JournalNews feature

Acting has been a life-long labor of love for Dixie Utter, who performs this weekend in the Oxford Area Community Theatre production of “Spoon River Anthology.”

Utter was a theater major at Dennison University in Granville, Ohio, class of 1949 and a classmate of actor Hal Holbrook.

“For several years after graduated I was in a touring company,” she said. “In the early 1950s, high schools would have assemblies and one of our classmates formed a company and we set out with an hour-long version of ‘The Importance of Being Ernest.’

“We took the seats out of a limousine to hold our set and props, then traveled up and down the East Coast doing three shows a day, five days a week.”

Her future husband, William “Luke” Utter, was also in that troupe and took her to Denver while he worked on his masters degree. He had some television experience and eventually landed a job at WMUB in Oxford.

“When he took the job we decided we would stay in Oxford for two years — and it turned into 50,” she said.

She went to work at Talawanda High School teaching English and speech, retiring in 1986.

She kept acting whenever she could, she said. Miami University once had a summer theater program that was open to the community, so she performed in those.

“I played Dolly Levi in ‘The Matchmaker,’ which is what ‘Hello, Dolly’ is based on,” she said. “But I can’t sing a note, so I’d never be able to do the musical.”

When OxACT was formed in the 1980s, she quickly became a mainstay in the group with a role in “Mousetrap,” the very first production, but also performed with Greater Hamilton Civic Theatre, most memorably, she said, in the play “On Golden Pond” opposite Henry Cepluch. She also had a small role in the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park’s production of “To Kill a Mockingbird” in 1993.

This weekend, Utter plays “nine or 10” characters in “Spoon River Anthology,” a play based on the poems of Edgar Lee Masters, inspired by life the small Illinois towns he grew up in. She turned 80 years old while the play was in rehearsal.

One of her cast-mates in “Spoon River Anthology,” Donna Stevens, was also one of her high school students.

“A teacher doesn’t have too many students that you remain close to for the rest of your life, but Donna was one of these,” she said. “She loved to speak and sign up for my classes without credit because she loved it so much.”

She remembers teaching the poems of Edgar Lee Master’s “Spoon River Anthology” in her sophomore English classes and as character studies in her speech classes.

“Some of them are pretty crazy,” she said. “These are people speaking from the grave and they all have stories to tell.

“It’s not a comedy but some of them are funny and  some are sad, some are outrageous, but I do think people are going to love it.”

Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.