VOORHEESVILLE — Although English and drama teacher Richard K. “Dick” Weeks died in 1977, students of theater at the Heldeberg Workshop in Voorheesville will continue to learn in his long shadow at the workshop’s newly built theater building, which will bear his name. 

The building replaces an older theater building that was also named after Weeks following his death in 1977. 

Weeks had created the Heldeberg Workshop Theater Program in 1962, as a passionate advocate for the various skills he felt that students could get from drama. 

“He had a special way of thinking where drama wasn’t, ‘Let’s put on a play,’” Weeks’s widow, Corinne Weeks, told The Enterprise. “It’s actually a part of life. And a lot of things we do during our lives — for instance, good conversation and so forth — are all based on the same skills that actors use for acting.”

Now retired, Mrs. Weeks was a long-time Voorheesville Elementary School teacher.

Dick Weeks was also critical of what Mrs. Weeks called the “star system” that existed in other theater environments, where the most outgoing kids with the best memories would inevitably pick up the largest parts play after play. 

“A lot of times, some of the younger ones got left out,” Mrs. Weeks said of the system. “Whereas, if you do it with an idea of working together on it, sometimes you give the shyer kids a real chance, and sometimes the best people for acting anyway.”

A former student of Weeks, Steve King, told The Enterprise that Weeks was a charismatic and encouraging teacher who “loved what he did.”

“He was always willing to spend time and give advice, and to encourage people to use their imaginations and abilities,” King said. 

Along with directing, Weeks taught playwriting and radio broadcasting at the Heldeberg Workshop, and he was chair of the English Department at Burnt Hills and at The Milne School, a laboratory school for what is now the University at Albany, after having taught in Voorheesville and Schenectady schools, according to Heldeberg Workshop Board Chair David Wallingford and Board Member Dorothy Matthews.

Weeks was also involved with other local theater groups, and had showcased an original play he wrote in New York City, they said. 

“It wasn’t just the people in his classroom who understood him to be an extraordinary and engaging person, who was also very good at his craft,” King said. “I think he was generally recognized that way within the larger educational community as well.”

In the mid-’70s, with help from his wife and 25 students at the Heldeberg Workshop, Weeks wrote and directed a play about the Anti-Rent Wars called “When the Bough Breaks,” based on the book “Tin Horns and Calico” by Henry Christman. 

The play was inspired in part by the American Bicentennial and Weeks’s own love for history. He died before he could complete the third act. 

However, performances of the first and second acts were enough to draw commendations from the Albany County Legislature; the towns of Berne, Knox, Rensselaerville, and Westerlo; and also the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, Wallingford and Matthews said. 

Because the Heldeberg Workshop didn’t have a stage or anywhere to perform, Acts I was performed at Voorheesville’s high school and Act II the Five Rivers Amphitheatre, they said. However, Weeks felt there was a location at the workshop that was perfect for an outdoor stage. 

After the performances, the New York State Council of the Arts sent architect Edward Knowles, who had designed the Wolf Trap in Virginia, to draw up plans for a theater space. 

Corinne Weeks said that the troupe began fundraising to build the stage. After Dick Weeks died, the Heldeberg Workshop used the money to build their first theater building, and named it after Weeks in his honor. 

“The building was just very simply built, and now they’ve built a beautiful, beautiful building that will last quite a while, I’m sure,” Mrs. Weeks said. 

The building will also feature a plaque that summarizes Weeks’s contribution to the workshop and the region as a whole, noting him as a “legendary champion of theater and integrative teaching methods at the Heldeberg Workshop.”

The construction of the building was made possible by a donation from the Stiefel Behner Charitable Trust, along with individual workshop donors, Wallingford and Matthews said.

There will be a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Heldeberg Workshop, at 353 Picard Road, on Thursday, Aug. 3, at 7 p.m. Wallingford and Matthews said there will be four performances by current workshop students — a musical performance by “Magical Music and More,” an improv performance by “Acting Antics,” a musical performance by “Let’s Play the Ukulele,” and a performance by “Wizarding Workshop” — along with musical interludes by Joe Hetko.