Improv High

Questionable promotional graphic (1994)

Annually I am in the position of auditioning young adults for a position in arts education. They are generally actors who aspire to the position, and volunteer the desire - sometimes without even being asked - to teach children.

"I have a lot to teach children," they will say. It is not necessary for me to ask from where they acquired this ability with a Bachelor's Degree in Acting. I can look at their resume and see where they have taught, if they have ever taught at all, and that is what I will ask them about.

There are those of us, myself strongly included, who felt at a young age that we have something to share, to teach, wisdom to impart. Our arrogance is in believing that the desire to teach makes one a teacher, that having done something right once means you have the talent and skill to instruct others.

I know many teachers. They went to school to learn how to do that.

Perhaps many actors believe they can teach for the same reason they believe they can act, because they like to stand in front of people and to be the center of attention. My own desire to show how smart I am led my younger self into many embarrassing situations for which I was entirely unprepared.

I signed up to teach improv at the regional Thespian conference my freshman year in college. There I was, standing in front of students who were basically the same age as I, and they did not view me with any special kind of respect or awe. They were there to learn something. And I was whimsically unprepared. I had taken, maybe, one improv class, once, when I was a sophomore in high school. We'd played improv games in high school, and I thought I'd jump up and we'd play some but pretty much all of these students had already played them.

I had no commentary, no notes to offer them. I was unaware of technique, why one thing worked and another did not. It was a long forty-five minutes.

I did take improv classes in college, we all took a basic improv course freshman year and a year or so later one of the most important acting classes I received at school, taught by George Sherman, Head of the MFA Directing program at O.U. (Read my 1988 interview with George.) There we learned more than games, we learned theory, a philosophy and also a certain amount of history. I was compelled to read books on the subject.

Rupture, Improv Comedy (1988)

We performed club improv in bars and coffee houses at school, but played the same old games, for laughs. The kind of improv George taught us was long-form improv, and though it was very successful in the classroom, creating actual drama from premise and character, there was never any thought of performing that stuff in front of an audience. We just never considered it.

The one year I worked for Karamu's Drama/Theatre for Youth project, we were each assigned a Saturday morning children's theater class, for which I neither received nor thought to request any kind of lesson plans. These were extremely unhappy Saturday mornings in which I worked for forty-five minutes to get thirty ten year olds (okay, there were only eight of them) to sit in a circle to play a concentration exercise, which was akin to drop a handful of marbles on the floor and then yelling at them as they scatter under the furniture.

I made mid-class hallway trips for the kids to drink water and go to the bathroom last for twenty minutes.

As I bounced from youth education project to youth education project two things were becoming abundantly clear. First, you need a lesson plan. Like, you need to plan ahead. That was a hard lesson for me.

Second and a bit more disheartening, I was never going to be the cool teacher. I am many things, but being someone that teenagers or even small children want to be around, that would never be me. I could instruct, but I would not be loved. I learned to be content with merely getting it right.

By our second year producing as Guerrilla Theater Company, we began discussing additional projects to be produced under the GTC banner. The Guerrilla Youth Theater project was launched in late 1993 in Bay Village (why not?) in which Torque and I taught classes for elementary-to-middle school aged kids. We had lesson plans. Mine were lifted entirely from Viola Spolin's Improvisation for the Theater. The class was arranged through the city recreation department.

We believed we had produced a decent eight-week curriculum and even staged an event at the end of the session in which we shared the exercises and games we had been working on with the kids parents. We promised to build on the work we had done in the winter session and were absolutely flummoxed when absolutely no one signed up for the winter session.

That spring we developed a concept in which I would teach high school students how to do perform long-form improv. The project was called IMPROV HIGH (see graphic above) and the promise was to create an inter-district high school improv troupe. Announcements were made, flyers were distributed.

We had two high school aged colleagues, both students at Cleveland School of the Arts. Bud was our most devoted audience member and Digit ran the sound for our late night show, Mind Your Own Business. They each did their part to sell their classmates on the project but the day of the first class they were the only two who showed up.

So I cancelled the whole thing. How could I create an improv troupe with two actors? This would not be the first time I would just walk away from something, even when there were dedicated participants ready to follow my lead, nor would it be the last. I regret that decision. They were there, you can do improv with two people. I could have joined in, we'd have three. I was afraid. I made a mistake.

The following summer GTC was done and I had a tentative agreement with Dobama Theatre to create a late night project there. My girlfriend and I were taking our first road trip together through the upper Midwest, twenty years ago this summer, in fact. I was yearning for an education in styles of theater which I might incorporate into this new project. In Chicago we saw the Neo-Futurists, yes, but also my first evil clown show (Die Hanswurst Klown), Danny Hoch's Some People and my first trip to Improv Olympic to see a Harold.

In Minneapolis we visited the Bryant Lake Bowl and saw an improvised, musical science fiction comedy titled The Young and the Weightless. It was a pretty educational theatrical exposition and it was my intention to attempt to approximate technique I had witnessed but had never really been schooled in. Dobama's Night Kitchen would be an education for me, as well.

The Realistic World (1996)

Some day I may take the time to cover that grand, flawed experiment which was The Realistic World. It may have been the world's first long-form improv based on the world's first reality show, but I can't prove that. It was the first time I had trained, coached and directed actors to perform any kind of improvisation onstage for a paying audience that was not an entire disaster.

Since that time, from time to time in my role as part of the School Residency Program I have led workshops in improvisation for middle and high school aged students, but these are brief and are usually only game-based improvs. You know, for fun. There isn't time to develop character or to dig very deep.

There's another problem, too, and that is my responsibility to the students and also to their teachers. Improv means trust and I can't encourage them to take risks but also be in the position of having to censor their behavior.

Actually, I can. I should. It's a skill, and it has been the hardest lesson to learn - how to say no. Improv has rules, of course it does, just because you do not have a script does not mean you do not have a structure. You cannot violate the reality of the scene. There is also the acceptance rule, that you take what is offered you and you agree to work with it and build on it.

For the uneducated:

WOMAN: I brought home a rhinoceros.

MAN: No, you didn't. (invalidation, bad choice)

MAN: Yes, and where are we going to keep this one? (good choice!)

The director, however, can say no. It's a director's job to say no. Rehearsal is not performance and when an actor breaks a rule, or does something unnatural - something intended to entertain or be funny - it is the director's job to call them on it. Not to humiliate them, just to stop the scene, address the issue, and either start a different scene or simply ask them to make a different choice.

As many times as possible. As many times as necessary.

But it is not easy. Invalidating an actor is not an action I take lightly. George was skilled in ending a scene when a rule has been broken. He was also good at letting an actor hang himself with his own rope if he made an asinine choice which did not actually break a rule.

Scene: A hardware store.

1. First actor establishes the store. They are organizing shelves.

2. Second actor establishes relationship by entering as a customer with a complaint above a defective purchase.

3. But then a third actor decides to burst in as a rather exaggerated example of a “robber” and holds the place up. 

However, we had been working with the rule that once you enter an improv, you cannot leave. So, having held the place up, he needed to come up with a reason to stay and the others had to deal with him. The decision to provide a character to the scene who was not actually a character but only a gag was clearly and painfully exhibited for the entire class to cringe at as the scene limped along.

For several years GLT has produced a summer theater arts camp at Berea-Midpark High School - Camp Theater. We teach those as young as four up through high school ages in a variety of games, exercises, scenes and disciplines such as combat choreography and stage make-up.

I was initially self-resistant to include much improv, apart from the very basic kinds of games, due to the constraints of time. The camp consists of two, week-long sessions. Some kids are only there for one week and for a few years our time with them were half-day sessions, perhaps two and a half hours. Improvisation, valid and valuable improvisation is not possible if you give it sixty minutes a day for five days.

We expanded to day long sessions last summer, continuing this year, and so I had the opportunity to work with the middle and high school aged campers in one group for two and a half hours each morning. They would split into two groups, one for middle school and one for high school in the afternoon to concentrate on scene work. But I would be working with them on my own all morning, and believed that with this time we might actually be able to create something wonderful right away.

Last summer was an experiment, one in which I was too limiting in the kinds of exercises we would perform, each performance based, skill based, character building. Not for performance. You see, each class would be presenting the scenes they had been working on at the end of the day Friday for their families. I had no intention for them to perform improv for an audience after such a brief period of work. It was technique-based work, and the students responded accordingly.
It was no fun.

Camp Improv (2015)

After all, these are kids – smart kids, to be sure, but not already skilled actors. They do not know how to “make choices” because they have never been asked to, they do not yet know how.

This summer, I flipped it. We would work towards sketch based improv. Very clear conflicts were assigned, characters were described and provided. Definite parameters were set, scene games which have a prescribed beginning and ending. They brought their own personalities to set scenarios and played them successfully and instead of having some vague sense of accomplishment from improving their skill set, they had the immediate satisfaction of making their peers laugh and successfully navigating a story.

And I said no. A lot.

Scene: You are lost in the city, and need money for bus fare.

Camper runs up to other actor screaming, “Give me a dollar!”

Hold please. Take that again, make a different decision this time.

Camper runs up to other actor screaming, “Please, give me a dollar!”

Hold please. If you were asking a stranger to give you a dollar, you would run up to them screaming, they’d run away. Try that again.

Camper runs up to other actor screaming, “Hey, can you help me!”

Hold please. No seriously, your goal is to get the dollar, not to frighten the person. Do something different to successfully get them to pay you.

Camper walks up to other actor and says, “Excuse me, I know you don’t know me –"

Other actor says, “Who are you, stay away, I have pepper spray!”

Camper says, “That’s cool, really, I’m just a guy, the thing is –“

And the scene started to click.

For our final morning together, I asked them to bring drinks and snacks and we created a bar. We closed the stage curtains creating a narrow space which we crammed with mismatched chairs found around the school. A stage was clearly marked to one side of the stage with tape. Colored stage lights were turned on giving the space a clubby vibe and I had brought Christmas lights which the students draped behind the stage.

Camp Improv (2019)

The kids performed about an hour of club improv, scenarios they had worked on and also games. I acted as MC as they sat around eating chips and drinking pop and performing their bits. In between set-ups many of them volunteered to sing their favorite songs a capella and I was surprised by how good their voices were. Even the boys sang.

It was a performance no one else had the honor of experiencing, it was private where they could tell the same jokes we’d been telling all week and not be judged by the other campers or anyone else. They were confident and did confident work. Just before lunch I had the unhappy task of closing the show and asking them to break down the show.

They were called into a circle and I was just going to make some brief remarks about keeping their energy up to prepare for their afternoon performance when one of the older students, one who had attended for several years now, she rose her hand demanding to speak. She said, “I just have to say! This has been the best week of camp ever!”

Oh.

Uh, I said. Uh. That’s good, uh ... that wasn't –

Another blurted out, “Come on, man -- we love you, David!”

I was just trying to get it right.

Stealing Christmas (play)

Clockwise from left: Jen, Larry, me, Shruti and Victor.

Casing the joint.

Part of our responsibilities as members of the Karamu education department, in addition to the daily outreach tour to schools around northeast Ohio, was to perform in the annual holiday play for young audiences.

In 1991 that was a new play by John Cameron, Stealing Christmas, directed by education department director Justin Dennis.

The tale is straightforward. Four kids, Chris, Lila, Tony and Donny, craft a plan to make some money on a cold, winter's night. Chris (Victor Dickerson) is the ring-leader, deciding it would be clever to  knock on the door of some old person, sing carols or something, and when they get invited in, he would distract them while the others go through the place and rob them blind.

New Jerk Hustler

The first house they try, they meet Edna (Jennifer Silver) who lives on her own, and is all too happy to have company. Soon Chris is seated, eating cookies while Lila (Shruti Amin), Donny (my college roommate Larry Trice) and Tony (myself) have disappeared into the rest of the house.

Edna's childhood stories were played out onstage by three of us, with me returning as her father, Larry her brother and Shruti as a young Edna, showing how she and her family always got by without much, except love and happiness and positive feelings. 

In the end Chris learns the true meaning of Christmas, and his friends return to tell what they have learned: the old woman has nothing, her house is practically empty.

Christmas memories.

I was reminded of this tale when my family and I journeyed downtown this afternoon to see the new holiday play A Carol for Cleveland at Cleveland Play House.

Written by Eric Coble and based on a novella by mystery writer Les Roberts, this play tells the story of an out-of-work steelworker in the late 1970s. Originally from the Pittsburgh area, Ed Podolak (Charles Kartali) has been living hand-to-mouth in the armpit of the nation for a year, trying to find steady employment.

As in Stealing Christmas — indeed, as in the original Dickens' classic, A Christmas Carol — the past is used as a device not only to educate the audience about the history of an individual, and how they came to be who they are, but to provide a reminder of what they were always meant to be. Or could be. Or after all, should be.

Yelling at hobos on Public Square.

However, as my wife pointed out, it is Dickens who dared take that extra step, and to wade into class politics.

It is important for us, all of us, to be grateful for what we have, to share with those closest to us, and with those we do not even know, and above all to remain positive. To have hope.

But Dickens also suggests that those who live in plenty have a moral responsibility to contribute to the general welfare, and to engage with and to care for mankind.

Or to burn for all eternity in the pits of Hell.

The Kardiac Kid (play)

Eric Schmiedl got me my first professional theater-related job. It wasn't really his doing, he was slated to remain with the education department of Karamu Theatre for a second year, but decided in stead to go off and get married or get another graduate degree or something and there was need for a tall, thin, guitar-playing white guy for their touring production My World If ... Someone else in the company knew my name, I got the call, and could stop waiting tables at Friday's.

I also needed to learn to play the guitar in 24 hours. Three chords. Who can't play three chords?

My World If ...

Eric and I first worked together when he directed Sarah Morton's Night Bloomers in 2006. That's an interesting story unto itself, for another time, perhaps. He also directed me in Eric Coble's The Velocity of Autumn at Beck Center last spring. But most of our time together is at the Playwrights' Unit, where I am constantly delighted by the pages he brings in from whatever he is currently working on.

Last summer, the boy and I saw Singin' On the Ohio, Schmiedl's two-hander about the Ohio & Erie Canal presented at the Big Red Barn Theatre. He wrote and was one of the performers in it, and spend the entire summer -- two performances every Saturday and Sunday -- spinning this historical yarn about an Irish-born canal boat captain and the once-enslaved young woman who came on board as his assistant. After the show I asked if these were real, historical people. He said, no, he'd made up the whole thing. But the Ohio & Erie Canal is real, the setting, the history is real. I wanted to believe.

Nathan Lilly, Eric Schmiedl, and a complete douchebag.

The Kardiac Kid opened this weekend at CPT, ostensibly a story of the 1980 Cleveland Browns Season, but fortunately it's not. I missed his last homage to the Browns, the collaboratively conceived Browns Rules because I was under the impression that it was supposed to be a big, funny, loud pageant of Browns Fever, and if I did not care to watch football, I wouldn't really enjoy it. That, and it had Nick Koesters in it, and I hate him.

Last night I took the kids and some friends to check out this new, solo performance. Watching Eric perform his own work is something not to be missed. He's just so warm, engaging, so very, very real. More human than human. In this ninety-minute show (there is an intermission) he tells five stories of Browns fans during the entirety of that non-championship season, a reminder that it's not the game, it's how that fits into the rest of your life that's important.

As the sun will cross the sky, the Browns lost today. Score was a laughable 41-27. No idea who they played, don't imagine it makes any difference, could have been anybody. The Cleveland Browns are just awful, and I have never understood why my fellow citizens put themselves through this misery year after year for what I find to be a painfully slow, boring game. Eric didn't change my opinion of football or the Browns one bit last night. He just made me love people more.

Lombardi by Eric Simonson closed at Cleveland Play House this weekend, a play about Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, who -- if you can believe his pain -- went three whole years without a championship. The story tales place in 1965, as Lombardi somehow (it's not clear) guides his team back to preeminence.

It went without mention that the city they had to beat to win 1965 championship was Cleveland.  The 1964 Cleveland Browns was the last championship team Cleveland will ever have.

Cleveland Public Theatre presented "The Kardiac Kid" from October 4 - 12, 2013

Two Trains Running @ Penumbra Theatre

Penumbra Theatre was founded in 1976 by Lou Bellamy in the Shelby/Dale neighborhood of St. Paul to "create a forum for African-American voices." That is where my brother and I headed last night for opening weekend of August Wilson's Two Trains Running.

Before he died in 2005, August Wilson created ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, chronicling the African-American experience through the prism of the Hill District. Each play represents one decade of the twentieth century. While I am shy to admit I have (until last night) read merely one of his works (Fences) by the end of the 2011-12 season I will have seen three, including Gem of the Ocean at Karamu and Radio Golf at the Play House.

Penumbra was responsible for Wilson's first professionally produced play, Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, and their relationship with Wilson remained strong throughout his life, and continues today, as the company decided following his death to produce the entire Pittsburgh Cycle, offering one or two of the works every season since 2007.

The facilities of Penumbra are very warm and welcoming, and the auditorium seats 250 but feels very intimate and close. The set for Lee's Restaurant circa 1969 was strikingly realistic.

While I was engaged by the entire ensemble, I most enjoyed sharing three hours in the same room as Abdul Salaam El Razzac (b. 1944) in the role of Halloway, a disciple of Aunt Esther, a man who has lived to the age of 65 by minding his own business. At turns kindly or fierce, this 6'5" grey-domed man in a comfortable suit keeps the top from blowing off Lee's ... or casually (but pointedly) makes his way out when he can't.

El Ra (as he is known to his friends) was born Allen Johnson II in Cleveland. Yes, he performed for Karamu, and graduated from East Tech High, the child of a postman and a "public servant." Right out of high school - during the Vietnam War - he joined the Air Force, moving to the Twin Cities after his service.

El Razzac means "service."

See: "Radio Golf" at Cleveland Play House

Sources:
Penumbra website
Star Tribune: The Mellowing of El Ra
Wikipedia

Karamu House

Zelma Watson George

Located at the corner of Quincy and East 89th Street, Karamu House is the "oldest African American theater company in America." Founded in 1915 by Russell and Rowena Jelliffe, that also means Karamu shares with the Play House the distinction of being the longest continually running theater company in Cleveland.

The theater club at Karamu was originally called the Dumas Drama Club, and later the Gilpin Players after actor Charles Gilpin. In 1941 they adopted the name Karamu, which is Swahili for either "a place of feasting and enjoyment in the center of the community" or the word "pencil" depending on whom you ask.

By the 1950s, Karamu's reputation as Cleveland's "Black" theater was firmly established, and had been for decades, premiering originally works by Zora Neal Hurston and once employing Langston Hughes as Playwright-In-Residence — one of only two to hold that title. However, from the original husband and wife team of the Jelliffes through the 1950s, the artistic and management directorships were held by whites.

"According to the record, Cleveland is one of the most progressive theatre cities in America."
- Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times

Interracial productions were the order of the day at that time — in recent days we learned that character actor Roberts Blossom got his professional start at Karamu, and Tedd Burr used to tell me he was half of a couple that engaged in the first interracial kiss on a Cleveland stage though for the life of me I can't remember what show he was talking about.

DID YOU KNOW ..?

Zelma Watson George (December 8, 1903 - July 3, 1994) sang the lead role in the opera The Medium for sixty-seven nights beginning in 1949 before the show transferred to Broadway? She returned to Cleveland, performing in The Consul at the Cleveland Play House and turn as Mrs. Peachum in a production of The Three-Penny Opera at Karamu. Later, of course, she was an advisor to the Eisenhower administration, as part of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Armed Forces from 1954 until 1957, and that was just the beginning of an illustrious philanthropic career.

For the record, Karamu House gave me my first professional theater job. I was a member of their youth outreach, Drama/Theatre for Youth Project (D/TY) from 1991-92, traveling Greater Cleveland in a van with four other young actors, performing world folk tales to elementary and middle school students. I also got to play Howard Wagner in Death of a Salesman on the boards of the Jelliffe Theatre. I never got to meet ether of the Jelliffes in person — Russell died in 1980, but I did attend Rowena's funeral, she died in April, 1992 just a month after her 100th birthday.

Stealing Christmas, 1991

8/1/11 UPDATE: In 1997 the Zelma W. George Recreation Center opened in Luke Easter Park, which is also the site of the annual Unity Day Festival, an annual family-friendly event of fun and music in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, now in its seventh year. On the very evening I published this entry (July 31) George Clinton was headlining the event, when someone with a handgun opened fire, wounding three and killing one.

The shooter remains at large.

Sources:
African American Registry
Wikipedia
Showtime In Cleveland (John Vacha)
The Handbook of Texas Online/Texas State Historical Association

Roberts Blossom

Pictured: Creepy character actor, and seated next to him, Roberts Blossom.
Roberts Blossom (March 25, 1924 - July 8, 2011) was that scary old man in Home Alone who was actually a nice old man.

He was a performer of stage and screen, you know his face, though since he retired from acting he has devoted himself entirely to his deep love of writing poetry.

Born in New Haven in the early 20s, his family soon relocated to Shaker Heights, and he attended Hawken School.

He went away to college, and served in WWII, returning to Cleveland to create a career in theater, as both an actor and a director at Karamu House and Candlelight Theatre.


Oh, and this is the trailer for Deranged, the only film in which Roberts Blossom played the main character. DO NOT WATCH THIS TRAILER.

His uncle, Dudley S. Blossom (March 10, 1879 - Oct. 7, 1938), was an important corporate and philantropic figure in Cleveland in the early 20th century.

Dudley Blossom was engaged with the Standard Tool Company, Central National Bank and Blossom Lock Company (among several others) and after serving with the Red Cross during World War I, was appointed city of Cleveland welfare director, and having a strong hand in developing City Hospital and Blossom Hill Home.

Dudley Blossom was also Chairman of the Great Lakes Exposition, and President of the Cleveland Orchestra during the late 1930s. Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls is named for him.


This weekend, conductor David Afkham makes his Cleveland Orchestra debut leading Beethoven's brilliant Third Piano Concerto and -- DUDE! Did you forget to pack the bong?
Roberts Blossom made his Off-Broadway debut in 1955 in the Shaw's Village Wooing, and the performance won him the first of three Obie Awards.


Blossom.
Sources:
Wikipedia
cleveland.com
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
The New York Times

Warfel on "The Crucible"

Season's Uncurtaining of Play House's Euclid-77th St. Theater offers Arthur Miller's compelling drama, "The Crucible." First night impressions by (Cleveland Press) Artist Jim Herron.
Play House Does a Great Job With Miller's Stirring "Crucible"
By Jack Warfel
Cleveland Press, Wednesday, October 7, 1954

With expected forwardness, the Play House opens a new season in its Euclid-77th St. Theater with a play vastly articulate and compellingly assertive.

Uncurtained for a premiere last evening the work, by Arthur Miller, author of the prize-winning drama "Death of a Salesman," is titled "The Crucible."

Winner of the Antoinette Perry Award for best play of the year, Miller's newer effort has already been produced in Germany and France with success of varying degrees, following its New York introduction, before reaching Cleveland.

Contemporary futility, sham and vanity, balanced by persevering dignity and truth are pitched back into the year 1692 with a Salem, Mass. setting, for the evaluation by the author.

Salem's field-fire spread of witchcraft suspicions, trials and hangings cast long shadows into our present generations in sundry guises, easily identified in Miller's preachment.

Savage Portrait

In a sense the play is frightening by implications, certainly electrifying as theatrical fare.

Here is a savage portrait of gossip-mongering and character defamation among persons, communities and nations; also a bitter denunciation of groups with such extreme righteousness that they attempt to extinguish all but their own light in the world.

In the author's own explanation for this work, "Characters of Salem appealed to me because they were conscious of an ideology and knew what they stood for ... they understood what was happening to them and they knew why they struggled ... they did not die helplessly ... they did not whimper."

Conflict Essential

Miller believes that since 1920 American drama has been a steady year-by-year documentation of man's defeat,a trend in which the author places no trust.

"Conflict," he asserts, "is the essence of life and until man realizes this he will knock himself out trying to wipe it from the world."

There are sterling performances in "The Crucible," staged by Frederic McConnell. Ella Apple, one of the more gifted actresses from Karamu Theater's talent lode, acts Tituba, a Christian accused of witchcraft and snuffed out as an easy victim.

Her performance, as usual, is splendidly eloquent.

Kirk Willis Fine

Kirk Willis and Eve Roberts as husband and wife, brooding over his indiscretion with a servant girl who subsequently accuses the wife of witchcraft for doom's-sake, are altogether right.

The cast is uniformly skilled and includes major performances by Max Ellis, Frank Stevens, Helen Watkins, Robert Allman, Rolf Engelhardt (who gives his role a Shakespearean flourish), and William Paterson, the latter a calculating deputy governor.

Settings by William McCreary are studies in Economy, tremendously effective.

Spaeth on "The Crucible"

Also not from The Crucible

SHOW TIME

“Crucible” Looses With (sic) Hunt In Euclid-77th Play House
By Arthur Spaeth
Cleveland News, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 1954

In "The Crucible", being given stirring, disturbing life in the Euclid-77th Play House these nights, Playwright Arthur Miller has turned the pages of American history to strike a parallel with our times in the infamous witch trials of Salem, circa 1692.

It is not new to see Justice dramatized for us as a woman with bandaged eyes, being prodded and pressured into blind confusion by self-seeking men twisting truth and disregarding the rights of free men.

Cleveland’s Karamu theater is now showing us such a world in the sixth century before Christ when a wise Socrates must die because witch-hunting Athenian politicos elect him their expedient victim. There is brutally clear parallel with our hour in Maxwell Anderson’s “Barefoot In Athens.”

Hysterical Salem

And the parallel is implicit and as ominous in Miller’s angry poetic parable. The good and pious people of Salem trade sanity and reason for mass hysteria to accuse and hang helpless citizens as witches because of the tantrums of some silly Puritan girls.

I have said that such pictures of our imperfect world have been dramatized again and again. That is reportorial and not editorial. I meant no implication that there have been too many such plays or that our dramatists have gone overboard in rallying the theater to speak out against social cancer.

Alas, the contrary is too true. There can’t be too many such dramas. On hasty inventory, the writers in our theater today who have the courage to try to more than just entertain us can be counted on the fingers. Come to think of it, the fingers of one hand.

Lies & Gallows

Don’t get me wrong about Mr. Miller’s drama. It is no soapbox oration. The playwright does not cup his hand to your ear and demand you catch a modern echo. There is no ranting insistence that there, but for the Puritan garb, musical speech and 262 years, go you.

No, he trusts audience perceptivity and conscience as he looks into the lives of hard-working farmer John Proctor, Good Wife Elizabeth Proctor and their respected friends that are twisted to horror by the prattle of some silly girls.

At first the lies of the harpies seem too absurd but soon their splattering taint have become truth and the Proctors and others are tried and convicted of witchcraft in the Salem Meeting House. When doubt of its justice disturbs the court, John Proctor is offered the chance to save his neck by confessing to the lie of guilt. His refusal brings the roll of the drums beside the gallows.

No 'Death of a Salesman'

This is for the most part powerful and effective drama. But it is by no means on the lofty level with Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” There is a vagrant feeling that the author tried to compress too much shrill action and to crowd too many characters into his scenes. He achieves the hysteria of the witch hunt to the detriment of his forte for character insight.

You do not understand John Proctor and Goodie Proctor as you did Willy Loman and the wife who ate her heart out for her man. The other characters are largely the author’s chorus stepping out of the ensemble only long enough for each to contribute his single phrase to the collective insanity of the witch hunt. But for all this, “The Crucible” demands and gets your will to believe and be moved.

In this the author has zealous and artful collaboration in Frederic McConnell's staging and the excellent company with which he has peopled the Euclid-77th Salem.

Kirk Willis and Eve Roberts as John and Elizabeth Proctor ring wonder into those quiet scenes when they are alone on the stage. Rolf Englehardt’s with-hunting cleric who discovers too late the monster he has helped loose is pretty special, too. And that goes for William Paterson’s righteous deputy governor-inquisitor. Helen Watkins and Robert Allman as victims of the inquisition inject high spirit into their roles and Max Ellis’ malicious parson and Frank Stevens’ evil parishioner do the author and play no harm. And there’s Jane Squibb’s impure Puritan whose lies loose hell in Salem town. There is competence everywhere in the large cast.

And speaking of acting, that impressionistic setting by William McCreary, a framework of stained beams, is artfully primitive early American in pretending to be four varied locales in Salem of 1692.

So much for witch hunting in the Euclid-77th Play House, save an urgent, SEE IT!

Ann Kathryn Flagg

Born in Charleston, West Virginia and a graduate of West Virginia State College, Ann Kathryn Flagg (1924-1970) was first a high school teacher before coming to Karamu House in 1952 to be Director of the Children's Theatre. In Cleveland she performed the title roles of Antigone and Lysistrata

RADIO-TV
Jet Magazine, February 20, 1964
"Great Gettin' Up Mornin" drama by Negro playwright Ann Flagg on Repertoire Workshop (Saturday, February 15 at 2:30 p.m., EST) on CBS-TV

The American Alliance for Theater & Education currently awards the Ann Flagg Multicultural Award to "an individual, organization or company making significant contributions to the field of theatre/drama for youth or arts education dealing with multicultural issues and/or reaching diverse audiences and constituencies."

Source:
The West Virginia Encyclopedia
Jet Magazine
American Alliance for Theatre & Education

Little Ham

Call & Post - April 2, 1936
Gilpin Scores in “Little Ham”

Offering the premiere of Langston Hughes’ newest vehicle, the Gilpin Players of the Playhouse Settlement have made another step froward. The Karamu Theatre has been filled to capacity for every performance since the play opened last Tuesday. A vivid portrayal of life in Harlem.

Little Ham is hilarious. I mean, it’s hysterical. Reading the cadences of these richly drawn, broad characters, it was impossible not to hear them, to see them. Maybe, hopefully, someday I will. I have been enamored of Hughes as a poet. I had not experienced any of his plays. I was wildly surprised.

Hamlet Hitchcock Jones is a player, but that is not to judge, everyone in this show is a player in one form or another and it is a world that does not condemn anyone for how they choose to make their way through life. Gambling, promiscuity, lying any which way to can to ingratiate yourself with anyone to get whatever it is you are looking for, it’s all the same to everyone.

It’s a comedy, and a period comedy at that. Written in 1935, it is set in the late (“roaring”) 20s in a version of Harlem where the people may be poor, but they are eternally optimistic. “Little Ham” as he is known (he is, uh, a short young man) is a charming shoe-shiner and numbers runner and by the end of the evening there have been songs, fist fights, a Mae West impersonation, live gunfire, and a dance contest live onstage - and Ham avoids several self-inflicted scrapes to end the night with everything he wanted as though he had it all coming to him.

Now I must read Mulatto - not as though that were a chore, but it is another of Hughes’ plays which was currently running in New York. That one is a drama, and after reading so much “non-colored” press, I feel the need to read something … less cartoony. Hughes’ work is full of fun and delight, and inoffensive because the characters, though ridiculous in their way, are not the subjects of derision. Not like the black maid in Merrily We Roll Along, who, though so many characters in that show are beneath contempt, is one of two people in the piece who are entirely disposable, who exist as decor. The other would be the Japanese houseboy Ito (why are all Japanese houseboys named Ito?)

Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes, (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, but spent most of his childhood with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. After her death, he eventually reunited with his mother and and they and his step-father moved to Cleveland, where he attended high school.

The Hughes' home in Cleveland was sold in foreclosure in 2009; the 2.5-story, wood-frame house on the city's east side was sold at a sheriff's auction in February for $16,667. - Wikipedia

Hughes had relocated to New York and gained success on Broadway with Mulatto, when he accepted the position of playwright in residence at Karamu House from 1936 to 1939, a position only recently-revived and currently held by Michael Oatman.

In 1936 alone several of his plays received world premieres, including Little Ham (opened March 24) about a Harlem numbers game. Plain Dealer critic William McDermott said, "as a folk-picture of Harlem life it is rich in character in humor."

Other premieres included When Jack Hollers (written with Arna Bontemps, the cast included Margaret Williams as Queen Esther, Jack Stewart as Bogator, Paul Banks as Rev. Lovelady, William Day as Jerico, Don McGregor as Sid Lowery and Nolan Bell as Arcie) and Troubled Island, a "historical panorama" about Haiti that had a cast of sixty-five and was later adapted into an opera by William Grant Still.

When I was an actor-educator at Karamu in 1991, the offices for the education department were in the space previously occupied by Hughes' old apartment.

To this day Karamu produces Langston Hughes' Black Nativity during the holidays.

Sources:
Wikipedia
Showtime in Cleveland