“Miller.” For many residents of Southwest Michigan, that one word conjures up visions of an auditorium that has spent 50 years as a backdrop for performers, making them laugh, cry, ponder and cheer.

There is a scene early on in Finding Neverland where playwright J.M. Barrie (Billy Harrigan Tighe) is talking about the play he’s working on with theater producer Charles Frohman (Matthew Quinn). Charles tells him that the play can’t be too short or too long. It also can’t be too funny or too serious. It needs to make people think but not think too hard. Finding that perfect balance isn’t always easy in a play, but Finding Neverland makes it look as effortless as lifting a feather.

When Andrea Arvanigian soulfully sings “Love is who we are and no season can contain it,” from Sara Bareilles’ sweet 2011 song “Love is Christmas” in the second act of The Barn Theatre School’s Christmas Cabaret, it’s impossible not to feel the truth of those lyrics straight from the heart of all the performers most regularly seen here during the summer months.

In the mid-century American classic play “The Miracle Worker,” by William Gibson, the child Helen Keller punches, kicks, flings food, throws whatever’s in her clutches, pulls hair, screams, wails, and otherwise throws physical tantrums like a feral animal. She’s a brilliant yet obstinate, wildly spoiled child in her upper-class, post Civil War Alabama home in which all her kin are cousin to General Robert E. Lee. From a baby with enormous vitality to a deaf-mute child, she is pitied for her disabilities caused by illness, and since none of the finest quacks money could buy helped, her family nearly ruins her for any kind of productive life.