"Oh, Mary!" at the Lyceum Theatre

Cole Escola in "Oh, Mary!"
(The Lyceum Theatre, 2024)

Last month, my wife and I took a whirlwind, twenty-four hour journey to New York City. The past several years, since the quarantine, we have tried to get back at least once a year. Life is too short and we have the miles.

Why now? For my birthday she got me tickets to see Oh, Mary! Cole Escola’s outrageous, ahistorical comedy, centering on the character of Mary Todd Lincoln. I have had a fascination with this show (and Escola) since it opened Off-Broadway earlier this year, a fascination bordering on obsession.

Clips of the show and interviews with its creator had popped up on my socials, and I followed the show as it went from the Lucille Lortel to the Lyceum, a Broadway upgrade for an absurd, profane and deeply queer little drag show.

I was shocked when I received her gift – I hadn’t thought to actually see it! A limited summer run had been expanded into November (and just announced, through January) and anyway, I was thrilled. My love takes me to the best places.

We’d fly in Saturday night, stay in Times Square, see a Sunday matinee and pop out again that night. I worried that on a Sunday matinee there may be an understudy (spoiler, there was not) and things being how they are, we were both concerned about the dependability of air travel, but there were no unpleasant surprises there, either.

I have never stayed in the Times Square district before, my spouse is always very good at finding places in interesting and much less absurd Manhattan neighborhoods. But it’s not like the 1970s, our room was immaculate and stylish (and tiny, of course, who cares) set high above the chaos.

Riding along on a carousel!

We dropped our bags in our room, freshened up and sought out The Rum House for cocktails, live jazz, and the most expensive dish of mixed nuts. The band was lively and engaging, a trio of men all somewhat older than myself, piano, trumpet and washboard, that last doubled as the singer, a scruffy ringer for Bobcat Goldthwait with beard and pork pie hat. The drinks were creamy and excellent, she watched the crowd and I kept an eye on the passersby on 47th Street.

No one smokes. I watched maybe a hundred people pass by the window, none of them were smoking, it really is amazing.

The next morning we were able to lie about a while and relax and talk (there is no one I would rather do nothing at all with) before having brunch at the hotel and taking a walk up and out of Times Square and into Central Park.

There are those who refer to NYC as an urban hellscape, but all I could see were families playing, folks running or biking, musicians and magicians, all on a bright beautiful late summer day.

There was a meadow, too, like a natural, untended meadow we found, one that has been recently established, and walked through. It did my heart good.

We had a moment of crisis waiting for a ride on the Central Park Carousel when I casually mentioned that Trump owns it – I don’t remember where I heard that – so she did some research and found that thought Trump Organization had once paid for maintenance of the carousel, following the events of January 6, the city broke all financial ties with the former president.

We took a delightful spin on the carousel.

Caption: Romeo & Juliet, 1995

The Lyceum is the oldest, continuously operating Broadway theater, designed in the Beaux-Arts style, which basically means its very fancy, ornately decorated and very fussy. The lobby and staircases feature photographs of the many storied entertainers who have played that stage over the past 120 years – but also, if you are paying attention, you will notice there are also currently photos of Cole Escola starring in fictional productions of Doubt, Fun Home, Romeo and Juliet, and many others. Captions attributed to the artist explain how each of these shows were complete economic and critical disasters.

Several of these photos were also on display above urinals in the gentlemen’s toilet.

Oh, Mary! Is about a frustrated former cabaret singer trapped in a loveless marriage to a closeted man who happens to be Abraham Lincoln and she the sixteenth First Lady of the United States of America.

When Seth Myers asked them about how much research they had done to write the script, Escola replied, “I did less than no research. I actively forgot things I knew about Mary Todd Lincoln.”

They went on to stress that the show is a comedy, and that they wanted it to be accessible to everyone, that there are no “in-jokes” about the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, though there is one big “in-joke” where the audience discovers the identity of the acting tutor Lincoln has hired to occupy his manic spouse.

Post-show cheeseburger.

Cleveland playwright Thomas P. Cullinan wrote another chamber play about the life of Mary Todd. Mrs. Lincoln premiered at the Cleveland Play House in 1968 and, like this newer play, was also held over six months due to its enormous popularity. That is where the similarity ends, however, as Mrs. Lincoln (starring Evie McElroy in the eponymous role) is a psychological drama about the years after the assassination when the historical Mrs. Lincoln was institutionalized.

Plain Dealer critic Peter Bellamy was effusive, calling Mrs. Lincoln, "an absorbing, engrossing and literate play" adding that" nobody could portray the mercurial Mrs. Lincoln with more theatrical effect that Evie McElroy. Her performance is a truly great one."

In his review for the Cleveland Press, Tony Mastroianni called Mrs. Lincoln, “an evening of theater that is both entertaining and informative.” And it is informative, indeed. It is a challenge balancing the forward momentum of a plot with facts.

From Mrs. Lincoln:

MARY: I’d as soon dine with Billy Herndon as with that man!
SALLY: Now who’s Billy Herndon?
MARY: My husband’s law partner.

Escola said they didn’t want to be writing jokes thinking “that’ll get a laugh because that’s where she was born!” Or because that's her husband’s law partner! I get it now. Of course, Cullinan was not writing an historical comic play ... but I have, or I have tried to. And mine are all a bit too heady.

From These Are the Times:

VOICE: Looks like you’re quite a baseball fan!

CHILD: You see this letter “C” on my cap? That stands for Cleveland, and it’s a logo I can be proud of!

VOICE: And HOW!

Cringe. I'm working on that.

The fictional protagonist of Oh, Mary! fares much better than Cullinan’s factual one, achieving her dreams of returning to the cabaret stage, though, who knows? Maybe she has also gone mad. But what a way to go!

My wife and I were both also delighted with Conrad Ricamora, who plays Lincoln starting at an eleven and going higher from there. The entire ensemble is a master class in comic tropes and timing. I'm so glad I got to see this show.

GUESS THE SHOW: 

A. "The character of Mrs. Lincoln is at once tragic, funny, pathetic and unbalanced."

B. "An acting style that’s as expressionistic as a silent movie or opera ... while at the same time imposing an almost balletic control over gesture and pose."

C. "There were times when a movement or intonation reminded me of the late Ruth Feather ..."

Sources:

"Mrs. Lincoln's Torment Staged" by Peter Bellamy, The Plain Dealer, 11/2/1968

"Mrs. Lincoln's Fascinates Through Fresh Viewpoint" by Tony Mastroianni, The Cleveland Press, 11/2/1968

Late Night With Seth Meyers, May 7, 2024 (NBC)
Cleveland Arts Prize, Thomas P. Cullinan (Literature, 1971)
"What Makes ‘Oh, Mary!’ One of the Best Summer Comedies in Years" by Jesse Green, The New York Times, 7/11/1968

Guess The Show:

A. Mrs. Lincoln (Mastroianni)

B. Oh, Mary! (Green)

C. Mrs. Lincoln (Bellamy)

Philip Johnson (revisited)

With the recent announcement that the Cleveland Clinic itends to bulldoze the former Cleveland Play House Theaters designed by Philip Johnson (Cleveland Arts Prize for Architecture, 1972) many of my theater friends are condemning and lamenting the move. While I am sympathetic to anyone who mourns the loss of any site which is a repository to good memories, claims that the building is "historic" don't hold water with me. 

The Play House worked in many different venues prior to consolidating into the former Sears Building at 8500 Euclid, and I was never so joyful as when it was announced they found a new home in Playhouse Square, where they are today.

The building created by Johnson in 1983 was a lazy cash grab in which he recycled old ideas and designed yet another proscenium stage for the company, a hall with terrible acoustics, awful sight lines, and useless "boxes". Plain Dealer theater critic Marianne Evett called the design of this new, 644-seat Kenyon C. Bolton Theatre, “appallingly short-sighted … aimed at public grandeur rather than furthering the art of theater.”

Following the unrest of the 1970s, many suburban whites declared they would never again visit downtown, and there were also those (like my parents) who would drive to this oasis of white privilege, in the center of a largely African American neighborhood, to park, scurry into the place, get their theater and jet directly back home.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan and supporter of the Cleveland Play House. I also have many incredible memories of the facility, like witnessing the Doris Baizley adaptation of A Christmas Carol starring Wayne Turney in the Drury, staging the first public reading of Sarah Morton’s Eighth Wonder of the World on the stage of the Brooks, and when Sherrod Brown read a scene from I Hate This on the stage of the Bolton.

Dobama Theatre produced several shows in the blackbox space (for which Johnson deserves credit, at least) including the world premiere of Morton’s Night Bloomers. One day I will spill the tea about that production, it was quite an adventure.

But by their own estimation, the Play House paid a million dollars a year just to keep the lights on in that vast, cavernous institution. The building is not beautiful, it’s not practical, it is not historic.

And it was designed by Philip Johnson. Eleven years ago as I was studying Cleveland in the 1930s I learned a lot about Johnson which made me like him even less. I will not miss this theater space.

Update: January 17, 2023

Sources:
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History 
Cleveland Clinic to demolish ex-Cleveland Play House by Ken Prendergast, Neo-Trans Blog (1112/2021) 
Cleveland Arts Prize 
"Showtime in Cleveland: The Rise of a Regional Theater Center" by John Vacha (2001)

Play a Day: Fairfield

Eric Coble

For Monday I read Fairfield by Eric Coble, and available at New Play Exchange.

Two months reading a new play every day, and this is the first time I have presented the work of Eric Coble which is odd because we are friends. I am friends with playwright Eric Coble. Everyone hear that? Me and Eric Coble. Yes.

We met in college, I was completing my fifth year as an undergrad and he began his MFA in Acting at Ohio University so though I think of him as older we are the same age. He stopped acting in 1996, I was the marketing director at Dobama Theatre when he walked on stage for the very last time in Eric Overmyer's Mi Vida Loca. Coble is an excellent actor and I am sorry no one else has the opportunity to see that.

Because he was committed to becoming a playwright! And he has been most prolific and most successful. I had the great good fortune to perform in The Velocity of Autumn opposite Cleveland legend Dorothy Silver at Beck Center in Lakewood, before it moved to the Arena Stage and then Broadway, a production for which Estelle Parson was nominated for a Tony.

The Velocity of Autumn
(Beck Center, 2012)

I am dropping all the names today.

For ten years Eric and I have been colleagues in the Playwrights' Unit at the Cleveland Play House, where I have been blessed to receive Eric's guidance, advice and good humor as I have made my own journey as a professional writer.

I have also had the fortune to experience several of his works in progress, including Fairfield, as well as seeing the CPH premiere production in 2015. In the spirit of #NewDayNewPlay, however, I did re-read it before writing my recommendation!

Fairfield takes place in an inner-ring suburb somewhere in the United States. Except the only city like this one in the United States in Cleveland Heights, a magical fantasyland where an almost equal number of white people and black people (and a not insignificant number of Jewish people) live side-by-side and get into heated arguments about race and racism and yet never actually set fire to anything and we don't leave because we love it here. Except for all the racism.

Fairfield
(Cleveland Play House, 2015)

Eric was a member of our school board when he wrote this play (we both live in Cleveland Heights, the city of great writers) and after the table read I asked if he wasn't concerned about how it might be received. He just gave that carefree smile of his and told me he wasn't running for reelection, anyway.

Coble has an incomparable way of taking difficult contemporary issues to outrageously hilarious extremes, and Fairfield is a classic example of this. He explodes modern conversations about race, while still presenting engaging and (with one obvious exception) sympathetic, well-meaning, occasionally delusional characters who truly want to do the right thing, even if they only help make everything spin more wildly out of control.

As one of the parents whose children attend Fairfield might say, Eric Coble knows how to "use his words."

This month I have been heartened to read thirty great works by thirty tremendous playwrights. So many of them were recommended to me by other playwrights, dedicated individuals who proudly promote each other's work.

I am taking a short break from writing, however, as I concentrate on an outdoor, summer production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Perhaps I will see you there!

Eric Coble is currently developing his new play, "The Girl Who Swallowed a Cactus" at the New Visions/New Voices Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical)

Cleveland Play House

This week, in addition to reading a lot of plays, I am seeing a lot of plays. Tonight I took our eldest to see The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at Cleveland Play House.

The 2002 film Spellbound (no association) is a documentary about the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Featured are the personal stories of the participants, who you might imagine from their achievement were not typical young people. In addition to having above-average intelligence and mental acuity, several are first- or second-generation immigrants. It is a very moving film, and was even nominated for an Academy-Award.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee premiered in 2005, following a trend started by Urinetown for Broadway producers to take risks on "quirky" material that used to get no further than Off-Broadway, like Avenue Q and Spamalot.

When I first heard about the concept, developed so soon after the aforementioned film, I was concerned. Spellbound is a celebration of difference, surely a musical comedy would be about mocking difference. And I'm not entirely wrong. Ha ha, one of these spelling bee participants has two daddies! One is an entirely unselfconscious, home-schooled savant! One is (really?) an over-achieving Asian-American!

#CPHPutnam

Last year we took the kids to the all-girls school, where the wife is an English teacher, for their production. I was delighted by the performances, enjoyed the songs, and generally brought around to the musical. This musical, too, is a celebration of difference. I think. Only it has jokes.

(Right: Pre-show fun in the lobby. They got “comedy.” I got “cymotrichous.”)

The production at Cleveland Play House features a diverse company, and this plays to the show's current strength and popularity, in high schools (where "Chip's Lament" is often performed with lyrics altered with permission,) amateur and professional houses. It's a modern musical which reflects contemporary Middle-American society. Yes, it pokes fun. But it does not judge. And ultimately it's an empowering story about kids deciding how they are going to fit in the world.

Cleveland Play House presents "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" in the Allen Theatre through May 6, 2018.

Shakespeare On Stage

The Dark Lady of the Sonnets
with Magdalyn Donnelly & Anne McEvoy
Great Lakes Theater

I am tired of Shakespeare.

Not tired of his work, that I am still quite fond of. I am tired of William Shakespeare, the man. A man about whom we know less than we know about any other individual about whom we have decided it is important to know things.

We know where he was born (not exactly when, though) when he died, a little bit about his family, and that he wrote thirty-eight plays. Respectable scholars are even still debating about that last bit.

For someone about whom we know nothing, there is an ever-expanding industry in making shit up about him. Each biography gets fatter than the last, containing greater amounts of conjecture, and the slightest potential new discovery turns out to be inconsequential or downright fantasy.

Someone found a painting in Canada twenty years ago of a young man, the artifact carbon-dated to the late 16th century. Bares a slight resemblance to Shakespeare, must be him.

More recently, however, is the cottage industry in stage plays, films or TV shows in which Shakespeare the man is a character. It began, more or less, with George Bernard Shaw, who wrote not one but two plays featuring the Bard in a lead role.

Oh, look. Shaw is lecturing.

Shakes vs. Shav (1949) is a ten-minute script which was written to be performed by marionette puppets in which the two famous playwrights argue over who is the better writer.

The Frogs, adapted from Aristophanes by Stephen Sondheim and Burt Shevelove in 1974, stole the "Shakespeare-against-Shaw" debate conceit entirely, drawing it out and making it much less amusing. But I digress.

Decades earlier Shaw wrote The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910) which was created expressly to promote the idea of England creating a federally-funded theater, which they eventually did with the National Theatre, though Shaw never lived to see it.

Dark Lady runs about a half-hour, and presents a blocked Shakespeare creeping around the streets of London after hours, searching for his mistress (about whom he writes in the Sonnets) and stealing inspiring snatches of dialogue from passersby for use in his future works. He eventually runs into not only his “dark lady” but also a sleepwalking Queen Elizabeth I, whom he first mistakes for his love. Comedy ensues.

The last third of this short play concerns Will’s efforts to persuade the Queen to establish what he calls a “national theater.” Most of the wit, however, involves the phrases uttered by the night watchman, the “dark lady” and the Queen herself -- familiar from Shakespeare’s canon-- which the frustrated playwrights jots down in a notebook for inclusion in his plays later. So the comedy depends upon these lines being familiar to the audience.

Mr. Shakespeare

Are you familiar with the phrase, “Frailty, thy name is woman”?

Perhaps you are.

“All the perfumes of Arabia”?

Yes, no? What is it from?

How about, “a snapper up of unconsidered trifles”?

No, of course you aren’t. Even I had to look that up.

Great Lakes produced Dark Lady for the outreach tour in 2006, and I played the role of Shakespeare. This was not a stretch, I had been playing the role of “Mr. Shakespeare” as a promotional gimmick for the company for two years by that point, making public appearances at art festival and rib cook-offs. I was their “unofficial mascot” for seven years. The costume shop created for me a beautiful, velvet doublet in the company’s signature purple.

The thing I learned performing Dark Lady … it isn’t funny. I mean, it would be, if the audience were composed entirely of those well-versed in the canon. Ever see The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)? It’s not funny because of references to Shakespeare. It’s funny because there’s a stoner in a dress and they rap Othello.

Actually, Complete Works isn’t funny, either. But I digress.

But therein lies the problem with plays about Shakespeare. We know nothing about him, we feign familiarity with him through his work, and inevitably we lean on the work itself to carry the narrative the pathos, and the humor.

Yeah, I saw Something Rotten. It’s funny, if it’s funny, because of the song about musicals. But "Will Power" is really painful to sit through. I know the idea of Shakespeare as a rock star is the joke, but is it? There’s this pretentious notion, flouted by complete nerds, that the man from Stratford was some kind of celebrity in his own time. Listening to Adam Pascal (who played him at the Palace) growl through “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” like some kind of Jim Morrison or something isn’t funny, it’s embarrassing.

It’s like that SNL sketch where Lin-Manuel Miranda plays a substitute teacher at a high school, determined to turn the kids onto how cool Shakespeare is, and they’ve heard it all before.


That’s actually part of a play I wrote once for an educational outreach tour, comparing verse to rap music. It was very awful and I will never mention it again.

Which brings us to the most produced American play of the 2017-18 season (as determined by American Theater) Shakespeare In Love, adapted for the stage by Lee Hall, from the screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard.

As in the film, this is a purely fictionalized tale of a young William Shakespeare, like so many of us in the mid-90s (in his case, the 1590s) slacking and suffering writer’s block. He’s trying to write a new play titled Romeo & Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter. A great deal of the charm and interest hangs on seeing Shakespeare as fallible, flawed, with the same passions and potential for falling short as the rest of us. Kind of the way he’s represented in The Dark Lady of the Sonnets.

He has to work at writing, it doesn’t come easy. The best stuff is taken whole cloth from someone else (kind of like in Dark Lady) in this case usually Kit Marlowe.

Rhys Ifan as Edward de Vere
Anonymous (2011)

And just as with Dark Lady, over one hundred years earlier, much humor is dependent upon the audience being well-versed in Shakespeare. When I was in an audience for the Cleveland Play House production they definitely enjoyed the dog, while somewhat familiar Shakespearean allusions  bounced awkwardly off their heads in silence.

When Will is asked for new pages of the script and he promises them “tomorrow and tomorrow” and his producer adds, “... and tomorrow?” there was a general if somewhat delayed chuckle of recognition and the woman behind me tittered, mumbling, “heh heh, ‘creeps in this petty pace…’”

I turned around and said, “oh, you got that one?”

Now, I enjoyed the film of Shakespeare In Love, too. But I also enjoyed Anonymous, which tells an alternative history based on a popular conspiracy theory that the works of Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, a nobleman about whom there is a deep and rich biography available. A man who was actually once captured by pirates.

HE WAS CAPTURED BY PIRATES.

My colleagues who abhor such theories dismiss that film out of hand, because it’s utter nonsense. One critic even pointed out that a flashback from the mid-1500s featuring the young de Vere performing a scene from “his” A Midsummer Night’s Dream was preposterous because there is no possible way Dream could have been written before the early 1590s.

Yeah, well? Shakespeare In Love is how the man from Stratford created the story to Romeo & Juliet, based on his own personal romantic experiences, when Arthur Brooke’s poem "Romeus and Juliet" had been in heavy circulation since 1562, and even that is not the original tale.

But Shakespeare In Love is a comedy, Anonymous is meant to be taken seriously.

Really. Is it?

Shakespeare In Love
Charlie Thurston as Will Shakespeare
Cleveland Play House
Photo credit: Roger Mastroianni

But what about the children, they cry. Someone might see Anonymous and think that it’s true. Yes, and I am sure there are those who believe Shakespeare In Love is true -- not in it’s every particular, but in the larger sense that the playwright and poet William Shakespeare was charming, passionate, and had lots of friends. Only he didn't.

The real reason people want to believe Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays is because he is the kind of exciting character we want William Shakespeare to be. Only he wasn't.

Couldn't we at least, then, present the unfaithful horn dog in Shakespeare In Love, a man who spends far more time partying and having sex than actually writing, as the opportunistic, litigious, status-obsessed striver with the weak chin, beady-eyes and receding hairline that the available historical record makes evident?

Instead we get another fictional yet admittedly extremely handsome, roguish-yet-self-effacing charmer, like the one who played him in the CPH production, pictured here, resplendent in his beautiful, velvet doublet.

Wait. Where did you get that doublet?

Entry Point (2017)

Rehearsal for "Set Fire and Start Again"

New play development is a thing. It is as though almost every theater in town has its own playwrights ensemble or presents some new plays festival. Convergence-Continuum has the NEOMFA Playwright Festival, Ensemble Theatre the Columbi New Plays Festival, Dobama Theatre has a playwrights program called Playwrights’ GYM, and the Play House the Playwrights’ Unit, that last of which I am a member.

Reaching back twenty years, I was an actor for Cleveland Public Theatre’s new play festivals. That event included a prize for best play, the Chilcote Award, which would go on to receive a full production the following season. I was in the world premiere production of Lucy Wang’s Junk Bonds in 1995, and performed in both the festival (1997) and premiere (1998) production of Sarah Morton’s Love In Pieces.

In more recent years, when they produced an annual festival of works-in-progress called Big Box, I was afforded the opportunity to develop my own plays, including solo pieces I Hate This (2003) and And Then You Die (2009) among others. Each had life outside Big Box, but the assistance provided by CPT made them happen.

Of course, there are a wide variety of ways to develop a new script. You can invite friends to your house and read it. You can stage your own public reading, or submit it to a celebration of new works like the Playwrights Local Annual Cleveland Playwrights Festival or attach yourself or gain membership to one of our local theaters’ playwright collectives. You can even declare your script completed and submit it for production, here or anywhere, really. The internet has made it much easier to find companies across the country that actively seek new work.

This year, CPT is trying something new, by producing a trio of events designed to progress dramatic works at various stages of completing. The first stage of these, Entry Point, takes place this weekend. Over the course of two and a half hours, audience members can move between over a half-dozen locations on the CPT campus to witness - and comment upon - new works at various stages of development.

In addition, they are featuring panel discussions on Saturday afternoon. A number of my favorite artists and CPT stalwarts are presenting as part of this project, you can even sit in on a brand new work from Eric Coble. Also, there's free beer.

My friend and colleague Carrie Williams is working on a script titled Set Fire and Start Again, since the beginning of the year she has been directing our company of five to create a script-in-hand, twenty-minute performance of what she calls “fragments” of a larger piece that she’s working toward. I have had a wonderful time working with this crew, a lot of positive energy devoted to developing Carrie’s work, giving her what she needs, we hope, to drive this piece forward.

This is the project I was referring to when describing those of us who go into the cold to create. For some reason my sharpest memories of participating in the creation of someone else's work, generally as an actor, with highlit and marked up new pages in my hand, take place in deepest winter. During the rehearsal process I was standing in the wings, and turned to face the black wall of the Levin Theatre. Painted black, and repainted many times over, how many layers of paint dating back how many years. I touched its surface, which has born witness to so much new work.

When I was a youth, when I was in college, even, I was not interested in new work. My ignorance of the classics placed a premium upon them, they had staying power and pedigree, they had been endorsed by time and I assumed therefore those were “real” plays. And I considered myself a writer!

Since that time I have come to an entirely different conclusion. New writing is the lifeblood of civilization, and that working as a collaborator (even as an actor! yes!) in the pursuit of original plays is vital to the progress of culture. The open, creative exchange of ideas in a public venue. You like movies? You like TV? It all begins with the basic, local act of crafting the words to be spoken from one person to another, on a stage, before an audience. That is the basis of understanding.

Entry Point will be presented at Cleveland Public Theatre, January 20-22, 2017.

The Book of William (How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World)

Following a performance of The Secret Adversary at a local school, one of the students remarked that she, “enjoyed that it was easy to follow ... and was not Shakespeare related.”

Indeed. Working backwards through the previous three years we have presented original works about the Globe Theatre (The Great Globe Itself), inspired by a speech in As You Like It (Seven Ages) and a prequel to Much Ado About Nothing (Double Heart.)

My work as a theater artist has been inextricably tied up in the works of Shakespeare. Apparently this is not the case for American theater artists, generally. This is made painfully obvious to me every time we hold auditions. College graduates stick the landing with their contemporary monologues, their verse is often not even memorized.

How did I become one of those Shakespeare people? In eighth grade Mrs. Carson assigned Macbeth which I really enjoyed reading. We read it, we did not watch a video.

(Side note: My father had recommended at that time that I also read James Thurber’s "The Macbeth Murder Mystery." It’s a hilarious short story which is funny only if you’ve read the play, which made me feel once again too damn clever for middle school.)

My high school at that time was passing out of a golden age when they actually had quarter classes in specialized subjects. Now you might take a year long course called Honors English Lit or something. I had the opportunity to take Death Perspectives and Journalism, there was a course on The Bible as Literature, and both Shakespearean Comedy and Shakespearean Tragedy.

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Great Lakes Theater, 1984

Chuck Millheim taught those last two my senior year. I took both. By that time I had already been introduced to Shakespeare on stage; my parents took me to see The Tempest in the new Bolton Theatre at Cleveland Play House, soon after the high school attended a student matinee of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Great Lakes Theater.

Those plays were covered in Millheim’s courses, and also The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear and Hamlet. For Hamlet we were treated to the audio version of Richard Burton’s portrayal. Picture if you will, a room of high school seniors listening to an audiobook version of Shakespeare. It’s awful, right? Heads on desks all over the room. Me, I loved it. Burton was my first Hamlet, and it is because of him I know the manner in which Hamlet is funny.

(Side note: We were required to memorize “To be or not to be.” This was no big deal for me, because I am an actor. I scheduled my time to meet with Millheim before classes, and rattled off the soliloquy in short order, and watched as he gave me an A for my recitation in his grade book. I also noticed he gave one of the football players an A+. When I pressed him for how that guy got extra credit, Millheim said bluntly, “He performed it. Very well.”)

When it was announced that Romeo and Juliet would be a mainstage production my junior year in college, we were suddenly learning Shakespeare. Verse and how to interpret and speak it. We had not received any such instruction until then, and suddenly it was all Shakespeare, all the time. Senior year came the Stratford trip, with master classes from RSC members and numerous performances (including a King Lear featuring then-unknown to American audiences Ralph Fiennes as Edmond and Alex Kingston as Cordelia) and “suddenly” I was one of those guys for whom everything comes back to William Shakespeare.

The elephant is in the room.

This summer something monumental is coming to Cleveland, and by that I am referring to a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, and not that other thing that is happening, though they are not merely coincident, as I will explain.

To celebrate the Stratford Man’s 400th death anniversary (which is not that odd, we celebrate Elvis Presley’s death, too; also, Jesus) the Folger Library in Washington created First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare, a yearlong celebration in which they will loan a copy of the First Folio to every state in the Union in 2016. The Folger owns 82 copies, so it is possible for numerous sites to display them at once.

Great Lakes Theater in partnership with the Cleveland Public Library won the privilege of hosting the Ohio stop on this tour, and so it will be on display in Cleveland from June 20 - July 30 at the main branch of the Cleveland Public Library. It was the Folger Library who chose when we would receive the book, and they felt it was important for it to be here during the Republican National Convention.

(Side note: If there were ever a political convention in which those in attendance might set fire to a library, this would be it, but the Folger didn’t know that when choosing the date.)

We haven’t yet announced Great Lakes Theater’s contributions to these events, but we do have several exciting projects in the works and you will want to participate in them.

So, long story short (too late.) For the time being I will be selecting books to read from my father’s library. It’s not some new thing, I have been doing that for years. We both like history and nonfiction. I daresay he is the reason I like history and nonfiction.

Last week I spied his copy of The Book of William (How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World) by Paul Collins in his office and took it with me. In brief (it’s not a long book, either) Collins describes the origins of Shakespeare’s First Folio (also the Second, Third and Fourth) which is to say not only how it came to be printed but how it was printed, how the First managed to survive its first hundred years (for example, the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed almost every copy that hadn’t been bought and taken out of central London) and its estimable journey from yesterday’s news to the most expensive book on earth.

G.B. Shaw coined the term Bardolatry to mock those who attempt to deify Shakespeare. Shaw felt his work equal to Shakespeare’s and he is certainly entitled to that opinion. I agree that far too much emphasis can be put on Shakespeare the man when attempting to understand the work. What I cannot abide is the invention of biography for Shakespeare of Stratford in attempt to expand upon his legacy. Most of what people think they know of Shakespeare is apocryphal, the fact is we do not know.

But that’s okay. We have the most important part of him: this big, fat book, which, if it had not been printed in 1623 we would not have any text for Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest and fifteen other of his plays. They would for, all intents and purposes, not exist.

When Great Lakes' slate of events are announced, I hope you make time to join us for a workshop or a performance. There are a lot of folks who would just as soon not venture downtown during the Baby Elephant Walk this summer, and I understand that, too.

It’s not worth losing your head over.

"Incendiaries" at Cleveland Public Theatre

Google Maps

This holiday season, WVIZ ideastream broadcast a program called The Way We Shopped. Because I had time on my hands and had a nostalgic impulse, I decided to watch it. I have an interest in Cleveland history, don’t you know, and as I watch my children grow I am reminded of those moments I experienced when I was their ages.

Cosmic Comics in the Colonial Arcade. Visiting Mr. Jingeling at Halle's, when he was portrayed by Earl Keyes. Staying up late to watch Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman because you knew you were in the middle of a blizzard and there was going to be no school the next day and that guy was going to read that day’s edition of the comic strip version of Howard the Duck out loud from the Plain Dealer when the show was over.

However, something struck me as I watched The Way We Shopped, and that was that it was not recently made. The way each of these individuals described their experiences downtown, dressing up to go with their parents to experience the capitalistic glories of Euclid Avenue … these people were not the right age to have been children in the 1940s and 50s.

Most striking was the account of H.W. Beattie and Sons. People of a certain age can recall the window displays at Beattie’s, which included mosaics of loose gems. According this program (which was actually produced in 2000) this legendary store is still in business at 1117 Euclid Avenue, one of the enduring legacies of old downtown.

Of course, it’s not. I walk past that empty storefront every time I walk from my office towards Public Square, be it to shop at the new Heinen’s or meet a friend for lunch on East Fourth. In fact, not only is Beattie’s closed, but the engraved stone facade which bears it’s name - prominently featured in the TV program - has begun to deteriorate.

It was at that moment, this past December, that I finally realized something very important. That city is gone. Not as in the Pretenders song. My city isn’t gone, because that was never my city, or if it part of it had been, it has been gone so long it is as though it never was. Cleveland may be on the rise, but what it is now has little or nothing to do with what it was then.

Ageing Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation lament the loss of the May Company, Halle’s and Higbee’s. But why? They were department stores. Who shops like that anymore? Who has the time or the money? I can’t be bothered to miss a fucking store. I believe I am done with this kind of nostalgia.

Last night I was standing in the lobby of the Gordon Square Theatre, having a (free) beer following a Cleveland Public Theatre performance, engaging in small-to-big talk with two guys in their late 20s I had just met. One was raised in Lyndhurst but now lives in Ohio City, the other from Connecticut but had recently moved to town and lives just up Detroit from the theater. I am of course from Bay Village, but have lived my entire adult life in Cleveland Heights.

The space in which we were standing was, some twenty years ago, an appliance warehouse. Cleveland Public Theatre was still only renting the single black box space which is now named the James Levin Theatre. The Gordon Square District was called the Detroit Shoreway and I recall there being not much there there. It was a neighborhood, a depressed Cleveland neighborhood with a two-lane highway running through it. You can debate whether gentrification has been a good thing or a bad thing. All I know is that there were two theater spaces playing to near-capacity in that complex last night, and the bars and restaurants were filled with people.

And the movie theater. And the pinball emporium. And the bookstore, the ice cream parlor, and all of the additional bars and restaurants.

Incendiaries (Photo: Steve Wagner)

The play we were talking about was Incendiaries, created by Pandora Robertson and produced in collaboration between CPT and Ohio City Theatre Project. That was my kind of show, an emotional, hour-long, research-based, ensemble performance piece about a significant moment in Cleveland history.

The subject is Hough. Call it a riot, call it a disturbance, call it an uprising. Fifty years ago this summer the Hough neighborhood burned. In this blog I have written about 1936, 1954 and even for a brief moment 1976, neatly leap-frogging over the 1960s, that decade which culminated in the largely symbolic fire on the Cuyahoga.

What I knew about Hough was from the outside. Even Mark Winegarder in his historical fiction Crooked River Burning failed to adequately tell the story. Most of that book successfully tells the story of the Cleveland's decline from 1948 to 1969 from the inside, his fictional protagonists in the same room for important events and crossing paths with historical figures with great detail and realism.

When it comes to matters of race, however, the story takes a big step back, holding some of the most consequential events in Cleveland history at arms length. The Hough disturbance is told dispassionately, as an essay for a newspaper, perhaps. From the outside. Carl Stokes has a chapter which has no bearing on the main plot of the novel. It’s a subplot which any editor would have suggested be cut, except its absence would of course be historically conspicuous.

Incendiaries is chaotic, and it took me some time to catch up with the dialog it flew so fast. When it did I was entirely engaged and distressed. So many overlapping narratives, but clearly defined, never repetitious. Fascinating characters. It made me want to get back into the library and look up the articles listed in the program.

Also, too: I have been making plans to return to some of my unrealized historical work. There will be time for that. None of it has the fierce urgency of now, not like this piece. During the fifteen minute post-show discussion several, including some young men from Hough, who heard these stories from their parents and grandparents, were very open in their comments, their happiness that this story was being told in this kind of forum. They also lamented that little has changed.

Because they're right. While Halle's may be gone, systematic racism is not.

The Crucible (Photo: Roger Mastroianni)

The audience was majority white, because anywhere I go the audience usually will be. But only a slight majority. Because this is an American fact: we like to see ourselves on stage. This is why non-traditional casting of Shakespeare irritates some people. This is why I had an interesting exchange with a guy in a lobby downtown about the recent Cleveland Play House production of The Crucible, in which he took issue with the fact that John Proctor was played by a black man.

“I have looked it up,” he said, “and the historical John Proctor did not look like that.”

“The historical John Proctor,” I said, “was 70 years old in 1692, and Abigail Williams was 11, would you prefer to see that production of The Crucible? Because that's creepy.”

“The whole second act was about a black man arguing with a white man,” he said. “I am sure that is not what Arthur Miller intended.”

I cannot recall Arthur Miller ever writing any roles for people of color (except Tituba, of course) so I couldn’t argue that specific point. But this guy insisted the play was about religious persecution, and I said it was about persecution in general, and we agreed to disagree.

However, it is not enough to cast productions based on the content of a performer’s talent, rather than the color of their skin, though I entirely support doing that. Everyone wants and needs to hear their own stories told from the stage. Black stories matter.

As we see today, white people feel threatened by the increasing advancement of narrative from non-white peoples. And non-white, non-male peoples. We see it in backlash to the #OscarsSoWhite movement, I see it in Facebook groups for playwrights. White dudes hate being criticized for being white dudes.

Me, I am not troubled by this controversy. I will keep writing what I write and if it's good enough, I'll find a home for it. I am not threatened by a deeper talent pool. Meantime, I am engaged in absorbing as much of the conversation as possible, because that is where the future is and I for one would prefer to be part of it.

Assessment

Perhaps this is a bit premature, but I am on an upswing and have no idea how long it will last. In my most recent assessment, I reflected on stagnancy and a general feeling of malaise. Writing was not happening. In fact, it continued not to happen for some time, as I was locked in my head over the Christie piece, unable to freely enjoy anything until that was sorted.

Tiresias Riddles the Fate

However, since that time I have written two brief pieces for performance. Cleveland Public Theatre's annual Pandemonium benefit was held on Saturday, September 12. My fifteen-minute play Tiresias Riddles The Fates was performed twice in one of the outdoor yurts and though it rained all evening crowds made their way across the sodden parking lot to join us.

The theme for the evening was "transform" and so I was inspired to call upon one of the oldest known transgendered characters in literature. And the Fates? Because women. My daughter encouraged me to create something for the event and I thought if I roped her and one of her friends into it I might actually come up with something fun. Two actor-teachers rounded out the cast.

The CPH Centennial Plays

The other short play, On the Beam, was written as part of the centennial celebration to be thrown next weekend in honor of the Cleveland Play House 100th Season. The Playwrights' Unit was asked to write short plays that tell the history of CPH in 60 minutes. Writing a short piece about the first Cleveland production of The Crucible was stepping into warm and familiar territory, and I was very happy to offer my contribution.

Performances of The CPH Centennial Plays will be in the Helen Theatre at Playhouse Square next Saturday, October 24 at 12:15 PM and again at 4:15 PM. Admission is free, though they are asking that people make a reservation. It's going to be a big, day-long party with events happening all around the Play House complex.

Not sure which performance of the Centennial Plays I will make, but I do know I will be performing in White Rabbit Red Rabbit at Cleveland Public Theatre that same night, Oct. 24 at 7:00 PM in the Parish Hall on the CPT campus.

White Rabbit Red Rabbit

I can't tell you anything about WRRR because I do not know anything about WRRR. It is a play an actor can only perform once, because they are expected not to know anything about it.

I will show up that Saturday night, they will hand me the script, and I will walk out on stage (will I be walking onto a stage?) to perform a play I have not read for an audience. As the play opened last weekend, and folks have been encouraged to see it more than once, it is very possible the audience I will be performing for will now much more about the play than I do, which is nothing.

This evening we had an impromptu reading of a work I wrote last Spring and only recently came back to, what I affectionately refer to as The George Michael Play. It is not my custom to hold a play reading in a bar but I did want to thank the people at Parnell's on Playhouse Square for letting us use the upstairs room this evening.

The George Michael Play

It's a dicey piece of work, but I had two splendid readers, and Khaki, as well as a room of actor-teachers to witness. It has been some time since I made up something entirely original, so many recent works have been adaptations or parodies or sequels or prequels, to create something to entirely me, well it has been a while.

There is also a great deal of work to see or things to do these days, we will be attending the Talespinner Halequinade benefit tomorrow evening, King Lear at Great Lakes later this week, the Play House production of The Crucible the week after that.

I Hate This

Most unusual of all, however, is a production of I Hate This the first weekend of November at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. Brian Cook will be designing, directing and performing this very personal play of mine for his senior thesis. How he came to choose this monodrama, from all those available, is a question I must ask him some day soon. For the time being it is enough to say that his thoughts on the script, and his preliminary concepts for design were enough to satisfy and I have otherwise had no input into the project.

The idea that this particular piece, this most personal stories, could have a life separate from my body, from my own mouth, is in a word reassuring. That I was able to put down the words, that the words alone tell the story, and that they may safely be interpreted by another independent from any additional contributions from me.

I ran a marathon a few weeks ago, the Twin Cities Marathon. Yes, I have been writing, but so much time was spent occupied by that intense, physical pursuit. And I did well. Now, on the other side, I am overwhelmed by all this work; home work, work work, and the writing work. I haven't had a run in almost a week, and I do not like to think that I have to choose between writing and running. Perhaps this time I might be able to keep body and mind together.

The Crucible: Archive Materials

Diane Bell as Mary Warren, Kirk Willis as John Proctor
Cleveland Play House archives (CWRU)

In honor of the Cleveland Play House 100^th Season, the Playwrights Unit has been asked to write short plays about the company’s history. As CPH’s 2015 production of The Crucible will be in performance when these sketches will be presented, I offered to cover the regional premiere of that play, which was produced at the Play House in 1954.

We were given access to company archives, which are kept at Case Western Reserve University, and their staff and the apprentices at CPH have been extremely helpful in locating and distributing specific items.

I have previously covered The Crucible in this blog, having read contemporary reviews of the CPH ’54 production, as well as Miller’s own inspiration for having written it. But there was much I had never seen, including photographic images of the actors, their costumes, and the scenic design.

Produced at the Euclid-77^th Street Space, it was presented on a wide, open thrust stage, with little wing space. The set is a spare frame construction. The period costumes, inspired by the garb of 17^th century Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay colony, do much of the work in placing this production in time and space.

The reviews for the CPH production were uniformly positive; when they were critical, it was generally in comparing this new play to Miller’s landmark Death of a Salesman.  A preview piece written by William F. McDermott for the Plain Dealer provided background which informed potential audiences this new work (it opened on Broadway in 1953) had elicited a wide range of opinion.

The Crucible at the Euclid-77th Street Theatre
Cleveland Play House archives (CWRU)

True, The Crucible had won the Tony Award for Best New Play. However, the producers did not decide to create a touring production. McDermott reported that the West German paper Der Tag found the work, “too narrow minded in clinging to historical fact,” and that in Miller’s characters he had created, “no one person which stirs our conscience.”

When the Munich-based paper Abend suggested this play is a “reliable image of what happens in the United States,” it even produced a defensive response from the playwright who countered, “In Salem they only hung [sic] sixteen persons, in Europe they had burned thousands.”

One of the great delights of looking into an archive like this are the pieces of personal correspondence which someone, at some time, decided it would be worth to save. There were some internal memos, and also personal messages of special interest or gratitude.

A thank you card from a Mrs. S. who lived on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights saw The Crucible with her husband in 1954 and offered a pair of observations which, taken together, will be familiar to anyone who has managed any theater company, anywhere:

“Neither of us can remember a more wonderful production.”

-- and also –

“I was annoyed to see so many empty seats.”

See also: some thoughts on "The Crucible" at Cleveland Play House (2015)

Cleveland Public Theatre presents THE WITCHES as part of Test Flight, a showcase of new works, March 3, 4 & 5, 2022.

Source:
The Plain Dealer, October 3, 1954
Cleveland Play House Archives, Case Western Reserve University

The Secret Adversary: First Reading

This paperback has been in my satchel for six months.

Historically, I have found it necessary or even desirable to be working on more than one piece at a time. This summer, however, one project in particular has created a distressing logjam, not only for my ability to write but also to think and conduct myself as an emotionally adult human.

During the past two weeks I held a rehearsal read of the work in question, a one-hour adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary, and then presented it to the unit this past Wednesday. Just completing the draft suddenly made it possible for me to think about an entirely other work, one which I began a year and a half ago, and discover what needed to happen next with that script.

In addition, there was another piece, a project we are working on within the unit, a five minute scene, which I was able to create in short order (the turnaround itself was fortuitously brief) and about which I will write in some detail in the days or weeks to come.

The reading at the CPH offices was happily well-attended. It helped that every single GLT actor-teacher was present – all eight of them, most reading and the rest to provide support and enjoy the read. But there were also CPH staff, most of the unit, and several of our kids.

Feedback was reassuring, that I have successfully adapted the novel into a script which flies along and is mostly coherent. RL for example is a great fan of Christie’s characters Tommy and Tuppence and expressed how much she looked forward to the reading (prior) and how much the characters satisfied (after).

In fact there was helpful balance of positive response and critical comment and suggestion to keep me moving forward. The small company (3 men, 2 women) put some in mind of 39 Steps, suggesting the piece is going to be even more humorous in performance then I had previously imagined.

CH stated the transition from what is Christie’s dialogue to what is mine is pretty seamless, and in fact most of the lines which popped for folks were actually mine (or in one glaring case, Evelyn Waugh’s.)

One issue of great interest is the McGuffin, the “draft treaty” which puts the entire adventure into motion. Where it passed hands - on the deck of the sinking Lusitania – requires some explanation to our modern, American audience. Even more important, however, is how such a document could topple a government. I mean, it really doesn’t matter, that’s not why the adventure is exciting. But it does give the entire endeavor some kind of point. Christie didn’t need to explain this, but I do.

Something else I need to do is create a calendar of events. The book takes place over the course of about a month. The way I have abridged it, it’s more like one week, but I’d like specifics.

It’s been a long summer. I remember writing pages in Montréal and in Maine, day after day in Cleveland. I thought I’d never produce a draft, but kept moving, one page after another.

I’m running a marathon in two weeks. Running a marathon is easy. Writing is hard. 

Lysistrata (2000)

Shannon McNamara, Arthur Grothe

Photo by Anthony Gray

"The version of Lysistrata you are about to witness comes at a time of particular economic strength in this country. The United States is not at war. People are making a lot of money, and nobody's losing his life on foreign soil. So, can Lysistrata only be performed when things are good? Is its original daringness never to be experienced by theater audiences again? Where is the radicalness of this play? What makes it worth seeing now, under these conditions?"

- David Bell, Lysistrata, Then and Now (Bad Epitaph production program)

In 1996, I picked up a copy of Aristophanes' Lysistrata at ABCDEFG Books in Camden, Maine. This edition was translated into verse in 1924 by the noted Australian Jack Lindsay, with illustrations by his father Norman Lindsay. One of the original hardcovers, this was exactly the kind of smutty book that would have been found indecent and its transmission through the U.S. Post illegal under the Comstock Act of 1873.

And this wasn't even the original. While Lindsay père created line drawings that are delightful and racy, featuring a collections of male and female characters naked or mostly naked, all actual genitalia are either (in the case of males) cast in dark shadows or (in the case of females) erased. You may interpret such censorship as you will.

The text of Lindsay fils, however, goes through an even more bizarre transformation. Reading it, I wasn't immediately compelled, for example, to produce it for the stage. It wasn't very funny, and though the sexual humor was apparent, it was so tame as to be virtually uninteresting. Later I found a paperback of Lindsay's translation that was published in the 1960s, and learned he had bowdlerized his own work! His original text, as published without fear of censorship, still includes innuendo and puns rather than outright obscenity ... but they're better.

The last major notable production of Lysistrata in Cleveland was the legendarily pilloried production at the Cleveland Play House in late 1970. That production was actually produced at a time America was at war, but as Tony Mastroianni reported in the Cleveland Press, "This is an anti-war play, basically, but it is difficult to find the message under all the sniggering and archness."

Cleveland Play House, 1970
Photo by Tom Prusha

Both he and Plain Dealer critic Peter Bellamy delivered the production a one-two punch the day after it opened (Bellamy called the production, "perverted" and "obscene") and reservations didn't merely dry up, people were calling the Play House to cancel. In what may have been the shortest run of any professional production in Cleveland, Lysistrata at the Play House had three performances and suspended the run.

Our new company, Bad Epitaph, was maintaining a streak of strongly-received productions. I had an idea at that time that we would produce a classic in the Spring and something contemporary in the fall, as far as we could take that. Having produced a Shakespeare as our inaugural production (Hamlet) I didn't want to return to the Bard again for as long as possible.

I found Lindsay's verse translation to be clever and funny, but possibly a little inaccessible to a modern audience. However, reading other, more recent translations, I realized that this was its strength. For example, the translation the Play House used thirty years earlier was by Douglass Parker, written in 1964, and that should tell you right there what went wrong. A jazz aficionado, Professor Parker strains to be hep and obvious with his sex jokes, and the entire script reads like an extended comedy sketch from Playboy After Dark.

But what is Lysistrata, anyway? Is it an anti-war argument, the purpose for which Aristophanes wrote it in 411 BCE? Is it one big sex comedy? Is it an Ur-feminist text, championing the strength and power of women? Or is it exactly the opposite of that -- as Mastroianni pointed out in his review, "What the Play House production misses in emphasizing the obvious is the underlying story of women desiring to resume normal domestic relations."

Lysistrata can be seen as a conservative piece of work; the women are refusing to have sex with their husbands until they abandon unending war and return home.

Also, at this point in history, I was only recently married, and my wife and I were making plans to have children. So my interest in staging a happy celebration of marriage, sex and procreation was also very personal.

Shannon McNamara, Alison Garrigan, Elaine Feagler
Photo by Anthony Gray

Director's Note:

There is no private domain of a person's life that is not political, and there is no political issue that is not ultimately personal.
- Charlotte Bunch

The Greeks invented Democracy, built the Acropolis, and then called it a day.

- David Sedaris

Bad Epitaph's production of Lysistrata opened on May 19, 2000, and it was very successful. The Plain Dealer called our production, Helter-skelter and often hilarious, the Free Times a high-spirited and campy romp, and Scene Magazine christened it that summer's first joyous work.

By closing night we were sold out - oversold, actually, adding more and more seats. That fall Bad Epitaph received a nomination for a Northern Ohio Live Magazine Award of Achievement, based largely on the success of Lysistrata. But that is the end of the story, not the beginning. 

I recently read over my notes from the rehearsal period, and learned some very important lessons that I had forgotten.

Christopher Bohan, Jennifer Wiech
Photo by Anthony Gray

My apprehension over producing a sex comedy were great. As a rule, sex just isn't funny, it's embarrassing. Case in point, the movie Exit To Eden, based on one of Anne Rice's soft porn novels. Director Garry Marshall wanted to make a gentle comedy that adults could enjoy together, but when it appeared the movie he was making wasn't going to appeal to anyone, he threw in a caper subplot (entirely unrelated to Rice's work) and cast Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd as detectives. What was merely cheesy swiftly became crass.

One of the few exceptions to this rule is The Tall Guy featuring Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson in the funniest sex scene every committed to film. And I've seen The Room.

I must have been inspired also by my recent experience performing in The Compleat Wks of Wllm Skhspr (abridged) at Beck Center. When Roger Truesdell cast two of the funniest men in Cleveland, Allen Branstein and Nick Koesters and then chose me to round out the trio, I thought he was insane because I am not funny. The experience was a crash course in what funny is or can be, and I took a (un)healthy dose of the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink ethos of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and thought I would try it with this 2,400 year old Greek comedy.

The production company was solid, Don McBride build to order an Acropolis that doubled as the set from Laugh-In, with balconies and shuttered windows that open and close. Ali Garrigan - our Lysistrata - designed contemporary costumes, and Brian Pedaci the numerous ridiculous props, some of which he procured from places like Chain Link Addiction.

I had invaluable assistance from my dramaturg David Bell (who provided all sources below) who provided not only a bottomless well of theater history, but was also my confidant during the darkest parts of the rehearsal process and was very insightful as to what was not working and reminding me what was.

And, of course ... it was a musical! As we assume, the ancient Greeks used song to convey strong messages, and so did we. Following my suggestion that this story plays itself out everywhere, all the time, our composer Dennis Yurich shaped Linday's verse into the lyrics for eight songs that were Goth, rock, ska, country, even a nod to the Andrews Sisters.



Of course, what everyone really remembers is the nudity. I know artists who have strong, negative opinions about nudity onstage, that it breaks down suspension of disbelief in a way that nudity on screen does not. Frankly, I think the opposite - that film celebrates unhealthy body types and calculated audience response in a way that a live naked human performing in a play does not.

That doesn't mean I wasn't eeked out by casting a play where I was asking actors how much they would or would not disrobe onstage. I knew from experience in other productions that it was best to be very specific up front, and to set a date when we would commence "show conditions".

Clyde Simon, Alison Garrigan
Photo by Anthony Gray

My rehearsal journals remind me how horribly self-conscious and unfunny everything was proceeding through the month of April. I was positive I was going to drop a large turd onto the stage of Cleveland Public Theatre (the company which we had made a healthy arrangement to perform) until the first of May. 

May Day we played the scenes where the men and women stripped to fight ... and suddenly the show was ridiculous! Not dirty, just happy, funny stupid, which is pretty much how we rode through the rest of the experience.

In addition to his praise, Tony Brown also called the show "sloppy", and it was literally sloppy, with buckets of actual water dumped onto Nick, Chris and Rob as they scurried around in jackstraps fitted with brightly-colored erections. Our Lysistrata came onstage for the interval with a mop. Opening night, one other writer for the Plain Dealer sniffed, "Well, it's not Aristophanes." There were also more than the usual backstage pranks throughout the run, some which during any other production would have been brought up with Human Resources.

By and large, it was a festive, funny and inoffensive anti-war play. Just before we really needed one.

Sources:
Revival Ruins Greek Play by Tony Mastroianni, Cleveland Press, Dec. 5, 1970

'Lysistrata' at Play House Plumbs Depths of Vulgarity by Peter Bellamy, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Dec. 5, 1970
Photo of Ronald Greene and Myriam Lipari as Kinesias and Myrrhina, Cleveland Press, 1970 (date unknown)

Revelry Abounds In Bad Epitaph's Version of 'Lysistrata' by Tony Brown, Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 22, 2000

Rowdy Romps by Amy Bracken Sparks, The Free Times, May 24, 2000

Greeks Bearing Gifts by Keith Joseph, Scene Magazine, June 1, 2000