How to Play the Cleveland Game
In a city of contradictions, the only constant for theatre artists is change
by Christopher Johnston
Cleveland is a city divided by a crooked river and a number of vigorously debated dichotomies. Depending on your orientation, Lake Erie is either mostly polluted or mostly clean. The great industrialists founded what became the best orchestra in the world and one of the best art museums. Today's manufacturers, however, are bleeding business to China and implementing ongoing layoffs. Yet, two of the finest hospitals in the world lead an emerging bioscience industry that could still give the region's economy a strong transition into the 21st century.
Sizable neighborhoods boast stunning affluence. Inner-city families suffer equally astonishing poverty. There's the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum—but not the induction ceremonies. Cleveland's civic and corporate leaders struggle to acknowledge that to be competitive in the global economy, they must share resources and collaborate with Akron and Canton to promote the region. Welcome to the yin-yang of post-industrialism on the North Coast.
Two assets keep Cleveland invigorated: a decent, industrious citizenry that's used to toughing out the hard times, and a rich arts and cultural landscape that constantly challenges both artists and those who appreciate them to adapt to change. With more than 20 theatres offering Equity contracts (including several at universities) and at least 50 community theatres, you'll find any size, style and sensibility of performance imaginable. You'll also find virtually no local public arts funding, though arts leaders are aggressively lobbying to correct that in the next few years.
Since the fall, plummeting ticket sales have plagued all arts organizations in the region. A sour economy, unemployment, foundations rocked by market losses and pressured to fund social and humanitarian efforts, an aging audience, a generation of future theatregoers addicted to electronic stimuli, presidential polling post-partum—those are today's game conditions; now go play. "There's a lack of comfort among many artists in recognizing that if the arts are going to be alive, they need to be dynamic," says Kathleen Cerveny, program director for arts and culture at the Cleveland Foundation. Oh, yes, and for the past 60 years, the Great Exodus to the suburbs has left the core city without a critical mass of full-time residents.
"One thing that Cleveland has done better than just about anybody is build successful suburbs," quips Andrew May, Great Lakes Theater Festival's associate artistic director. May, who's lived and worked as an actor and director in Chicago and Milwaukee as well as Cleveland, knows that one of the reasons it's grown increasingly difficult for city arts organizations to draw audiences is the ongoing dispersal of potential patrons throughout the suburbs and exurbs.
For the past two years, May and producing artistic director Charles Fee have led an extensive overhaul of GLTF that includes teaming up with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival in Boise, of which Fee is also artistic director, to co-produce classical theatre, and a shift in scheduling from the school season model to a July-through-December model. The two oversaw a budget reduction, from $4 million to $2.6 million, achieved through downsizing, disposing of work/storage space and designing more moderate productions than the previous regime. "We inherited the Titanic as it was sinking," May relates. "Then we got it to float and streamlined it into a beautiful yacht."
To further streamline, the artistic tandem plans to unveil another new tack in 2006: Boise and Cleveland will each produce two shows, then rotate the entire production team to the other city. "If we make this work, it will definitely serve as a national model for other theatres," May says.
GLTF is housed in Playhouse Square Center, which is located downtown in the heart of the central business district. The multi-building complex includes six theatres (with a seventh opening this fall), rehearsal rooms, office spaces and a cabaret space. "We say we're the largest performing arts center in the continental U.S., since Manhattan is connected by bridges," jokes director of programming Gina Vernaci. Lincoln Center may actually be the nation's largest, but Playhouse Square makes a similarly strong impression: It grew from four contiguous theatres built in the 1920s that closed in the '60s, fell into disrepair and came within 96 hours of a date with a demolition crew in 1972 before community leaders intervened and restoration began. Two additional theatres across the street house long-running shows such as Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding and Menopause the Musical.
In addition to Broadway fare—such as the recent tour of Movin' Out with native son Michael Cavanaugh—the more than one million patrons who come each year, primarily from the northeast Ohio region, can enjoy entertainment ranging from ballet, modern dance and children's plays to standup comics and rock-and-roll acts.
"I was astounded by how comprehensive the whole facility is," says Thomas Schumacher, head of, and producer for, Disney Theatrical Productions. Last fall, Disney was in residence at Playhouse Square for six weeks to launch On the Record, a touring musical.
Playhouse Square, which owns real estate throughout its district, has been instrumental in adding restaurants and a hotel to the neighborhood, which aggressively advertises itself as the Theater District and also boasts shopping and loft-like apartments. Fully aware of the economic development role her organization plays for the city, Vernaci advocates the long-term vision that has paid off for her facility. "It's not just about the gratification that we're getting here and now," she says. "It's about what it means for your community and serving as caretakers for the next generation."
Several miles east down Euclid Avenue (Cleveland's main street will undergo a $200-million-plus facelift over the next few years), the Cleveland Play House rises like a giant temple to theatre. Built in 1915, the original structure that houses the Brooks and Drury theatres was refurbished in the '80s by Philip Johnson to include the new 612-seat Kenyon C. Bolton Theater. Though the facility stands as the nation's oldest regional theatre and houses rehearsal, production and administrative spaces (as well as the Play House Club and Museum of Contemporary Art), the Play House had fallen into artistic disrepair in recent times.
Enter Michael Bloom, who became the Play House's eighth artistic director, after leaving his teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin this past summer. While the venerable institution has had its share of landmark productions and legendary performers, such as Joel Gray and Margaret "Wicked Witch" Hamilton, the ghosts have not been enough to scare off lackluster shows for nearly a decade. All eyes are on Bloom as he prepares his first season, the theatre's 90th, for 2005-06. He's gained many supporters, who admire the way he spent his first several months meeting with artistic directors from theatres and other major arts organizations. He's already announced plans to sponsor a three-week arts festival next spring that will feature a new play and a new opera produced in conjunction with the Cleveland Opera. "My goal is to not only highlight the various performing arts organizations in town, but to bring them together, so we can cross-pollinate ideas," Bloom states.
Just a few blocks to the south, Terrence Spivey has found himself in a similar position at Cleveland's other historic theatre, Karamu House, which was founded in the same year as its neighbor as the Playhouse Settlement. Renamed in 1941, it's considered the nation's first black theatre. Spivey became a fan of Ron "Superfly" O'Neal in his childhood and later learned that O'Neal had acted and directed at Karamu. After college, however, Spivey headed for a theatre career in New York City. In March 2003, Spivey guest-directed a show at Karamu and fell in love with the place. The artistic feeling was mutual. Though he went through some soul searching, he moved to Cleveland in October of that year to become artistic director.
The once-influential Karamu had essentially been treading water for nearly a decade without an artistic director, but the dynamic Spivey is not concerned about strapping all those ghosts to his back (the long list includes Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Robert Guillaume, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston) to return Karamu to its rightful place in African-American theatre. After all, Karamu—or "the MU," as alumni refer to it—means "feast," so Spivey's committed to making it just that, both in its productions and community activities. He plans to leverage the annual ArenaFest of new plays to launch young playwrights. "We can do just as well as Chicago or Atlanta," proclaims Cleveland theatre's newest loyalist. "We just need to get everyone to work as an ensemble."
Cleveland was once known as the City of Bridges because of the diverse industrial expanses arcing over the Cuyahoga River, so it's fitting that collaboration has become a buzzword in the city's theatre community. The Ohio Arts Council and the Cleveland and Gund foundations, the two major local philanthropic organizations that support the arts, foster collaborations because they obviously stretch the dwindling dollars available. GLTF and Cleveland Public Theatre's co-production of Nickel and Dimed last season, performed at CPT, enhanced the audience base for both theatres. The show's success at the box office and critical acclaim should ease the way for other major collaborative projects.
Twenty-one-year-old CPT is the theatre Cleveland looks to for innovative productions and approaches. It began as a grassroots group that engaged audiences in wild and wonderful rides, albeit some of dubious quality. By 1998, when artistic director Randy Rollison arrived from New York, CPT was employing professional actors, directors and designers. Rollison has continued to push the theatre in that direction, working to elevate the quality standards further. This past summer, founder and executive director James Levin resigned to guide a capital campaign that will enable CPT to enhance its West Side complex in a historic but struggling urban neighborhood on the way toward revitalization.
CPT's battles for funding and its low attendance figures (a spring show was cut to meet budget) have only intensified Rollison's commitment to shake things up. Finding he was "bored with the way theatre's going," Rollison says he wants to do more than sturdy, well-made productions such as Gross Indecency and the original work Blue Sky Transmission, an experimental piece based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead that grabbed the public's imagination and toured to New York City's La MaMa E.T.C. "Each year we claw financially just to get through this season, believing it's going to turn around," Rollison says. "I finally realized it never will, so we want to be the theatre here that tests a new model."
Dobama Theatre finds itself in an even greater state of flux: In July, it must move out of its home of the past 40 years, a former basement bowling alley on a colorful, historic street of shops, bars and restaurants in Cleveland Heights. Although the theatre's name carries the first letters of three co-founders (Donald, Barry and Mark), the driving force behind Dobama was a pair of Cleveland theatre icons, husband-and-wife team Donald and Marilyn Bianchi. The theatre will close its final season in the space with the 26th annual Marilyn Bianchi Kids' Playwriting Festival, named for her after she died of cancer. Committed to producing contemporary plays, Dobama's recent lineup featured Midwest premieres of Mark St. Germain's Ears on a Beatle and Rinde Eckert's Highway Ulysses.
Dobama will then spend a season in limbo, reducing the number of shows and renting spaces or collaborating, while it raises between $2 and $3 million to convert a former YMCA building in Cleveland Heights into a new theatre. The community arts center will offer after-school programs, an art gallery, dance and other arts activities as well as a full season of plays. When Dobama announced its intentions to move in the late '90s, the economy was strong. While waiting for the exhaustive review board processes to play out, however, conditions became more challenging. "It's taken us from the best of times to a very difficult time to bring money in," says Joyce Casey, artistic director since 1991, adding that the theatre does have a $200,000 matching grant available once a formal capital campaign commences.
Ensemble Theatre endured similar upheaval two years ago, when the new owners of the theatre's Cleveland Heights home of 18 years dropped a 60-percent rent increase bombshell, sending the monthly figure to $4,000. "You could run an Off-Broadway theatre for that," cracks Lucia Colombi, founder and artistic director, who runs Ensemble with her twin sister, Licia. Though it had to cut its season short, the theatre moved into the Cleveland Play House for 2003-04 and ticket sales surged, thanks primarily to the greater visibility and more central location. This season, Ensemble celebrated its 25th anniversary by remounting past hits The Trip to Bountiful and Long Day's Journey into Night, along with The Mercy Seat.
Concerned about the obsession of young audience members with all things video and the increasing need to play the corporate game to raise money, the fiftysomething Colombi observes: "It's important today, especially in our technology- and business-focused world, that the word 'passion' reenter the scene."
In the late '80s and early '90s, Ensemble and Dobama were at the heart of a sea change for Cleveland theatre. The two longtime community theatres began to hire Equity actors released by the disbanding of the Play House's resident company by then artistic director Josephine Abady. They also began to cast non-union professional actors and pay them a small stipend. This move substantially elevated the quality of the shows, and several other theatres followed suit.
Six years ago, at the Beck Center for the Arts, a community cultural and educational center in the West Side suburb Lakewood, artistic director Scott Spence offered his first Equity contract. This season, he will use nearly 20 for the 11 shows performed on the main stage and in the studio space. With productions that range from Seussical and The Children's Hour to Fully Committed and Moby Dick! The Musical!, Spence delights in keeping Beck eclectic. Audiences have responded to the diverse programming—though they've not given Spence the mandate artistic directors dream of, he says, in which patrons come to see plays based on previous experiences, not current reviews.
While Beck's educational programs for more than 3,600 students annually already surpass its theatre budget, Spence is content to pursue the methodical baby steps he's implemented since 1992. "I would like to keep growing at a small rate, especially with the economic climate now," he says. "Besides, I don't see Cleveland being able to support a third major regional theatre."
Cleveland's theatre community has recently begun to gel in more productive ways, thanks to the formation of the Northeast Ohio Performing Arts List, an online community forum, by local director Fred Sternfeld and the Cleveland Theater Collective. CTC, which recently obtained its nonprofit status, serves as a professional development organization and a neutral medium for discussion. CTC also publishes a one-sheet play schedule as a program insert and operates a website that features an event calendar and artists' profiles. "As members of the Association of Performing Arts Service Organizations, we also serve as ambassadors on a national level, promoting Cleveland's high-quality, diverse fabric of institutions and artists," adds co-director Fred Gloor.
Perhaps one of the most promising trends for the future, though, has been the emergence of a next generation of theatre companies. Launched six years ago with the mission of producing the great works of modern theatre and fostering local talent, including Equity actors, Charenton Theater Company has already made several changes to adapt to tough economic conditions. "We've moved away from charging $25 a ticket and performing out of Playhouse Square," says producing director Mindy Childress. "Now we perform free, accessible shows out in people's neighborhoods instead of having them try to come to our space." The Bald Soprano, The Dumb Waiter and No Exit were recently performed in rep as part of Charenton's popular "park bench tours" at parks throughout the city, which have frequently drawn more than 400 people. The nomad model has worked well for Charenton, which receives grants for performing "free theatre for the people" and garners more money from larger audiences by passing the hat.
Acknowledging that collaboration could represent the future, Childress has already scheduled a production of Rhinoceros at Cleveland Public Theatre in conjunction with TITLEWave, founded in 2003 by another upstart and Charenton alumnus, Gregory Vovos. Vovos, who will direct the play, started TITLEWave in response to the rash of cancellations that ended the previous season. "It couldn't get much worse, so I figured it was a good time to start," says the University of Nevada-Las Vegas MFA graduate, who returned to his hometown seven years ago. Dedicated to new works, Vovos—who is partnered at TITLEWave by his wife, managing director Jean, and his mother-in-law, the third board member—is a self-proclaimed "bodyguard for the playwright." "While the great plays are universal, there's no time quite like ours," Vovos claims. "So we need playwrights who are armed with all of that theatre history, but can tell us a story about ourselves." This June, Vovos will direct Adam Rapp's Stone Cold Dead Serious.
Amanda Shaffer concurs that pulling together—and pooling together—could be the way to overcome economic conditions. "Everyone has to realize this is not a competition for the same dollar, since we all put out different products," says Shaffer, founding artistic director of the decade-old Red Hen Productions, which she counts as one of only eight feminist theatres in the U.S. "If we're working together, we can have a revolution in Cleveland, and we're poised for that now."
One of the seminal upstarts, Bad Epitaph Theater Company, a cadre of gifted artists who started producing riskier fare throughout the city in 1999, announced it was disbanding in December; company members wanted to move on to other projects or had young families at home. "We always ran pretty much at sea level financially, never too far ahead or too far behind," confirms founding artistic director David Hansen, who works full time as a supervisor for GLTF's resident program and has a two-year-old daughter, with another child due this May.
Hansen also founded, in 1995, Dobama's Night Kitchen, Cleveland's only after-hours theatre. (Downtown Cleveland's Cabaret Dada offers late-night improvisational comedy and runs a black-box theatre for anyone willing to produce shows.) DNK is now under the guidance of Adrienne Moon, 25, the youngest of Cleveland's artistic directors. She's working to entice younger audiences, while making sure that young artists enjoy a safe haven to practice their craft. "We provide a good place for the talented artists in the area to transition from college to professional productions," says Moon.
In just two seasons, convergence-continuum (lower case preferred) has emerged as an anchor among the upstarts. Founders Clyde Simon and Brian Breth spent life savings and maxed credit cards to purchase a 140-year-old home connected to a 94-year-old brick building that had served primarily as a tavern and Hispanic community center in the trendy Tremont neighborhood. They converted it into a flexible black box, where offerings have included Quills, Hot 'n' Throbbing and several plays by hometown boy Mac Wellman. The rental income from the home, where they also live, covers approximately 70 percent of the mortgage, which helps keep ticket prices between $9 and $12.
Convergence-continuum has also trained its audiences to expect "in-your-face" fare. Actors typically roam around, above and sometimes on top of audience members. "The most important thing for us was to create our own niche by challenging people's notions of the fourth wall," declares Breth, who's performed in most of the shows.
Ultimately, these intrepid young leaders symbolize the spirit that keeps Cleveland's scene energized, despite the obstacle course that is life in the arts on the North Coast. The new artistic leadership at the Play House, GLTF and Karamu certainly seem to have tapped into that dedication. Whether they consider their coffers half-empty or half-full, theatres realize that the region's post-industrial distress may just serve as the crucible in which great art is conceived. True, some artists choose to test the potentially greener pastures of Chicago, Los Angeles or New York-but many remain in Cleveland because it's a smaller, more affordable town, where they can work on a regular basis, especially as the new professional theatres continue to grow, and the established theatres are channeling that energy and employing more local talent.
Vovos, 33, who remembers his father's "Cleveland, You Gotta Be Tough" T-shirt from the '80s, sums up Cleveland's collective psyche: "We all have some strange affinity for this crazy town. We see people come and go, but there's a core group of talented artists who stay here and think, 'Yeah, we can do this.'"
Christopher Johnston, a playwright and director, is a freelance writer and native Clevelander.