Pastor Dave takes stage in one-man play

During EPAF’s 2022-2023 season, Dave Boughter played a genial squire, Sancho, in Luigi Jannuzzi’ Night of the Foolish Moon.

By ALEXANDREA BAILEY
editor@portisabelsouthpadre.com

Chapel By The Sea Pastor Dave Boughter will be staring in a one-man show next weekend.

El Paseo Arts Foundation [EPAF], a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the arts in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, recently wrapped up production on Niel Simon’s I Ought To Be In Pictures, debuting Abigal Crum and also starring veteran actor Peter Quentin Smith and Boughter’s wife, Julie, the Director of the Art Business Incubator. Up next for EPAF, and the Boughters, is Tom Lysaght’s Ain’t Nobody Like Yogi. According to EPAF, this production is “set in the clubhouse of the cathedral of baseball” as it chronicles Yogi Berra’s return to Yankee Stadium after a 14-year absence to throw the opening pitch. It will show at the South Padre Island Convention Center for three nights, Jan. 24-26.

Boughter grew up in Southern California as the youngest of three kids. He graduated from Southern Hills High School in 1979 and went on to receive a degree in education from the University of Northern Colorado in 1985. Having been a youth pastor when he was 25, he became ordained in 2001.

His mother was a theater major, and she met his father doing summer stock theater in Illinois. He says that doing theater today makes him feel connected to his parents.

“I think about my mom a lot. She would have been so happy that I was in this,” said Boughter.

Boughter says he dabbled in acting in high school but took a long break from the art until he moved to South Padre Island with his wife and two children in 2001 to work as a golf course superintendent. This was four days before the collapse of the Causeway Memorial Bridge, which provided quite the shocking start in the Lower Laguna Madre, according to Boughter.

It wasn’t long before Boughter became a youth pastor again, this time in Laguna Vista at what is now known as Cross Church. According to him, then it was known as Christ Harbor Church. He also operated a youth church catered to junior high and high school-aged kids, for nearly ten years with the help of Julie. Door Youth Church was located in the Shell Harbor Center in Port Isabel and was funded by local businesses. They had nearly 100 kids involved and even had their own band, says Boughter. Nowadays, he’s the full-time pastor of Chapel by the Sea, and has been for the last four years.

El Paseo Arts Foundation came into his life after Julie, who has an extensive history with theater, auditioned for a play with her friend Brenda Bailey. The following year he took the stage in the melodrama Curse You, Otis Crummy.

He returned to the stage again in Marc Camoletti’s farce, Boeing-Boeing. Since then, he’s had parts in many musicals, including David Nehls and Betsy Kelso’s The Great American Trailer Park Musical, Peter DePietro’s
Clue: The Musical and Rachel Sheinkin’s The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. According to Boughter, his biggest role was Vanya in Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. Boughter estimates he’s done about 15 total productions with EPAF. He says it’s been great.

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