If you’ve ever wondered how Napa’s Dreamweavers Theatre got its start, here’s the tale: The Napa Valley’s only all-volunteer theatre troupe began as a film-making group.

Thirty years ago, a young Napa couple named Louise and John Anderson thought of a new way to entertain themselves and their friends: They scripted, then shot a silent movie, complete with subtitles.

“It was just an excuse to have a house party,” recalled Louise Anderson.

Filmed over the Labor Day weekend of 1978 and later premiered at the Andersons’ north Napa home, the 8-millimeter movie “Murder by Invitation Only” was followed by two more silents, written by Louise and performed by the couple’s friends.

“It became a tradition,” she said.

In 1982, the group decided to go “live,” running lines for the original play “Scramble Deggs” while simultaneously building a set in the Andersons’ backyard.

A second live production, in 1985, spurred the couple and their friends to establish themselves as a performance troupe, touring the Napa Valley with the one-act melodrama spoof, “Curse You, Jack Dalton.”

In early 1987, Dreamweavers incorporated as a nonprofit, with Louise Anderson as its first president. The troupe has been active ever since, most recently at its theater in the Riverpark shopping center on Imola Avenue.

“Six of us pulled out our checkbooks” to found the organization, John recalled.

The Andersons themselves, however, departed Napa in the early 1990s for jobs on the East Coast, where John worked for the U.S. Navy as a civilian planner and estimator. Louise, a former special-education teacher at Vintage High School, became artistic director for a community theater group in rural Maryland.

John Anderson still recalls the day he was returning east after a visit to Napa a few years later, and picked up a Dreamweavers flyer at the Evans bus depot.

Not only was the troupe still active: Dreamweavers was presenting the same play Louise was directing back in Maryland, the female-cast version of Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple.”

Homecoming

In 2004, John retired and the couple moved back to Napa. Louise insists they had no intention of re-inserting themselves into the Dreamweavers organization, after a decade away.

“I wasn’t even sure they were glad I was back,” she said.

But inevitably, the two were drawn back in when the troupe drafted Louise to direct its second production of “Blithe Spirit,” with Napa County Superintendent of Schools Barbara Nemko as Madame Arcati — the role Anderson herself had played in the first Dreamweavers run of the Noel Coward play more than 10 years earlier.

Today, the Andersons are as much of a Dreamweavers fixture as ever. John Anderson helps build sets and repair the theater, among many other tasks, while Louise has been named “theater steward”—a job she describes as “a cross between a sergeant-at-arms and a den mother,” looking after all of Dreamweavers’ volunteer staff and selecting the season’s plays.

The couple have been married for 35 years, but their performance careers go back even longer: While still a student at Napa High School, Louise sang in the popular “Gatewatchers” vocal trio; John was a drummer, living in Illinois, who decided to move west and attend Napa Valley College with a friend named Dean.

Dean and Louise, both vocal-music majors at the college, began dating and performing in a band together; John became their drummer, and when Dean went home for the summer — well, as Louise put it, “it was a very bad move on his part.”

John stayed in Napa, and the couple married in 1973.

Over the years, as Dreamweavers was taking shape, Louise stopped working for the school district and got more involved in her husband’s car-racing activities — John is a second-generation racer who regularly placed in the top five at tracks like Laguna Seca and Sears Point.

“We wound up in the race-car business,” she recalled. They repaired and sold Sport Renault and Shelby Can-Am vehicles in the 1990s.

But it was in Leonardtown, Maryland that Louise discovered, almost entirely by chance, that her real vocation lay in theater production. The TheatriText troupe at the College of Southern Maryland needed an artistic director; she stepped in, and found both success and satisfaction beyond what she’d known as a performer.

“What was fun for me was the backstage work and the planning,” she explained.

Right now, the Andersons are helping plan a Dreamweavers open house and costume sale, complete with refreshments, for Oct. 12 (see accompanying article).

No reservations are needed to attend the open house at the recently refurbished theater; it’s a good opportunity to get acquainted with the troupe, which regularly wins the North Bay Bohemian readers poll of best regional community theater groups.

You can even say hello to the couple who helped start it all, 30 years ago.