The play's the thing: but who pays is another for the state's--and the nation's--oldest outdoor dramas, whose audiences are slipping away.

• Author: Vora, Nirav
• Position: Feature

As the Battle of Kings Mountain rages around them, Jack Stuart slashes at Maj. Patrick Ferguson with his sword. Behind them sprawls a dead redcoat. Every summer, six nights a week, the scene plays out in the 2,500-seat Daniel Boone Theatre in Boone. Horn in the West, the nation's third-oldest outdoor drama, tells the story of the Stuart family's flight--led by the hunter and explorer whose name the theater and town bear--from British rule and their fight to preserve the freedom they found in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

And every summer since 1952, when the show debuted, the audience has sat in the same metal folding chairs. Money is so tight that Horn in the West squeaks. The highest-paid actors make $240 a week. Most earn about $180. Attendance is down; the theater needs fixing up. Unless things change, Horn in the West, rather than celebrating history, could fade into it. "We're hurting," General Manager Michael Scialabba says, "and it's rather sad."

Created in North Carolina, the outdoor drama, blending historical story lines with singing and dancing, is a Tar Heel institution. But it's an institution that's struggling. The state has the nation's three oldest outdoor dramas--The Lost Colony in Manteo, Unto These Hills in Cherokee and Horn in the West. Attendance at all three has declined during the last decade. But while The Lost Colony gets a big boost from state and local government and has a $3.2 million endowment and Unto These Hills gets funding from the casino-flush Indian band's Cherokee Preservation Foundation, so dire are Horn in the West's finances that it almost didn't open this season.

In April, the board of the Southern Appalachian Historical Association, the nonprofit that runs Horn in the West and the Hickory Ridge Homestead living-history museum, voted to cancel the production this year for fear of the liability posed by the rundown theater, with its broken bathrooms and crumbling stone steps. Though the Boone town government was considering helping with repairs, the board feared they wouldn't be completed in time. Its action also dismissed Ceylon Barclay as general manager.

Barclay, who had joined the production in March, contended that the vote was invalid because seven of the 16 members hadn't paid their SAHA membership dues. Fourteen of them resigned. "They didn't feel Horn was going in the right direction," says Daniel Cook, the board's chairman and one of the members who stayed. "They just didn't feel they could do it."

To rebuild the board, Cook contacted each of SAHA's 187 members. The new...