers that the room was in the unused basement and “the drama club people cleaned it up and painted this huge dragon on the wall, it was about 25 feet long…We called it the ‘Dragon Room’ and we used it to have our drama meetings down there. We kept a lot of old furniture that we used for sets and so forth.”

Eventually, the Dragon Room was turned into a classroom and the dragon watched over some English as well as German classes.

According to the Lycoming Bulletin, the room was dubbed the Thursday Theatre, where a theater forum took place and “students and teachers could present original works, experiment with avante-garde plays, or learn from the spontaneity of improvisations.”

Every year the dragon remained, the maintenance crew would touch up and help maintain the dragon until the demolition of Bradley Hall.

Around 2000, the professors in the theater department decided the Green Room Theatre needed a new name. For one, it was not green, but black.

Professor Jerry Allen, with the help of a student, Matt Alexander, wanted to recreate the fire-breathing dragon on the wall outside the theater as close as possible to the original. They also renamed the Green Room Theatre to the Dragon’s Lair Theatre.

The dragon in the hallway outside the door stands today under the Mary Welch Theatre.