No, this isn’t an essay about the Confederacy’s retreat toward Appomattox, as much as that’s a pet topic of mine. It’s about an actor named Richmond Hoxie, who died recently and was a longtime member of the Peterborough Players acting troupe of the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.

It’s not that Richmond and I were such close friends. He lived in the “city,” after all, and we hadn’t seen him up here in many years. But he was a contemporary and those deaths always bring you face to face with your own past.

If you’ve spent as many magical nights at the Players as Cathie and I have, you would see a lot of Richmond in Kraig Swartz. Both of them have been troupers in the finest sense of the stage.

Like Kraig has done for so many years, Richmond took on roles that ran a huge gamut, from the tortured priest in “The Runner Stumbles” to the peculiar houseguest in “The Foreigner” to all the madcap characters he transformed into for “The Mystery of Irma Vep.” He was agile enough to play the fool one week and to have you choking back tears two weeks later.

His passing is yet another broken strand that precariously connects today’s Players with a time there that fewer and fewer of us remember.

His were the days of hard-as-a-rock folding chairs, bats swooping for mosquitoes during performances (passed off as barn swallows to keep people from screaming) and the same temperature inside and out, even on the hottest August nights. Not that I miss everything from those years when Richmond was on stage, but what he was doing up there seemed to make us forget everything else.

Those were the days, too, when regulars might be tapped after a show to join the company in the red farmhouse next door where Sally Brown and her family lived and where Richmond and his castmates would be deconstructing the night’s performance around Sally’s dining room table. We felt privileged to be in on those conversations and to realize we’d just seen something that would never occur again in exactly the same way.

It’s hard to explain those experiences to today’s audiences, who are tempted just to punch up Netflix from the sofa and forgo live theater. That option has its place, but to compare it to what Richmond was offering us is the definition of the apples and oranges metaphor. So, if you never got to see Richmond in his heyday, don’t despair, because you may yet see Kraig again or one of the troupe now being assembled by new Players’ Artistic Director Brendon Fox.

I look forward to seeing you there in June for the new season and to telling you about the night that Richmond and Players favorite Joyce Cohen were on stage in a new play, with the proud playwright in the audience. What happened next is worth the few moments of your time it will take. There is a trove of those experiences during almost a century in the barn, and I guarantee no one who was there that memorable night ever saw anything like it on Netflix.

L. Phillips Runyon III has practiced law in Peterborough for 50 years and was the presiding justice of the 8th Circuit Court for 27 years.