Jefferson Opera House in The Sound and the Fury (Location)

"Opera House" was the way playhouses were often referred to in towns where the religious community frowned on play-acting. "Opera" sounded culturally more respectable than plays, though actual operas were seldom staged in them. By the late 1920s the advent of movies had closed or taken over a lot of small town playhouses. In The Reivers, set in 1905, "balls or minstrel or drama shows" regularly take place there. In this novel, Jefferson's "old opera house" is apparently no longer in use at all; it is where "a lot of papers and junk out of the old Merchants' and Farmer's Bank" is stored (216).