BorderLight 2026 has closed. I had gotten myself a “Binge on Fringe” pass so that I could make plentiful reservations without thinking about the cost each time. No, I didn’t max out the pass, but that’s fine. Let's call it a donation.
Saturday I made the error of booking some shows back-to-back, I don’t recommend it. You fret about how long the show you are watching will go over and then run the risk of entering the next show late like a douche.
By noon I’d decided to just drop one of the shows I had planned to see and relaxed. Maybe a little too relaxed. No one need eat an entire jumbo pretzel at Hofbräuhaus all by themselves.
Later, I was on my way from one place to somewhere else when I ran into Bell/Book’s Carrie Williams at the Patio, part of an SOR crowd enjoying Tales From the Bard. Improvisor Mike Frye (with musical accompaniment by Jack Routhier) spins a sung and spoken yarn based on audience interactions.
I had no idea what the plot was (hardly the point) when he announced the arrival of Old Father Time. And oh God yes, he was looking directly at me. I was pressed into service, and executing my role as instructed, hobbling in pain and just as suddenly spry. Then old. Older. It was a hoot.
So, I can honestly say I performed at BorderLight this year. See you in 2027!
Someone needs to write a book about Anne McEvoy. Many know her as a local theater actor and director. She has played most Cleveland area stages — and also her streets as a historic interpreter.
Did you also know she co-founded Nature's Bin in the 1970s, which was not only an important local food source but provided vocational training for those with developmental disabilities?
I first got to know Anne when we were both cast in You Can't Take It With You at Great Lakes Theater in 2005, and soon after we played together in The Dark Lady of the Sonnets for the GLT outreach tour.
She's originated roles in a few of my plays, including my adaptation of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and during the quarantine she was a player in Savory Taṇhāfor Cleveland Public Theatre.
And with Women in History she has interpreted a slew a memorable characters, including Sarah Bernhardt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abigail Adams, and Dorothy Fuldheim, among many others. She also performed the role of Mary, mother of Jesus, in Mamaí Theater Company's final production, The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín, a production marked by crowds of protestors lining the avenue currently occupied by the BorderLight Festival.
William & Elizabeth "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets" (2006)
In Blessed Unrest: A Fantasia on Martha Graham's Demons (written by the performer, directed by Jamie Koeth) McEvoy embodies the legendary mother of modern dance as she grapples with the limitations of her physical self. The unapologetic anger she feels that can no longer dance, anger and resentment, but never self-pity.
Emily Kuntz makes two remarkable appearances, first as a memory of a young Graham, dancing in ponytail and black headband. Later, as a contemporary student, providing the septuagenarian Graham the opportunity to find a way back from despair.
It's a bravura performance from McEvoy, and one I hope finds a larger local audience some time soon.
I first saw Kierstan Kathleen Conway when played Kattrin in a local production of Mother Courage and Her Children. Kattrin is the daughter of the titular character, so traumatized by her wartime experiences she has been rendered voiceless.
My wife and I were both so taken by Conway's performance and I strongly recommended the folks at Talespinner Children's Theatre ask her to audition for my new play, The Toothpaste Millionaire.
It wasn't until after I had suggested she audition that I realized I had never heard her speak. No matter, she was just the right person to play Kate.
Conway is not only a talented actor, she is also a photographer, theater producer and playwright, and she wrote Our Souls Did Touch which was presented in the Grille at the Hermit Club. I don't know enough about the Hermit Club to know why they call it that, the paneling and baby grand piano more befits a space called the Parlor than the Grille, but it was ideal for this production.
Shows like this are like an elegant gift box, when a fringe production is assigned an unusual space which they subtly inhabit (I speak from experience). I can't even say whether Conway's team brought in a single piece of furniture, they didn't need to, it was all right there, down to the small piano lamp which narrator Truth Alice Taylor, channeling the spirit of Hedda Hopper, would use to briefly illuminate her space to provide context and innuendo.
Our Souls is a fictional piece inspired by the kind of sordid tales found in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, though in this case "sordid" doesn't involve ugly details like Coke bottles or low overpasses but instead the lives of people in non-heteronormative relationships.
Complimenting the space, Conway created handwritten programs in the form of love letters, and designed a series of devastatingly stylish period looks. The playwright is also blessed with a classic face, even in her starlet character's most difficult moments, she looked as though she could be captured for a black and white still for Look. Her paramour, a journalist played by Kiara Sylvie Durbin, was styled in a number of Katherine Hepburnesque pants looks, each more confident than the one before.
This is what I am talking about. Big stories, big talent, small budget well spent, a dedication to the details. Well done.
With book, music and lyrics by Paige Scott, Enjoy This EP is a one-hour play from Indianapolis that chronicles the lyrical annihilation of a twit. Zachariah Stonerock is the picture perfect embodiment of a critic, specifically a music critic.
But this isn't Sideways, the white male snob slouching towards middle age does not charm the attractive younger woman in spite of his many unpleasant attributes. At least, not for long. Not only does Lisa M. (gorgeously voiced by Hannah Boswell) put up with very little of his shit, unbeknownst to him she is an artist, a musician, a good one, and she does not require his validation.
Not that she wouldn't like it. She just doesn't need it. Or him. It's a really great takedown of the myth of the put-upon, self-styled intellectual snob who really, really deserves love, a character that Paul Giamatti has played several times, actually.
This wasn't on my list. Creators Britt Anderson and Richie Schiraldi put out a call on social media for dad jokes, so I offered my favorite joke ever.
I saw my doctor for an examination the other day and he told me I needed to stop masturbating. When I asked him why, he said so I can examine you.
They private messaged me to say it's a good joke, but more of a "dirty uncle joke" than a dad joke. I hadn't noticed that theirs is a family show. I sheepishly responded with an apology and deleted my joke.
But then I posted another one.
Q: Why was six afraid of seven?
A: 6/7 lol
This one went over much better, because I also hadn't realized they were offering free tickets to Well-Balanced Dads for the best dad joke — and I won! Thank you, Britt and Richie! Eventually, I get it right.
And this is a show I would have been sorry to have missed. I did not assume it would have a meaningful plot. I also did not anticipate the Hotel California Dream Ballet. Dick and Dale and neighbors and dads and great friends who go on a dad-only camping weekend in a show which asks the question, "Why are dads?"
Anderson and Schiraldi are very talented acrobats and hilarious comedians and improvisors. There were several opportunities for audience interaction (our performance included a small child who did a spot-on impersonation of an irritated parent who wanted the monkey business in the back seat to stop or they were going to turn this car around) and a coda that illustrated just how much more there is to being a dad than fathering.
It’s not just that It’s All a Mess is a collection of monologues written by great local playwrights like Klae Bainter, EN Brettrager, JC Cifranic, Samantha Cocco, Léo Fez (pictured), Mike Geither, and Christopher Johnston, and performed by some of my favorite local actors, it’s the fact that Convergence-Continuum has reintroduced the word SMUT to the popular conversation. That fact by itself tickled my trigger.
Making sex funny is hard (I said "hard") or at least it is when you are worried about offending anyone. It's a fine line, and so I have got to hand it to each of these playwrights, and this team of talented interpreters, that the evening was not only hilarious, but also earnest, hurt, kinky, angsty, and joyful.
In what was perhaps my favorite piece of the evening, it was also ornithological. Big ups to Michael Anderson for giving us the horniest bird obsessive since Matthew Modine.
You can look that up.
I have eight shows (nine if you count another double-bill) booked for tomorrow. While none of them overlap, I am curious as to whether or not I will be able to successfully dash from one venue to another on time. Curious, but I refuse to be anxious about it.
My wife had a piece in the New York Fringe in 2001. I was running sound and had a lot of time on my hands. I think I saw sixteen different shows. If I play my cards right, I may see as many shows this weekend!
I am always so grateful to have the opportunity to catch something I missed the first time around. Emily Liptow and Carol Laursen were developing Closed Loop of Consanguinity at Cleveland Public Theatre as part of Soft Launch last winter (where our elder child was also presenting) but we missed it. Here it is again!
Carol and I met at Ohio University and we performed together in Michael Frayn's Wild Honey in 1990, and later in Eight Impressions of a Lunaticfor Red Hen Productions. I have directed her In Shakespeare. We are both citizens of Cleveland Heights, her children were child-minders for our children. I love Carol.
Closed Loop of Consanguinity is a brief, semi-improvised dance and movement piece in which the two artists explore the space and objects and each other and at times even the audience. The event begins with a voiceover inviting the audience to switch seats, to have a different perspective, and I kept thinking of that as I watched them, asking myself what their perspective was at any given moment.
After the show an audience member I was speaking with wondered what "consanguinity" means and I told them it's having a common ancestor, to be connected by blood. I also admitted I looked that up before the show.
Consanguinity is on a double-bill with In Visible Orbit, created and performed by Greenhouse. They perform strenuous choreography to anxiety-inducing music, allowing us to bear witness to the physical toll the work takes on them, at the same time how dedicated they are to the performance. It's a celebration of grace and exhaustion, pain and exhilaration.
While I was there I ran into playwright Eric Coble. He strongly recommends H.O.P.E., Natasha Mirny's modern interpretation of the myth of Pandora.
My brother introduced me to the works of Jim Jarmusch in the late 1980s. When I first visited his new St. Paul apartment in 1989 he had a handsomely framed poster of Stranger Than Paradise. It's one of his favorite movies, and we often quote that or Down By Law whenever it seems appropriate. And cousin Eva taught me about Screamin' Jay Hawkins.
Much later, I took my fourteen year-old son to see The Dead Don't Die, Jarmusch's 2019 zombie comedy film. I thought it was okay, but he really dug it. I thought I recognized Fern the waitress, and sure enough, that was also Eszter Balint. It was crazy. I have only ever thought of her as a teenager, but she's my age.
The other night she made an appearance at the Cinematheque, and you might ask why she would come to Cleveland for the screening of a film she made over forty years ago, or maybe you were already aware that her musical memoir I Hate Memory! is playing BorderLight.
A Hungarian immigrant, and the child of dissident theater artists, she first settled in New York City in the late 1970s. They lived at the Chelsea Hotel. No, really. She was in the thick of it, at that time, in that city, as an adolescent. As a child.
The show is a happening, as Balint tells stories, plays songs (great band) penned by herself ... and Stew! The young musician and actor Esme Thorne takes turns as the teenage Balint. The playwright's own vocal quality is a like a punk rock Blossom Dearie. There are projections and banter. It's a play, it's a concert.
It's a rough show. I mean that in any number of ways. It is a rare opportunity. Get there.
Dan Zanes was lead singer of the Del Fuegos and a wild garage rocker and swiller of Miller High Life until he started having kids and that's when he started recording children's music. I, too, had not considered the child audience until I started fathering them.
Fathering. What a terrible verb. I digress.
Faye Hargate and Renee Schilling collaborated on the Visual Theatre Award winning Her Mark for BorderLight 2023 and they (with Joan Hargate and Jeremy Paul) have devised a new exploration of motherhood with the creation of Gr33n Hamzies & Eggoes, an original and exploratory art installation for the very, very young.
I felt a bit odd, I knew I would, appearing as an adult without a child escort, but they don't judge. The space had just opened and there were already five kids with their two adults, and Hargate and Schilling, costumed as what appeared to me to be DIY store associates were making suggestions and accommodating needs as the child audience explored and commented and created.
Dan Zanes with my family (2005)
I was provided with stickers I was told I could put anywhere I liked (I put hem up high, there seemed to be no stickers up there for some reason) and was offered a basket of "dream boxes" the team had created previously in collaboration with a CHUH school.
In fact, dreams were a theme, the walls featured trees that asked "Where do you go when you dream?" with answers like, "I hear music in my dreams," and "I see my dog, he is no longer with us."
The night before I had dreamed that we lived in a society where cannibalism was permissible, but it was unseemly to discuss it. You had to be very discreet when disposing of long bones. I didn't write any of this on the trees.
Before I left there was a group activity where our hosts read the Dr. Seuss book which inspired the title of the installation. There were many questions from the children. How did you set this all up? What is that? Are you a rapper?
It's a calming, welcoming room, and the kids I saw appeared very happy to be there. This is an non-ticketed event. I recommend bringing a young person.
I might have missed this one entirely, were it not for another company having to unfortunately pull from the festival. I looked at the performance map and In the Castle of Eternal Sunset was playing at the same time so I swapped my tickets for that, without even looking up what it was about.
And it just so happens to be a play about the randomness of experience! Epically poignant.
The show is being presented in the upstairs space at Parnell's, a room I have spent much time in but God as my witness I can't remember if I have been up there since Covid. Waiting at the bottom of the steps I met Lethan Candlish, who is also presenting at BorderLight this year, and he handed me an honest-to-goodness promotional card for his show, Who Am I, Again?
Handing out your card at festivals was such a big deal in the early aughts, by the time we did Double Heart in 2013 it seemed to be a dying art. For And Then You Die in 2009, I handed out actual bottled water with the show attached as a sticker, which was burdensome but I'm proud of it. Which is all to say, go see Lethan's show! He brought cards!
Lethan Candlish
In the Castle of Eternal Sunset is written by Charles Green and comes to us from Knoxville, Performed by Brady Craddock and Hogan Wayland, an audience of twelve circles the game table as these two play Dungeons & Dragons and navigate an epic quest.
There is a random element; on the throw of a die, an audience member will read a passage from a game manual, a poem of memory, nostalgia, and loss, while the agile performers execute tableaus of connection and discovery. This participation lent the proceedings an element of electricity and alertness.
Our crew didn't play Dungeons & Dragons, we played its scrappy knock-off, Tunnels & Trolls, which had fewer rules and took itself a lot less seriously. The game master was usually Fred, and his adventures were tightly wound, fraught with excitement, and strewn with hoary in-jokes and characters that were usually a thinly veiled swipe and either someone in the room or one of our usual targets. Eternal Sunset is much more earnest, and reflected a sincerity we were all too protective to permit.
After the show I had to dash, we were seeing Lucinda Williams at the Beachland Ballroom. I have plans to see many more shows Friday night!
What if the United States threw a once-in-a-generation celebration and nobody came? Well, after last weekend, we all know the answer to that that question. When I was a kid, the American government commissioned all kinds of things to celebrate the Bicentennial, including the short film People People People, created by animators John and Faith Hubley.
It is a surprisingly frank depiction of life on this continent (or this part of it, anyway) from before the arrival of European colonizers, and including some of the more unsettling aspects of what they (we) did once they (we) got here. The Bicentennial was a celebration, but it was also an education. And even the government, for a brief moment, strove to educate people.
First on my dance card for BorderLight 2026 was a selection of American protest songs, The Protest Café, bringing together some of my favorite folks. I have seen Eric Schmiedl and Tina D. Stump work together, most recently BUCKEYES; Buses & Baseball at last year's BorderLight, and this show also brings in Chennelle Bryant-Harris and Chelsea Cannon, both of whom composed the entire cast for Schmiedl's play adaptation Huck Finn, which I produced for the Great Lakes Theater outreach tour in 2018.
Chelsea & Chennelle
The program began before the rains began, it was a lovely evening. Eighty degrees, but cloudy, on the Patio at the Hermit Club. I had enough time after work to grab a pint at the bar and settle in to a table, where I found familiar faces and made new friends. I am reminded of previous festivals in other cities, where I felt alone and desperate for connection. Here, I know everyone. Like, really. It makes me so happy. It feels like home.
The Protest Cafe is brief and joyful, but powerful. We were invited to sing along, and I was delighted not only by how many lyrics I knew, but by the songs they chose. I was expecting something old-timey. Union songs! The Bourgeois Blues! Instead we were treated to protest songs from the entire span of the last century — and even one from this.
Looking around, I saw a one or two (white male) faces that weren't necessarily happy with the menu of songs. I wonder what they thought was going was going to be protested, the King of England? The First Amendment? Immigration? There's a spirited rendition of Irving Berlin's When That Man Is Dead and Gone. It was written about Hitler, but if in hearing it you are thinking about someone else, someone in particular, well surely that's his fault and not yours.
The company is inviting and warm, and so very patriotic. This one's free, but you need to make a reservation as seating is limited.
When the BorderLight Theatre Festival debuted in 2019, I was so excited! I have had several delightful experiences participating in theater festivals from New York to Minnesota to Alaska, and the thought of having our own, right here in Cleveland? The possibilities were thrilling.
I have been grateful to have had plays in the past three festivals, by accident and by design. Give Me Your Keys commissioned and produced Step Nine in 2023, Talespinner Children’s Theatre remounted their spring production of The Toothpaste Millionaire in 2024, and I self-produced The Right Room in 2025.
This year, while I do not have a show in BorderLight, I have made plans to see as many shows as possible. While I expect there to be a lot of my friends in the festival in any given year, I have so many friends in the festival this year!
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