Jacob Dimond / jake@yelmonline.com
Following the success of inaugural showings of Standing Room Only (SRO) Theater’s “live action role playing game” in March of 2025, the local organization brought the interactive concept back with a matinee and evening showing titled “Forgotten Yelms: The Wreck of Many Things.”
According to Steve Harshfield, SRO Theater’s president and the producer of the two shows, nearly 100 people attended the two shows at 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 16. The event occurred inside The Outpost Church in Yelm, where the organization has been rooted recently. He described the showings as a “wildly successful” followup to the Forgotten Yelms premiere in March.
Charles Phillips, director of “Forgotten Yelms: The Wreck of Many Things,” was thrilled to see the series expand to four total showings over two weekends. Last March, the original “Forgotten Yelms” was presented twice in the evening, while the second series had two shows on Saturday, Aug. 16, and will have two additional events on Saturday, Aug. 23 in the same time slots.
“The feedback from the community has been awesome. We’ve been able to see the need of SRO Theater being able to host more events like this. We’re looking at different things,” Phillips said. “We could possibly travel and show up at different locations. Maybe some of the local restaurants would allow us to come and perform there, too. We’ve got some ideas of how we can keep bringing this to Yelm.”
Additionally, SRO Theater included two separate casts for the matinee and evening showings in order to create additional opportunities for the community-oriented actors.
“We wanted to get more people involved. We had so many people audition, and initially we only wanted to have a cast of five,” Phillips said. “We really just wanted to involve more people, so we decided we wanted to run with two casts. We just want to make sure we continue to grow this talent pool we’re creating so we’re able to pull from them throughout the year.”
The director noted that people might have heard of Dungeon’s and Dragons’s “Deck of Many Things,” and described the four performances as “The Wreck of Many Things” for Yelm. According to Phillips, there is a deck of cards that can be used to “throw off the entire adventure” in a good way or a bad way.
“The audience will pick out those cards, and depending on what they choose, it could send our cast of characters into peril or it might help them get a leg up in the adventure,” he said. “We will have the same fun atmosphere for sure. There will be audience participation. We’ll have the potion store for audience members to buy them to try to trip up our adventurers as well. We also opened up to have matinees this year. We only had nighttime performances last year, and the feedback we got was that people wanted to be able to come throughout the day. So as a result, we opened up two additional matinee performances.”
Auditions for the event were hosted several months ago, and since then, the cast has been diving into their characters’ backstories in order to really learn the role they’re set to play.
“A lot of the rehearsals we’ve done have been focused on our character’s backstories. They’ve been planning for three months together — adventuring for three months together, so they can come into this adventure knowing each other and knowing who they are in order to work together in the shows,” he said.
Additionally, SRO Theater is continuing to look for a building to call their own, full time. Phillips said the organization is gracious for The Outpost Church’s constant support in allowing the community acting organization to use their space, but noted they’re ready to permanently place their roots somewhere locally.
“SRO is continuing to look for a building. We continue to be able to use the Outpost Church space here in Yelm. They’ve been great by serving the community and allowing us to have these events here,” Phillips said. “We are looking for that building we can have and call our home. We’re Standing Room Only, but we want to have some seats somewhere where people can sit down and watch a show with us.”
