Political Theater

Missouri drama teacher Jo Nell Seifert was floored by the million-dollar bequest left to her high school club after a close friend's death. But the dispute that followed made the gesture more bitter than sweet.

The scene is a railroad station in the Ukraine early in the 20th century. A young woman named Hodel is about to board a train so that she can join her fiancé, a revolutionary who’s been exiled to Siberia. As she bids a poignant farewell to her father, Tevye, he hands her a worn, dark-red valise with cream-colored trim and says, “Tell him I rely on his honor to treat my daughter well.”

Their embrace in this abridged production of Fiddler on the Roof has an adolescent awkwardness, but the pathos is there. For some older teens in the audience, and especially for their high school drama teacher, Jo Nell Seifert, the emotion is made stronger still by the presence of that small red suitcase. Its original owner was the late Kay Porter, and by tradition, every performance in the school theater that bears her name includes something of hers as a prop, a set piece, or part of a costume.

In 1998, Porter began funding the construction of a state-of-the-art performance space for the Poplar Bluff High School theater department and for Seifert, who considered the older woman something of a second mother. By the time the project was completed two years later, Porter had written checks totaling $2.1 million. After the retired businesswoman died in February 2004, Seifert’s school drama club received $980,000—more than the district has ever received in a single donation—to pay for trips to Broadway, printing costs, supplies, or anything else...