On the week of Thanksgiving, Executive Director Judy Lewis was doing what you’d expect a theatre leader to do at the start of December: building a set.

FMCT’s holiday run opens December 6 and stretches through December 21, 2025, with tech week starting right after Thanksgiving.

The actors have already been rehearsing for weeks. Now comes the part where everything clicks.

“Tech week is when the magic happens,” Lewis said. “You add costumes, sound, lighting, all those things. Some people call it hell week, but it’s my favorite.”

A Cast That Looks Like the Community

Lewis lights up most when she talks about who’s on stage.

She tries to make sure at least a quarter of every cast is made up of new people. She doesn’t just want familiar faces cycling through every show. For this holiday production, about 70 people auditioned for 14 roles. Almost all of the final cast are newcomers.

“It’s nerve-wracking when you don’t know people,” she admitted. “You’re like, are you going to show up to rehearsal every day? But after four or five rehearsals, you breathe again.”

That approach has built a reputation. People who’ve never done theatre before still feel welcome walking into an FMCT audition. Lewis sees that as the point of community theatre. If the same small circle does every show, the door isn’t really open.

80 Years Strong

The company was founded in 1946 by Bev Halbison (later Blanich) and June Dobervich—two women who refused to let community theatre disappear after college.

Lewis’s favorite part of that origin story is what it set in motion. She says roughly 19 other theatre groups in the region trace their roots back to FMCT. One company planted the habit; the community grew the rest.

“That’s a huge success,” she said.

Losing a Building, Finding a New Way

When Lewis arrived, FMCT was still in the Emma K. Herbst Playhouse in Island Park. Her first show here was A Christmas Carol in 2019, and during that production, the roof failed

.A major beam cracked. The building was declared unsafe. FMCT had to evacuate, then the pandemic hit on top of it.

What came next was a call from Moorhead Mayor Shelly Carlson. “She asked if we wanted to build a theatre in the ‘Hjemkomst’,” Lewis said.

FMCT moved into the Hjemkomst Center’s large exhibit hall and built out two stages. The main space seats 191 people in a black-box style setup

“It’s intimate. There’s no bad seat in the house,” Lewis said. “Row one is five feet from the edge of the stage. You’re in it with whatever is happening.”

She also loves the sound, which is the result of a lucky collision of cinder-block walls and heavy curtains that makes performances feel close and full.

FM Opera has used the stage. So have pageants and other arts groups. FMCT keeps rental rates low enough that smaller organizations can afford to create.

People are doing great things, but they don’t have money to pay for places to do those things,” Lewis said. “I want to keep managing this space even after we move into the new building.”

That new building is rising in downtown Fargo on NP Avenue as part of The Avery development. Groundbreaking was in May 2024, and the project will include a 400-plus seat theatre, classrooms, and a shared complex with housing and parking.

The theatre portion is currently projected to open in fall 2026.

Lewis said FMCT expects to own the “cold dark shell,” basically the finished exterior, by late December 2025, with roughly ten more months of interior build-out after that. (Construction timelines can shift, she noted.)

Building Support, One Seat at a Time

FMCT is about to launch a “seat drive.” The idea is simple: donors can buy a physical seat for the new theatre, have their name attached to it, and get first crack at tickets for that exact seat before every show.

“It’s a nice perk,” Lewis said. “Forever.”

She’s also starting a penny drive, which is part fundraiser, part art project. With pennies no longer being minted, FMCT plans to polish donated coins, use them to spell out donor names on a floor pathway to the donor wall, and seal the whole thing in epoxy

“It’ll be a path made in pennies,” she said. “Beautiful.”

Growing Directors, Not Just Actors

Looking ahead, Lewis is calling next year “the director’s season.”

She’s planning ten shows built on unit sets as a smart way to keep production moving while staff split time between the Hjemkomst and downtown construction. But the bigger goal is leadership

The region has plenty of acting talent. Directing is harder to recruit, and Lewis wants to grow that bench. She’ll select ten directors, give them a slate of options, and let each choose which show they want to lead.

“It’s a totally different skillset,” she said. “And it’s the most important piece of each puzzle.”

She’s also been steadily nudging audiences toward plays, not only musicals. Musicals sell fast here. Plays take trust.

Over the past few seasons, FMCT’s straight-play ticket sales climbed from about 400 to 800 to full capacity at roughly 1,200, which proof that audiences will follow if the work is sharp and the experience is good.

Lewis has a clear rule for that experience: keep it moving.

“You strap in like a roller coaster,” she said. “It should be compelling from the moment it begins till it ends.”

Asked what else people should know, Lewis jumped to her favorite thing FMCT does, which is the 10-Minute Play Festival.

They cap submissions at 200 and get entries from around 35 countries. FMCT staff read all of them, narrow to 50, then to 24. Ten newer directors each pick four plays to stage. The festival runs two weekends and is livestreamed worldwide, so even playwrights who weren’t selected can watch along.

For Lewis, it’s theatre doing what theatre does best.

“It makes a giant world smaller,” she said. “No matter where we’re from, we laugh at the same things. We cry about the same things.”