Producing a play on an island presents unique challenges.

The Beaver Island Community Players experienced a power outage during a summer performance of “Terror in the Suburbs” in 1994. Jacqueline LaFreniere, the group’s founder, said shining car headlights through a side door to light the stage just wasn’t enough. Finally, an island resident went home to get his generator.

“He started it up across the road at the public beach to minimize the noise and ran extension cords into the hall for us to connect to the lights,” LaFreniere explained. “They say ‘the show must go on,’ and it did!”

That’s never happened again, thanks to Great Lakes Energy. The electric co-op provides service to approximately 600 year-round residents on the Island, which is located in Lake Michigan, 30 miles northwest of Charlevoix.

“Obviously, a theater group needs lighting and sound to perform, which are dependent on electricity,” LaFreniere said. “We have had excellent response to outages on the island; GLE built a new power plant here to provide for us if the cable to the mainland were to break.”

The theater group is also poised to move into new facilities. Since starting in 1993, the Community Players have presented all their productions on the stage in Holy Cross Parish Hall, which seats 150 in metal folding chairs. In July, the Island’s historic General Store will re-open as a community center, featuring a new performance area.

“The stage we’re using at the church hall is very small,” LaFreniere said. “We try to keep our sets minimal, like a one-box set, because we have no wing space, no storage space off-stage.”

Renovated by the Preservation Association of Beaver Island, the new Center for Island Events and the Performing Arts has a much bigger stage and lots of space in the wings. Audiences will also enjoy the 150 plush, theater-style seats.

“There will be opportunities for a lot different productions than what we’ve been doing,” LaFreniere said.

A transplant from Grand Blanc, LaFreniere has lived on the island for 29 years. She started the theater group because she gets the bug to do a play every now and then.

“I’ll go through all the play books and come up with five or six I like,” she explained. “I’ll order preview copies for the other people on the Island who are consistently involved with the plays, and I will look to them for advice.”

Beaver Island audiences prefer comedies, but occasionally LaFreniere has produced a drama or a musical.

“‘Our Town’ was one of my favorites,” she said. “It had a large cast, so a lot of people showed up because their relatives or friends were in it.”

Casting is always a challenge. After the group has selected a play, LaFreniere sets an audition date. She’s lucky if she has enough actors show up to fill all the roles.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a time where I have had to choose,” she laughed. “Usually, it’s: ‘We need another man. Is there somebody else we can get?’”

Typically, LaFreniere tries to mount one or two productions a year, usually in the spring and fall. Occasionally, if the spring play is a hit, she will try to present it again during the summer.

“I get everybody back for a week’s rehearsal, and boom, we do it again,” she explained.

However, as the group’s primary producer, director, stage manager and costumer, LaFreniere isn’t able to stage a production as often as she might like.

“If I get involved in other things, sometimes a play doesn’t happen,” she said. “I actually took a two-year break because I was teaching full-time and had a young child. I just didn’t have the time to devote to a play.”

One of the theater group’s guiding principles is to break even. Ticket prices are $7 or $8, productions usually run two nights, and performances average 100 audience members. That means very tight budgets.

“We mostly produce little-known plays because the royalties are cheaper,” LaFreniere said. “Probably the biggest play we’ve ever done is ‘Nunsense.’” A musical comedy about five nuns who decide to put on a variety show to raise money, it presented some costuming challenges. She really had to scrounge around to find five habits.

LaFreniere usually selects plays that don’t require unique costumes. The actors can wear their own street clothes, and if they don’t have a specific item, she points them to the resale shop.

“If it’s a specialty thing, I will make the costume,” she said. “We have one gentleman on the Island who does not balk at playing a large woman. For one particular play, I ended up buying material to make his dresses.”

When she needed a gorilla costume for “Hurricane Smith and the Garden of the Golden Monkey,” a children’s production that spoofed the Indiana Jones movies, she rented one. She saved money by improvising on the sets.

“The kids had to climb over a mountain, so we set up a big step ladder and put cardboard on the front to make it look like a mountain,” LaFreniere said. “When they had to ford a river, we had blue streamers, and the kids pretended they were swimming across the river.”

She thought Hurricane Smith was a fun play, and she really enjoyed directing the production.

“Our main goal is to have fun,” she said. “So far, we have accomplished that goal with every production.”