The Tennessee Williams Coincidence Living Inside Bay St. Louis's Community Theater

Andreas Scafide built a two-story building on Blaize Avenue around 1920 to sell groceries downstairs and raise eleven children upstairs. Forty-five years later, Hollywood turned that same building into the town of Dodson, Mississippi, for a Sidney Pollack film based on a Tennessee Williams script. This fall, a community theater company is performing its 80th season inside those same walls, and its signature annual event is a contest built entirely around a Tennessee Williams stage direction.

Nobody planned any of that to line up. It just did.

A Grocery Store With Eleven Kids Upstairs

The building at 398 Blaize Avenue started as commerce, not culture. Scafide ran his grocery on the ground floor while his family lived above it, an ordinary arrangement for a Gulf Coast storefront in the early twentieth century. The store didn't last. By the early 1930s the building sat empty, its only tenant a bottling operation that filled bottles of Dr. Nut, an almond-flavored soda popular in New Orleans, until even that business moved on. For roughly three decades, the building had no real job.

Sidney Pollack Picked This Building for a Reason

That changed in 1965, when director Sidney Pollack brought a film crew to Bay St. Louis to shoot This Property Is Condemned, adapted from a Tennessee Williams one-act play and starring Natalie Wood, Robert Redford, and Charles Bronson. The production renamed the town Dodson for the screen, and the old Scafide building became one of its key locations, alongside the nearby Depot District. Some local residents appeared in the film as extras. For a few weeks, a vacant grocery building was a movie set.

Then the cameras left, and the building went back to sitting empty.

Forty Years of Almost Nothing

There's a gap in this building's story that's easy to skip past but shouldn't be: roughly forty years between the last tenant leaving in the early 1930s and its eventual rescue, with a Hollywood cameo in the middle that changed nothing about its day-to-day fate. It kept deteriorating. By most accounts it came within days of demolition before someone intervened to save it. A building with a documented film credit was still, functionally, just an old empty structure that the town could have lost without much notice.

A Theater That Started Somewhere Else Entirely

While the Scafide building sat idle, an unrelated story was unfolding across town. In 1946, John and Mary Bell, recent transplants from Connecticut, gathered in their living room with fellow resident Emily DeMontluzin and decided Bay St. Louis needed a yacht club, a golf course, and a community theater. They incorporated the Little Theatre that same year. Two years later, local physician Dr. Emmett Erwin donated land on Boardman Avenue, and the group built its home from two war-surplus barracks purchased from the Seabee base in Gulfport. That building housed the Little Theatre for 57 years.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed it in 2005.

Here's the timeline that makes the coincidence legible:

Fourteen Buildings, Three Years, One Winner

After Katrina, the Little Theatre's board had no building and very few standing structures left to choose from anywhere in town. They spent roughly three years evaluating fourteen potential sites, getting their hopes up and having them dashed as one option after another fell through. They sold the Boardman Avenue property to a private citizen and used those funds as seed money for whatever came next. Grants from the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and the Leo Seal Family Foundation, along with individual donations, eventually made a new building possible.

They landed on the old Scafide building. Not because of its film history, but because it was one of the few structures left standing that could be repurposed. The Little Theatre didn't preserve a piece of theater architecture. It moved into a building that had already survived one near-demolition and happened to carry a movie credit nobody was chasing.

The Same Walls, the Same Playwright, Decades Apart

Once the Little Theatre settled into 398 Blaize Avenue, its programming developed its own identity, including an annual weekend built around Tennessee Williams. The tradition centers on a Stella Yelling Contest, where participants compete to deliver the famous "Stella!" cry from A Streetcar Named Desire, alongside original one-act plays by Mississippi playwrights.

That means the same building where a film crew once shot a script Williams wrote now hosts a yearly celebration of Williams's work, staged by a theater company that had no connection to the building when the cameras were there in 1965. Nobody at the Bells' living room meeting in 1946 could have known their theater would eventually end up honoring Williams inside a building already tied to his writing. The overlap is coincidence, not design, which is exactly what makes it worth knowing if you live within walking distance of Blaize Avenue and have never heard the whole story.

What's Actually Playing at 398 Blaize Avenue This Fall

The 80th season opened with On Golden Pond, running September 11 through 20, and the calendar keeps moving from there:

• Comedian Gabe, a Seattle International Comedy Competition and Laughing Skull Comedy Festival winner with credits on Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, performs live on October 16
• NOLATET, the New Orleans-based ensemble reuniting bassist James Singleton and drummer Johnny Vidacovich with vibraphonist Mike Dillon and pianist Brian Haas, returns to the Little Theatre stage this fall touring behind its newest record
• The theater's recurring Tennessee Williams tribute weekend, including the Stella Yelling Contest, continues as one of its longest-running annual traditions

Tickets for shows are typically available through the theater's own box office by phone at 228-467-9024, or in person at two Main Street shops, Lulu's and Twin Light Creations, a detail that keeps ticket sales inside the same six or seven walkable blocks as everything else in Old Town. The theater has drawn members from New Orleans, Hattiesburg, and Mobile over the years, which says something about how far people are willing to drive for a 100-seat house with two poles in the middle of the floor and a story like this one behind it.

The building nearly didn't survive to host any of it. The theater company nearly didn't have anywhere to go. Both of those separate near-misses ended at the same address, and the result is a stage where a Williams cry-off happens in the same rooms a Williams script was once filmed, eighty seasons and sixty-one years apart, with nobody in either era planning for the other.

If you're looking for more of what makes life in Old Town Bay St. Louis worth paying attention to, 124 Court keeps a close eye on the neighborhood's day-to-day rhythms, from its stages to its storefronts. Reach out anytime to schedule a consultation and talk through what living here actually looks like.