Hays, Harris build friendship, careers off Coastal youth theater collaboration
Almost 30 years ago, Tonya Hays answered the phone at the Gulfport Little Theater. Hays, a theater director with big plans but a shoestring budget, wore many hats at the small organization.
On the other line was Melanie Harris. A recent transplant to the Coast, she hoped to find a way to plug in to the local creative community.
“I called the Gulfport Little Theater because it was closest to my house,” Harris joked. “Tonya was in such a need that I never had a chance to call any of the others.”
Hays quickly accepted Harris’ offer to help make costumes for an upcoming production in partnership with the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Gulf Coast.
“I was super excited to have someone volunteering like that and roped her in immediately,” Hays said. “The cast changed a lot over the next few weeks, so Melanie had to make things that anybody could wear because we were never sure who was doing which part. It was a very fluid situation, but just like everything else we’ve done together, we made it work.”
Neither realized how intertwined their lives would become after that one phone call. That simple act led to a decades-long friendship and working relationship that gave hundreds of children and young adults on the Gulf Coast space to create art and support to discover themselves.
Now, Harris and Hays are supporting students, the arts and each other as faculty at Mississippi State University.
Terry Likes, head of MSU’s Department of Communication, Media and Theatre, said the duo’s skills complement each other to make the university’s theater program a well-rounded, well-oiled venture.
“They bring different things to the table that work so well together,” Likes said. “Melanie, with her technical experience—she’s wonderful at working with students on the complex ideas that contribute to the bigger picture of a main-stage production. And then Tonya—when you add her experience and compassion, there’s just no one better to truly inspire others.
“Theater is a different beast than any other art or discipline. Our faculty have a dedication to their craft—to teaching and applying it—like no other,” he continued.
“The Pirates of Penzance” (2014); “The Light Princess” (2022); “Charlotte’s Web” (2024)
Harris said their approach to teaching Bulldog students is an extension of the partnership she and Hays honed on the Coast while they poured their creativity into children’s theater.
After their first collaboration, Hays joined the Lynn Meadows Discovery Center in Gulfport where she created the WINGS Performing Arts program—the realization of a dream to create a theater program specifically for children. She quickly brought Harris on board, and the pair began navigating the difficulties of creating theater with a limited budget.
“There was no blueprint for what we were doing,” Harris said. “It was guerrilla theater, or fly-by-the-seats-of-our-pants theater. We were making stuff up left, right and center.”
With no money for royalties, the two theater professionals and their students wrote their own plays and took the performances to schools, community centers and even tree houses—whatever they had to do to bring the performing art to area youth.
“Our students really had ownership of their work,” Harris explained. “We had a kid who wrote a symphony and two girls who came up with a USO-style, 1940s show set to WWII-era music and went to a retirement home for veterans and performed it.”
That spirit of service—taking art to the community—became a hallmark of the program.
“We knew we had talented kids with good hearts, and that’s what we wanted to focus on,” Hays said. “They were born with the privilege of having talent and creativity, and we wanted to make sure we used it to give back.”
While Harris left the Coast in 2003 and began teaching technical theater classes at MSU, the WINGS program flourished under Hays’ continued guidance. During that time, it received numerous local, regional and national honors including the Coming Up Taller Award, now known as the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Awards, from the President’s Council on the Arts and Humanities; the Mississippi Governor’s Award for Excellence in Arts Education; and the Mississippi Humanities Educator Award.
Building on the foundation laid by Hays and Harris, WINGS now boasts more than 500 annual student participants, from first graders to seniors. Approximately 10 yearly productions reach combined audiences of more than 40,000 people, including traditionally underserved demographics of the young and elderly.
When Hays eventually bowed out from Lynn Meadows Discovery Center in 2019, the museum honored her by naming its theater space after her. Before her departure, however, another phone call planted the seeds for a life-changing reunion.
This time Harris called not needing a creative outlet but having one to share: an adjunct instructor role in MSU’s communication department. Hays soon began commuting from the Coast to Starkville once a week. Likes said she was a natural teacher—an obvious choice for a full-time role in 2020.
“The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” (2016); “Banner: A Sea Turtle Saga” (2021)
“Tonya is the big dreamer and big ideas person, while I’m very pragmatic and more about the details,” Harris said. “We’re like an old married couple now. We’ve had the same arguments for 30 years now, but I love having her around.”
Since joining the MSU faculty, Hays has taught acting, directing and playwriting. She also teaches a special theater-for-young-audiences class and shares her passion for children’s theater with Bulldog thespians. She helps lead Theatre MSU, serves as advisor of MSU’s Alpha Psi Omega Eta Pi Chapter of the national theater honor society. She also received the Penny Wallin Lifetime Achievement in Arts Education Award from the Mississippi Alliance for Arts in Education, which previously recognized Theatr MSU as a School of Excellence.
“Our original ideas about how theater can make changes in audiences, artists and the world—they’re so much a part of what we do here at Mississippi State,” Hays said. “I believe everyone is creative deep down, and if you’re not feeding that part of your soul, then you will lose the joy of life.
“It’s called play for a reason, and we invite students from every walk of life to join us,” she added.
Many WINGS alums who have found success in theater visit Hays’ and Harris’ classes, imparting their experience and knowledge to burgeoning writers, directors, actors and techs.
One of those former guests is Cayson Miles, who joined WINGS as a rising high school freshman.
Now an award-winning, nationally established playwright, Miles credits Hays for encouraging his creative drive. As a rising freshman, Hays pushed Miles to enter a regional competition with an original play that ultimately won second place.
“And that was that,” Miles said. “Eighth grade me, who was writing ideas in a small notebook thinking nobody would ever read them, could not have fathomed having those plays performed in different states. WINGS did that for me.
“I’ve never been someone who has a lot of self-confidence, but Tonya was incredible and pushed me,” Miles continued. “That led me to Vassar College’s Powerhouse Training Company, and that program was the most transformative experience I’ve ever had. I went there and realized I could do this as a career.”
Coming full circle, Miles was recently hired by the discovery center to spearhead its WINGS programming, giving today’s coastal youth the same support and guidance Hays and Harris envisioned when developing the program.
“I was such a shy, quiet and reserved kid going through some rough times in many different ways when I entered the program,” Miles said. “Having that space where we could come in, make art, feel supported and be outside of all the noise of life changed my life.”
Story by Carl Smith, Photos by Beth Wynn