Guerrilla Theater Company: Thirty Years On

Guerrillas in the Professor Street Theater

Now we are here. Now it is time. Now we have come to rule you.

Dusk in Tremont. A tortured dog, a coat hanger wrapped around the base of his matted, entangled tail, ran down Professor, yowling in pain, followed by two or three other mutts. 

The dog stopped every few yards to turn around to snap at the metal dragging the ground, an entirely useless attempt, the coat hanger whipping around with it. The other dogs yapped in delight and surprise, also trying to bite at the wire hanger.

The seven of us emerged from the building for which Torque and I had recently signed a lease, the building we would soon call the Professor Street Theatre. We were going to rehearse one of our new short plays outdoors. I was anxious.

“Let’s do it over there,” Torque said, gesturing down the street with a mallet, toward the steps of St. John Cantius. Torque was wearing a bass drum, Wee-Bear had a pair of cymbals.

“Uhm,” I said. “Okay.”

We walked over to the church. I stood at the top of the steps, with Torque and Wee-Bear a few steps below, flanking me. The others stood around, scattered here and there, on the sidewalk, in the street, like they would do if they were standing among the crowd at the corner of Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry, or the Yard as it was called. The way we were going to do, there, in a little over an hour.

Torque beat out one loud rhythm on his drum, Wee-Bear a different one on her cymbals. And I began our first ever play, calling out into the darkness.

The view from the steps of St. John Cantius was not a particularly interesting one. It faced a vacant lot. There was a huge, grassy lot between our building and the boarded up delicatessen on the corner, where there were once three other buildings. You could see where the buildings had been because the land sagged in the middle. None of us ever walked across this lot for fear of popping into the ground and never being seen again.

I was shouting at a vacant lot. An abandoned storefront. The empty street. A Tremonster, just out for a walk. I felt like an idiot, calling into the night air. And if I felt stupid here, how would I feel an hour later, in front of actual people, in Cleveland Heights?

Earlier that day we had sent faxes to all the major news outlets -- Channels 3, 5 and 8, as well as the daily newspaper, the Plain Dealer -- announcing that Guerrilla Theater Company would be staging a “Hit on Coventry” at 10:30 PM that night, Thursday, September 10, 1992.

We had never performed in public before. We were still creating the show which we planned to open in late October. No one knew who we were. This was the reason we were doing this stunt, to announce our arrival. So all would know our name. 

Steps of St. John Cantius at night.

When no one called the office number (the one we called the Guerrilla Connection) for more information, we called them.

WKYC couldn’t find the release, and didn’t know what we were talking about. Ditto WJW and the Plain Dealer.

The guy at WEWS, when we pressed him as to whether or not we would get covered, asked smartly, “Do you believe your little stunt would be of any interest to 10,000 people?” We were unable to convince him that it would.

Screw it. We traveled in two cars out to Coventry Village, a fifteen minute drive from Tremont, and began the assault.

Coventry Yard was bustling, the tables were full of folks enjoying coffee from Arabica. Guitars were being plucked. Beemer and Jelly Jam wandered in from Coventry Road, and moved among the throng, passing out cryptic little flyers with the Guerrilla Logo on it, and the number for the Guerrilla Connection.

We had two phone lines, one for regular office use, and a second, the Guerrilla Connection, with a funny answering machine message on it that we promised to change once a week to encourage people to call back.

Mammy and Retro approached from Euclid Heights Boulevard, passing out these same flyers. The four of them mingled amongst the folks sitting out in the Yard, enjoying the last of the late summer weather.

Torque, Wee-Bear and I waited in the car.

“Do you see any cameras or anything?”

“No.”

“Well, forget it, let’s just do this.”

We strode in lock-step, I at point, my long, black, cotton jacket whipping behind me. Torque and Wee-Bear were at my corners with their instruments. Once into the Yard, I hopped up onto the topmost step of the long cement bankment and turned to face the crowd.

There may have been fifty people spread out around the patio, chatting, playing hacky-sack. Standing up there, aware of what I was about to do, I felt very tall indeed, and far from everyone but dreadfully exposed. I felt vertiginous.

Before I could think too hard, however, Torque and Wee-Bear were in their places, just below me, as we had rehearsed, and beating out their rhythms very, very loud. I had expected such an arrival to create a great hush amidst the throng, but I was mistaken. They looked up in surprise, but their response was louder than the normal cacophony of a crowd of voices. Some laughed, some said “What the hell?” I waited not an instant.

“I am here,” I said, loudly. Now they got a little quiet.

“I am here!” I repeated, as though I had not gotten the response I wanted. There were giggles.

“So what?” someone called back.

“Who are you?” Mammy, sitting at a table, called back to me.

“Yeah, who the fuck are you?” someone else said.

“I have come to lead you!” I yelled.

“Why should we follow you?” Jelly Jam said, standing close by, looking up at me.

“Because I know what's good for you,” I said, pointing at him. By now no one was heckling, some still laughed, but they were listening. It was a show!

“You know what's good for us?” Beemer and Retro said together.

“I have a plan to end the bad times we are currently suffering and start anew the good times we all remember,” I said.

“Where have you been?” said all four crowd-member Guerrillas. Torque and Wee-Bear stood silently at attention below me.

“I have been living life as one of you, making mistakes, achieving great victories, and now I am here,” I said. “Now it is time. Now I have come to rule you.”

“I’ll vote for you!” someone called out.

“Tell us more!” said the Guerrillas. They were slowly stepping towards me, through the Yard.

“The people who rule you now don't care about you!” I shouted. “I care about you!”

“You care about us!” they cried in disbelief.

“The people who rule you don't know how to make things better! But I know how to make things better!”

“Make things better!” they wept.

“Yes! I can make things better! And I need your help!” I said.

“What can we do?”

“I need your support!”

“We support you!”

“I need your money!”

“Take our money!”

“I need your trust! I need your love!”

“We trust you! We love you!”

Anchorman Ted

“And …” I said, looking down at them all, my hands outstretched “... I need you to love each other!”

They all stopped in their tracks and looked at each other. The crowd of strangers in the Yard waited for what happened next.

“Kill him,” they all agreed. Torque, Wee-Bear and I looked shocked and scared.

“Kill him!” they yelled again, and lunged for us, but we had turned around and were sprinting through the shrubs and bushes that blocked the way behind us. We tore through the traffic across Euclid Hts. Boulevard as Jelly Jam, Mammy, Beemer and Retro took after us, shouting with hate.

Who knows what happened at the Yard, we were too full of the notion that maybe we were being pursued, that perhaps our actions were somehow illegal, which they weren’t, but that maybe cops would try to stop us or something.

In any case, we jumped in our cars, and took off, back to Tremont.

We were putting things away at the building when my fiancée called.

“Turn on Channel 5,” she said.

“What? Why?”

“No time!”

So we all gathered in the sitting room and switched on the TV, and there was Anchorman Ted.

“From the strange to the bizarre,” said Anchorman Ted, “Impromptu theater took on new meaning tonight in town when a group of actors paid a very unannounced visit to the Arabica coffee shop on Coventry!”

The image on the screen switched to that of Torque, Wee-Bear and myself, striding past the Centrum movie theater towards the Yard.

“Oh my God!” Wee-Bear said.

“Can you qualify how ‘unannounced’ something is?” Mammy asked.

Anchorman Ted continued, “Happened around 10:30 tonight, the performers rushed into the restaurant, surprising absolutely all the patrons there …”

“We didn’t go inside!” Beemer said, squinting.

“Say our name!” Torque said.

“... they put on a short performance, then they rushed out again.”

The image switched abruptly to our running away from the scene, Wee-Bear clanging her cymbals, all of us dodging traffic.

“They missed the performance,” I sighed.

“Now from what we’ve been told,” Ted said, “troupes of actors in New York City have been staging similar performances like this one. No harm done, really, but it certainly comes as a surprise to those who see it happen.”

“Similar performances like this one?” Mammy said.

“Say the name!” Torque said.

“I wonder how our cameraperson found out it was going to happen?” Ted asked as the picture switched back to three happy TV people on the set -- Ted, Don the Weatherman and their newest arrival, Evelyn.

“Because we sent you a fucking press release?” I said.

“He’s sharp,” said Evelyn, the new female anchor, and significantly younger than Ted or Don. “Maybe Don is going to surprise us with some nice weather this weekend,” she said, making the perfect segue.

“You haven’t been around long enough to know,” cried the ancient meteorologist (he was fifty-four). “Only on Coventry!”

“Is that right?” she asked, appropriately interested.

“Uh yes,” Ted added, with fatherly insight, “Home of the strange and the unusual for over three decades now.”

“Ha ha ha.”

“Heh heh heh.”

“Anyway!” Don said, facing camera two.

Click.

“They didn’t say our name.”

The Avenue As It Used To Be

 Company for "Bummer" - Dobama's Night Kitchen, 1995

Last night I had an hour-long conversation with a young man who is writing  book about the Coventry neighborhood, and how it is no longer cool the way it was when he was a teenager in the late 1990s. Over the course of this discussion, I was reminded of an article I had written in honor of Dobama Theatre's eviction from their former basement home.

There Goes the Neighborhood
by David Hansen
First published in Cleveland Magazine, June 2005

Coventry loses Dobama Theatre this month, but what does it gain?

The year 1968 was auspicious in Cleveland theater history for two big reasons: I was born, and Dobama Theatre opened its doors on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights. In the intervening 37 years, we have each changed a lot, Dobama and I, together and apart, for better and for worse.

Our playgrounds could not have been more different back then. Somewhere between the eras of Marilyn Sheppard and Amy Mihaljevic, I could toddle around unmonitored in the front yard of my Wolf Road home in Bay Village with little fear of being snatched . . . or maybe my parents' "Ice Storm" generation really was kind of slow.

Coventry, meanwhile, was cementing its reputation, one that persists to this day, as a hangout for an "edgy" crowd. It was an inexpensive place to live and was an attractive spot for a lot of intellectuals, teachers and otherwise unsavory, forward-thinking pinkos to live, drink and presumably take a lot of drugs.

Founding artistic director Donald Bianchi signed the lease on the basement space at 1846 Coventry — then a bowling alley — in 1964. The landlord offered them (if you can believe this) free rent until their first show opened. The owner was obviously a communist. Even so, no one imagined then that it would take four years to get the space into shape.

When Dobama opened its first play on Coventry, Lorrainne Hansberry's "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window," an examination of race relations between blacks and Jews, there was a real-live biker bar across the street. Oooh, scary — big, hairy bikers!

This is funny because my father-in-law is a big, hairy biker, who owns a real-live biker bar in Athens, Ohio. But I digress.

Following a rather cushy upbringing and putting in the requisite five years at Ohio University, I came to Cleveland Heights in the early 1990s. It was the end of an era . . . and apparently the beginning of a new one. It still had a hippie-dippy vibe. Hang-abouts were still smoking cigarettes and playing Pente at all hours in the Arabica on the corner. My friends and I performed at open-mic nights in what they used to call The Yard out in front of that coffeehouse, a big open plaza where kids played hackey-sack and there was even more smoking.

It was also a depressed time. A friend who came to visit got his car broken into in the middle of the afternoon and has never been back. I was consistently hit up by a guy named Benny. Nice guy. He got most of my change, back when I still gave people change.

My introduction to Dobama was when I went to see "Nebraska" by Keith Reddin, a play about the effects of stress upon the men and women who work in nuclear weapons silos. Then as now, Dobama Theatre has been dedicated to plays with strong, left-leaning social messages.

The early '90s was also when Joyce Casey began her tenure as artistic director. Since then she has worked to maintain the theater's reputation for progressive-thinking plays, to reward her artists with pay (the performers, directors and artisans from the Age of Aquarius did it all for love, the amateurs) and to attract young, new audiences.

That's where I came in. In 1995 I was asked to create a late-night theater project — shows that would go up after the curtain came down on the mainstage shows — specifically to get teenagers and young adults into the seats. I also worked as the public relations director, to justify a paycheck.

Before I left Dobama in 1998, I developed a strong attachment to that theater. At that time, it was practically the only theater in town presenting the best modern plays to Cleveland audiences. "Angels In America," "Wit," the works of Suzan-Lori Parks and Paula Vogel — if you had seen the Cleveland premiere of a Pulitzer Prize- or Tony Award-winning play, or last year's great Off-Broadway or West End hit, the odds were very good you saw it at Dobama.

Their dedication to local playwrights is unequaled in Cleveland, presenting one world premiere a season. Eric Coble, Sarah Morton, Faye Sholiton, and, yes, even I have had new works presented for the first time either as part of the mainstage or Night Kitchen productions.

There have been detractors. Even I thought Joyce was high when she chose to produce Mart Crowley's "For Reasons That Remain Unclear" in 1997. A two-person, one-set drama featuring Mitchell Fields as a pedophile priest and Scott Plate as one of his now-grown victims who confronts him — in Rome! I thought it would be hooted off the stage. And I had to sell it.

Crowley, best known for the groundbreaking and gay-stereotype-setting "The Boys in the Band," had had one ill-received production of "For Reasons" in Washington a few years earlier. The Dobama production seemed sure to be its second.

It was a big, big hit for Dobama. The show's run was extended an additional weekend, which afforded the playwright, with his L.A. entourage (Crowley does a lot of writing for television), the opportunity to come to Cleveland and see his latest work be vindicated. I will never forget when Joyce announced the playwright's presence in the audience following curtain call. We could all hear Scott in the dressing room; he yelped like a little girl. It was yet another touching, transcendent moment in the history of this little theater.

Meanwhile, time was not kind to the glazed, white terra cotta building Dobama has called home. One morning I was working in the office, alone, when I heard someone turn on the shower in the men's room lobby — which has no shower. I stood in mute horror as the entire lobby flooded in a matter of minutes. Quite often I have watched in pain as productions would include actual rain, onstage. Conditions for producing professional theater became incrementally intolerable.

When the Winking Lizard restaurant moved in upstairs in 1998, the sounds of chairs scraping across the floor and newly installed toilets flushing directly over the audience's heads became a commonplace occurrence. Intimate, quiet productions have become almost impossible to consider for production, and Dobama has lost subscribers because of this, as well as all of the other inconveniences.

Meanwhile, the Coventry neighborhood has been evolving around this liberal bastion of free expression and authority-questioning drama. While the stalwart, funky and fun emporiums of the past (Tommy's Restaurant, High Tide-Rock Bottom, Mac's Back Paperbacks and Record Revolution among others) have held back corporate encroachment by consolidating into one co-operatively owned block in the middle of the street, new landlords at the extremes have done their best to maximize profit and lower the common denominator.

In the neighborhood where I used to get my eyeglass prescription filled, take tai chi lessons, get my groceries and ply my trade as a theater artist, I can now buy pizza, hoagies, sushi, burritos and ice cream. For every independent boutique that can't cut it, we get another place to stuff your face.

Worse still, it's like Coventry is eating itself. The chain coffee shop put the old Arabica out of business in 2001. The chain burrito place went up after the success of the locally owned Que Tal up the street, and Strickland's and Goodie's ice cream shops opened almost simultaneously to much consternation. The new sub shop will no doubt do damage to the long-established Grum's, and now there's a third pizza place.

The business model seems to be: You have clientele? I want it. No imagination, no plan for the future; it's just business.

Now, I have no illusion about the bohemian era for which Coventry is so celebrated. It's like Derf put it in one of his cartoons: "Coventry — it's just like Greenwich Village!!! (Only smaller and duller.)"

But it was once a neighborhood where I would go and stay, and not just to work. On a beautiful day, you could even walk up to The Yard and see who was there. No one does that anymore, either — the powers that be put giant, hideous planters there several years ago as part of some forgotten beautification plan. Now there isn't any room for people to play guitar or skateboard or attract any kind of crowd.

Dobama has been looking for a new home for some time, someplace warm and dry, where it can afford the rent, which has been rising exponentially up and down the street. The theater has been promised a new space in the old YMCA building across the street from the Cleveland Heights Main Library on Lee Road. And a proud new sign hangs on the building that reads "Future Home of Dobama Theatre."

Unfortunately, that place won't be ready until 2006. And J. Scott Scheel, Dobama's landlord since March 2003, gave management a "notice to vacate premises" in November 2004. It was only through a last-minute intervention by the city of Cleveland Heights that the theater could keep operating on Coventry through the conclusion of the 2004-2005 season.

For the next year — and hopefully only for the next year — Dobama will go "on tour," producing plays under the Dobama name at other venues around the city.

With Dobama gone, the moneymaking can really begin in that basement space. That is, once its spongelike ceiling is taken care of and an elevator is installed to take care of the problem that no one with a wheelchair or a heart condition can get down those steps. Scheel told me he is looking forward to putting "a comedy club, other live theater, a jazz club, a pool hall . . . or a restaurant" down there. He quickly added that a restaurant "is not our preference."

The last three retail stores to leave his iced wedding cake of a building have been replaced with places to eat. This is me holding my breath.

I feel Coventry is at a painful and difficult juncture. Perhaps the large crowds currently drawn to the sports bar and the other sports bar and the other sports bar don't really care that Dobama is leaving — or don't even know it's there, which is more likely. What troubles me is that I used to go to Coventry not just to work, but to see what was happening, to run into people, and to, you know, have a life.

If Coventry is going to win back any of its reputation as a cool place to be, it needs someplace like Dobama, if not the place itself. A place where folks from diverse backgrounds — bikers and bankers, punks and preps, white, black, straight, gay, Jew, gentile — come together for a communal experience. Not merely to consume, but to participate in some time-honored ritual. Entertaining, edifying, affordable and something uniquely Cleveland.

After 40 years, Coventry needs a new bowling alley.

 Join Death of the Cool: Decline of Coventry Village's Counter-Culture Scene Facebook Page.

"The Avenue As It Used To Be" is a play by Donald A. Bianchi (1976)

Waiting For Lefty (2011)

The People's Theatre is not aligned with any political party. That is the euphemistic way of saying that it is not Communistic, and its organizers wish you to be clear about that. - William F. McDermott, The Plain Dealer, 1935

When I moved to Cleveland Heights we had three theaters. Name me another American suburb that can boast having three theaters. Well, anyway, time passed and by 2005 we had none. Ensemble lost their lease at the Civic, Dobama had been evicted from Coventry, and like all things Jewish, the JCC had moved from Cleveland Heights to Beachwood.

The new Mandel Jewish Community Center has many exciting new features, but theater? Eh, not so much. Dobama managed miraculously to maintain an identity in the wild before returning to the Heights at their fine new home in the CH-UH Library complex. And Ensemble has carved a new home out of the former Coventry Elementary School, and a really great space it is.

Two out of three? Not bad.

This afternoon I caught the closing performance of Ensemble's production of Waiting For Lefty, the first show in this new theater space. Life has not been kind to my wife's extended family the past several weeks, and in spite of wanting to catch numerous productions this fall, several closed this weekend without an opportunity for us to see them. At least I could catch this 70-minute program in my own backyard.

Seated in the front row, I invited Mike Partington to take the chair next to mine. It had been years since we had had the chance to talk, and this week I saw him both at Harvey's Tribute and in this place. Mike's got some years on me, our pre-show conversation had a lot to do with theater space, how he first reacted to the new Bolton Theatre at the Play House -- same as almost everyone else, really, stunned that they had dumped a thrust stage at East 77th Street to add yet another proscenium.

Ensemble Theatre has a thrust, with seating sections on three sides. It feels more like the old Dobama on Coventry than the new Dobama does. The platform stage is so close to the audience, and actors make entrances and exits through the house as well as through the wings. I love that.

I was very pleased to see such a large audience on a Sunday afternoon. Sunday matinees are notoriously depressing in Cleveland, with maybe ten to twenty people in the house. It was quite a full house!

So. First time seeing Waiting For Lefty in its entirety. How does it hold up? Interesting! While employing period costumes and some kind of non-specific tough-guy New Yawk accents, the Ensemble production utilized their large video screen to bridge scene changes with footage and music from the future (HUAC testimony, Occupy Wall Street demonstrations) to empasize the continuing resonance of the work.

Remember: The Living Newspaper performances of the 1930s did use film projections and live music to bridge scene changes, and as commentary!

However, having just directed a staged reading of It Can’t Happen Here, I have been disabused of the notion that writing from the 1930s is dated, or must feel dated. Sinclair Lewis words, spoken by a contemporary cast, was suprisingly fresh, meaningful, humorous and resonance with our modern audience last Monday night. People were taken with the story, and moved by its conclusion.

A friend who caught the show reflected how much more slangy Lefty is, which explains why it is seems dated. Also, there’s no real story to be swept up in, it is a collection of vignettes on a common theme. It’s like Saturday Night Live without punchlines.

But that’s not the real problem with its presentation as a contemporary work. It’s one long debate, more like Greek drama than soap opera. For example, the tale of a young suitor, on a perfect summer’s evening, breaking up with his devoted gal because he can never be the man that she deserves in this economy, where the bosses and the company men keep the worker under his boot, where a guy can’t earn a crust while Uncle Sam stands idly by, doing as little as possible because the truth is The Man still mans the controls of government and always will, so the little guy is left to gasp meekly for dignity - let alone a dollar, and its high time we pulled together and rose up to demand what is coming to us, an eight hour day, a pension and a heart handshake, but until that day comes I will never be the kind of joe who can care for a girl the way she deserves to be treated, and not like some two-bit floozy, always promising, never committing, I mean what kind of life is that for a young American lady? The Masters of Power don’t care about these things, the velvet-gloved capitalist executive sees the workers as an endless supply of hands and muscle to hoist the gears that make the things that fill their endless, bulging pockets …

Hey, baby, where you going?

After the performance, the audience was invited into another part of Coventry Elementary (wait, do we have a name for this new community facility concept?) for a special event celebrating the opening of Lake Erie Ink.

What's that, you say? So glad you asked! It's a drop-on center for area youth with an emphasis on creative writing! HOW AWESOME IS THAT??? It's like an 826 Valencia for Cleveland Heights. I mean, it is an 826 Valencia for Cleveland Heights.

And wow-man-wow, there were a lot of people there! Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate Cavana Faithwalker represented, and world-renown hipster-shaman-beatnik-poet Ray McNiece was on hand to lead children in poetry exercises. There were a number of writing activities for young and old, I wrote a haiku on a paper pumpkin:

WORKERS THEATER
JUST SAW ‘WAITING FOR LEFTY’
LIKE AN UPPERCUT

Hey! You! Douchebag in the hat!

See also: Waiting for Lefty (1935)

The Vampyres (1997)

Seventeen years ago the world ended. And another began. The summer of 1994 stretched on until deep into November. I was playing games I would never play again, making foolish decisions which would define the rest of my life. I have few friends that pre-date that time.

One day in January, 1995 I came home from my shift at the pizza restaurant to find half of the house was empty. There was no longer a piano, a dresser, a bed. It was time to rebuild.

The music was dark, the house was cold. I boarded a train to New York on most frigid weekend of the year, to visit my new girlfriend. I had a PowerBook. I had destroyed my theater company, I had destroyed my marriage. I was full of hope, and I feared there would be no future. I started to write a play.


By late 1996, life was rich and decadent. Long nights of drink and smoke, producing crazy theater on Coventry, live music shows, late hours at new friends’ apartments. I got the green light fo The Vampyres in Dobama’s Night Kitchen. We had tapped professional musicians to write rock songs for the show. The production was the greatest attempt to incorporate a DNK show into the mainstage, our set melded perfectly with theirs, transforming the humble, mid-century home of Beast on the Moon into the dark and stylish coffee shop called The Night Kitchen.

Critics hate this play. The protagonist is a former actor who cowardly abandons his career in the arts to pursue on in medicine, but he can’t help but comment on everything, judging the girl he hasn’t seen since high school for wanting to be an artist (even though he still wants to bang her,) transparently hits on the teenage barista, and displays naked jealousy of the two musicians that frequent the place who may, or may not, be real vampires.

Maurice Adams, Brian Pedaci

In the end, this pathetic wanna-be gets literally and figuratively fucked up the ass.
Christine Howey called it a "misbegotten effort."

The Free Times called it, "more hollow than haunting."

Tony Brown said it was "juvenile" and "infantile blathering."

The original production in 1997 was too long by half. Cleveland Public Theatre produced an edited version in 2005, and I was very happy to have the chance to present it with the most of the flab cut from it, but it was still such a nasty piece of work and I was no longer in that place. I find it difficult to reconcile my disconnect with this work that I spent so much energy living in. It’s obvious who wrote it. But I cannot believe there was ever so much anger and hurt in me.


In spite of critical derision, or perhaps because of it, it was a very successful run. One of the best attended Night Kitchen shows I produced. Houses were full, there were small tables on the stage for audience members to sit at to give the impression that The Night Kitchen (the coffee house) actually had customers in it. Elizabeth (as Claire the barista) was onstage during preshow serving coffee and pocketed the tips.

Cool Cleveland called The Vampyres, "Sinister, sexy, perverse and hilarious."

Anastasia Pantsios said it had “an intensity that makes the waters in which it wades feel very deep and dangerous indeed.”

Dobama Artistic Director Joyce Casey didn't actually want me to produce the piece. She was concerned that it glorified cutting and drug-use. When I moved on from Night Kitchen, DNK Artistic Director Dan Kilbane produced Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking.

Cutting bad. Screwdriver-sodomy good. Got it.

Happy Halloween

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