Hotel Olympian’s opening in 1920 is the subject of Bryan Willis’ new play

Both politics and a global pandemic figure prominently in Olympia playwright Bryan Willis’s new radio play, premiering Sunday.

The play isn’t about current events, though, but rather about a pivotal moment in Olympia history: the July 1920 grand opening of the Hotel Olympian, an event that secured Olympia’s status as the state’s capital.

“It’s a fascinating story,” Willis told The Olympian. “I’m a hometown boy. From the roof of the hotel, you can see the hospital in which I was born, and I didn’t know any of this history. The hotel is not on the historic register, and I think very few of us know much about it.”

“The Hotel Olympian 100th Anniversary Gala Extravaganza,” directed by Deane Shellman, re-creates the hotel’s opening, weaving together history — including the speeches given by Olympia’s mayor and Washington’s governor — with romantic subplots and period songs produced by musical director Daven Tillinghast.

When the hotel opened, Prohibition had just begun and the Spanish flu pandemic and World War I had both recently ended. It was a turbulent time, and the hotel — funded by more than 150 private citizens, nearly all residents of Olympia — provided some much needed good news.

“The deeper I got into his project, the more parallels I saw between 1920 and 2020, and this was before the pandemic,” said Willis, who began working on the play in spring 2018.

He was inspired, he said, by the vision of the locals who worked together to keep the capital in Olympia.

“It was this wonderful group uprising,” Willis said. “I’ve been asking myself, ‘Under what circumstances can the community come together for the mutual good?’

“Is that a question that we need to ask now? Yes,” he added.

Willis asks it, metaphorically speaking, in the play, which puts history in perspective with a comic turn by a fortuneteller called Madame Zanahoria (Xander Layden), who predicts what will be happening in Olympia 100 years hence.

Layden is just one of a long list of well-known actors appearing in the show, which also features Rowin Breaux, Carolyn Fry, Andrew Gordon, Kim and Russ Holm, John Serembe, Brian and Jana Tyrrell, and Richard Wheeler.

And then there’s a very well-known local making her Olympia acting debut: Jill Barnes, executive director of The Washington Center for the Performing Arts, who gets a chance to show her comedic skills as well as her singing voice.

“Collectively, I’ve worked with the people in the cast for more than 100 years,” Willis said. “Almost everybody is a very dear longtime colleague.”

Like the hotel, the production has been a group effort, Willis said. He began work on the project after Carol Klacik, Lynn Erickson and Marsha Venables showed him the exhaustive research they’d done on its history as part of a proposal that the city buy the hotel and make it the centerpiece of a historic district.

“They gave me notebooks full of all the history,” Willis said.

With Shellman and Tillinghast, and with support from the Olympia Arts Commission, the Thurston County Historic Commission and many other organizations and businesses, he’d planned a run of live and interactive performances for July 2020.

With those performances rescheduled to July 2021, he and his colleagues turned their efforts toward a period-appropriate radio broadcast, which the actors rehearsed in their homes and recorded at the Olympia Family Theater. The songs were recorded remotely.

“When we recorded at OFT, we were distanced and masked, but even so, the theater magic was present,” Shellman told The Olympian.

‘The Hotel Olympian 100th Anniversary Gala Extravaganza’

• What: Bryan Willis has written a new radio play about an important moment in Olympia history: the July 1920 grand opening of the Hotel Olympian.
• When: 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 20
• Where: 95.3 KGY FM and online
• Tickets: Free