07/31/2026
Inspiring story from a local leader of theater and an English major from FMU. Arts and humanities!
“I grew up thirty minutes down the road in Lynchburg, South Carolina, but I maintained my connection to Florence. I started at Francis Marion University, and I, like many college students had no idea what I wanted to do.
I was an English major with a focus on business writing, but I took a theatre class which was a whole lot of fun, so it just sort of fit together that I would complete an internship at the Florence Little Theatre, and I ended up adding Theatre to my degree.
After I graduated, I was working in a coffee shop and one of the ladies from the Little Theatre board called me and said they needed someone to fill in for a few months during a transition period and asked if I could help out. So I did that, and here I am thirteen years later.
I never left.
Community theatre is such a beautiful thing. We’re entering our 103rd season here, and it really is everybody in the community coming together. All of our actors, directors, and designers are volunteers. We only operate with four staff members. You’ll be sitting in the audience watching a production and say, ‘wait a minute, that’s my doctor!’ It’s so fun to see the passion of the community through the theatre, and then you turn and see your neighbor sitting beside you have a great time, too all enjoying the arts right here in our community.
It’s been wonderful to see how our downtown has grown into this beautiful, thriving environment, and how we’ve been able to connect with many of the businesses downtown. We have a lovely partnership with Lula’s Coffee—they make special drinks to promote our shows and in turn, we promote them. Victors and other downtown restaurants send their customers down to see our shows and we in turn send them downtown, too. It’s a great partnership. When I graduated high school I wouldn’t have been allowed to come downtown. But when I was at FMU, one of the first shows I did was actually at the FMU Performing Arts Center, and I got to see how downtown was evolving. And now, we have all of these wonderful restaurants and shops. We’ll leave a show and go downtown, have a drink or coffee, and walk from the theatre!
I’m most proud of the community we’ve built within our volunteer base. It sounds cheesy, people say ‘oh, we’re a family.’ But it really is. When you come and do a show, you’re spending three to four months with people, four days a week. So it is family. And we go through the ups and downs that every family has, but to see how we’ve grown with inclusion and welcoming new people, and just building up volunteers that come in is great. They come in and think they’ll just scan tickets or hand out playbills, but they end up directing a show.
It’s just so nice to see that growth.
We’ve seen business relationships form, we’ve seen romantic relationships spark, we’ve seen best friends come out of this theatre. It’s wonderful to see those connections. At first, it can be intimidating to come into a place like this, knowing there’s an established volunteer base and all these talented people. But when you’re in the space, everyone is so welcoming and loving—they take you in, find out what you’re interested in, and pull out all of your talents. Maybe someone is a great seamstress and we need a costumer, or maybe someone is just really friendly and loves to greet people. We have roles for that, too! It’s great for people to have a sense of belonging and we can find something for anyone to do.
The theatre has allowed me to connect with so many people in Florence that I never would have had the opportunity to. I mean, I’ve met senators, lawyers, and doctors, and it’s amazing to walk around Florence and know all these people and speak to folks who have a personal connection to the theatre. And some of these people have become like family to me.
And my daughter does theatre now. She’s seven and has grown up here, started in our summer camps and now she’s going into workshops and doing shows. It’s one of those things—either she’ll love it or hate it because she’s been a part of it since day one, but right now, she loves it. Youth programming is a huge part of our mission. We do summer camps for ages 5-10, a children’s workshop for 2nd through 6th grade, and a rising star workshop for 7th-12th grade. It’s been so fun to see kids that come in who can’t look you in the eye to speak to you at the beginning but by the end of the semester, they are running around like crazy and on the stage shining.
It’s so much more than theatre, than telling stories, acting, singing, and dancing. It’s these kids building their confidence, learning life skills, learning how to work together with others, and learning responsibility and accountability. It teaches them about commitment.
We have a really good season coming up, and one of my very favorite shows that I’ve ever seen is Come From Away. It’s about the planes that were diverted away from New York on 9/11 and we’re opening the show on September 11th this year, 25 years after the Twin Tower tragedy. It’s an honor for our theatre to be able to produce this show.
We were fortunate enough to have been part of an early release program when it was offered to us. It wasn’t open for all community theatres to apply for, so we’re fortunate to be one of the first ones in South Carolina to be able to put it on, and then to open it on such a commemorative day which such an inspiring story! At first people might think it’s depressing, but it’s not. It’s about how a community in Gander, Newfoundland, in Canada, came together, welcomed people who came from away, showed them love, and sent them home to their families while becoming family themselves.
It’s kind of like the story of our theatre community.
Being in the arts world and in the non-profit space, there are so many valid and worthy causes that are competing with the same community dollars. And there isn’t as much funding now for the arts as there used to be. But, we’re fortunate to have a growing and strong donor base that’s passionate about community theater, and they might not be on stage, but they are helping us, supporting us with their dollars.
We have so many patrons who, on their way out, will say ‘Jessica, that was the best one yet.’ And I’ll say ‘You said that last time.' And getting feedback like that, it just keeps getting better and better.
The first Florence Little Theatre was actually on an air base. And our FLT veterans love to tell stories about when it was pouring down rain and going from one side of the stage to make an entrance on the other required actors to go outside because there wasn’t backstage space. And those same veterans now tell stories about how far the dressing rooms are from the stage in our new space, but they didn’t have to go outside in the pouring rain!
I hope Florence realizes how fortunate we are to have this incredible arts corridor with a beautiful library, community theater, performing arts center, local symphony and masterworks choir, and museum all walkable.
We’re critically important for quality of life in our community.”
- Jessica Larrimore, Executive Director of the Florence Little Theatre
