Oswego High School theater alums opened their pocketbooks for a good cause last week and raised more than $5,000 in a matter of days for a cause near and dear to their hearts.

The funds will go to purchase signs, commemorative plaques and shadow boxes for the high school’s performing arts center when it’s renamed this week after the program’s longtime and now-retired directors. The space will be known as the Dave and Donna Barnes Performing Arts Center.

Dave and Donna Barnes spent 33 years directing 99 plays with Oswego High School students until they retired in 2008. During those years, they created a network of alumni who have gone on to act on stage and screen, direct, and work in set production in their adult lives.

“My life would not be what it is today, had it not been for Dave and Donna,” former theater student Amanda Drinkall wrote of her mentors when donating to the GoFundMe campaign. “Their continued support of my acting career has meant the world to me. Love Love Love!”

Drinkall was one of nearly 80 people who donated to an online campaign and talked about her affection for the couple. Supporters lamented that the auditorium dedication was a long time coming.

“When the auditorium was first built in 1990, one of our oldest alums had his daughter write a letter asking that they name it after us,” Dave recalled. “We were given a copy of the letter and just laughed. We thought, ‘That’s nice, but it’s not going to happen.’”

And it didn’t – for another 28 years, anyhow.

Name or no name, Dave and Donna (who married in 1980) went on to run a hugely successful program inside that auditorium. One of their last performances was a musical with a cast of nearly 200 students. It was a far cry from the program’s infancy in the 1970s, when the casts were small and the stage was the dingy floor of the school’s small gym.

“We worked in the wrestling room for the first five years,” Donna explained, recalling days long past. As they built their cast and the program’s name, their practice spaces upgraded – from wresting room, to small gym, to large gym, and eventually their own auditorium.

While alumni Mark Tucker never got to use the auditorium himself as a student, he was a member of the class of 1990 who helped knock on doors to get the referendum passed and watch the space be built.

“It gives me an appreciation for what it took to put on shows before then,” Tucker said. “Dave and Donna literally built shows from the ground up in those days, and made it look easy. No two people have ever managed so much with so little, and no two people are more deserving of such an honor.”

For 18 years, Dave and Donna spent hundreds of hours among the lights and seats and stages of the auditorium, directing passionate students and growing a family. Former students recalled the theater as a place where they felt belonged and a place they were proud to be a part of.

Dave Barnes said he made it his mission to ensure they felt exactly that way.

“First and foremost, we realized that in order for us to subsist as a group, we had to have each other’s back,” he said about building the program. “I tell the kids, let’s care about each other and who we are as a group, because if we don’t, no one else will. As long as you do that, this group will follow you anywhere.”

Dave and Donna still frequent the shows of their former students, and they still attend the school’s musicals and plays. Because of this, their alumni group is vast and strong.

“The name on the building will be our name, but it’s really the OHS theater family name,” Donna Barnes said.

“It couldn’t have happened without thousands of other people who were involved. We had the keys [to the auditorium] and we turned on the lights. But the students made it all happen.”