Plymouth's single-screen movie house opened three days before Pearl Harbor

The Penn Theatre opened on Penniman Avenue in downtown Plymouth on December 4, 1941 — three days before Japanese planes hit Pearl Harbor and the country’s mood changed overnight. The first feature was a bright Carmen Miranda musical, “Weekend in Havana.” It was about the last carefree thing a Plymouth crowd would watch for a while. A man named Harry Lush built the place and named it for the avenue out front. He’d worked at the older Penniman & Allen theater up the street.

What’s remarkable is that it’s still here, and still itself. The Penn never got chopped into a six-plex or wrapped in a strip mall. It’s one screen and 402 seats, the way neighborhood theaters were before the multiplex swallowed them. A marquee on the main drag. A lobby you can cross in a few steps. One movie at a time.

By the 2000s that was exactly the kind of building that usually closes. A lone screen barely pencils out against suburban megaplexes. A group of local businessmen kept it alive for a stretch. Then a nonprofit called Friends of the Penn took it over for good. They bought out the last private owners by 2021 and now run the theater as a federally recognized charity. Volunteers sell the tickets and the popcorn. Ticket money and donations cover the rest.

The programming shows it. Instead of chasing first-run blockbusters, the Penn leans into second-run films, classic movie nights, the odd live concert, and free field trips for local schoolkids who get to see a film in a real old theater. On a winter evening, with the marquee lit over Penniman and the ice festival sculptures glittering down the block, the Penn looks much the way it did the week it opened — minus the newsreels about the war that started three days later.