In a building named for an 18th-century French aristocrat, it seems fitting an entire room should be devoted to wigs.
About 100 of them — not the stiff, powdery curls of 200 years ago, but more demonstrative modern numbers, from brown and pin-straight to long, blonde curls — fill a storage room in the former Lafayette School on Grove Street in Shelton.
The 101-year-old building stopped being an elementary school in 2010 but now has a new identity as home to Center Stage Theater, a nonprofit community theater company, and the Valley United Way.
A grand opening for the two groups is planned for March 24. Click here to RSVP.
Roots For The Future
“This is just a really great space with a lot of potential for us,” Fran Scarpa, who directs the theater company with her husband, Gary, said during a recent interview at the school.
Center Stage began its life in 2005 in a building on Center Street that now houses Verace Pizzeria, before moving to the vacant Crabtree car dealership on Bridgeport Avenue in 2010.
While Scarpa said she has loved all three of the theater company’s incarnations, the Lafayette School location has a lot of pluses.
The building has room enough for an entire workshop for building sets, and ample storage space for past productions’ sets, costumes, and props.
“We can reuse a lot, so it keeps our costs down,” she said.
“We’re able to do more in this space,” she added. “It gives us the roots we need to be able to plan for the future.”
Center Stage has put on four productions since moving into the building in September. Their performance space — the school’s old gym — seats about 180 people, and the stage there is currently being transformed into an Italian villa for a production of “Enchanted April” due to begin March 23.
The theater company also uses old classrooms for its summer theater group for high schoolers.
The box office is where the school’s administrative offices used to be. “I’m the principal,” Scarpa joked.
In the long run, she wants her group to establish an identity at the school.
“We’re really hoping this is the place we can stay for a really long time,” Scarpa said.
Upstairs, Valley United Way President Jack Walsh hopes the same thing.
Valley United Way completed a move into what used to be the school’s media center on Jan. 28, Walsh said during an interview at his office.
He has nicknamed the room “The Skybox” because it looks out on Lafayette Field, where high school football games were played years ago, and Pop Warner programs run now.
Walsh, who works at the office with five other staff members, credited generous gifts, grants, and volunteer work for the reason the rooms resemble class A office space more than an old school.
Walsh singled out Mike Marcinek, managing partner and CFO with Fletcher Thompson, a Shelton-based architectural firm, for praise.
The company’s staff designed the facility and secured donations for carpeting, ceiling tiles, and office furniture, Walsh said.
“Those three things by themselves would have blown our budget,” he said.
Students from the carpentry shop at Emmett O’Brien Regional Technical School built new walls for the office as well, Walsh said.
“A lot of pieces made this happen,” he said. “If you look at the finished product, we could not have afforded this.”
The group’s offices also include two large rooms to host nonprofits in the region, which Walsh said was a huge advantage.
“That was one of the things we wanted to make sure we had wherever we went: conference room space,” he said.
Conference rooms named for Raymond P. Lavietes and Katharine Matthies can be reserved by nonprofit groups for large group meetings, which is space such organizations don’t always have, Walsh said.
“I think it’ll be a big help to all the nonprofits in the Valley,” he said.
He said that overall, he thinks the move — for both nonprofits — has been a “home run,” adding that the money the United Way is saving can be put back into programs to help people.
“It’s really a creative reuse of an old building,” he said. “We’re really pleased to be here. It’s going to give us quite a bit of money that will go back to the community, so it’s a win-win for everybody.”