Guerrilla Theater Company opened the doors at the Professor Street Theater thirty years ago today, on Friday, October 23, 1992. Our production was called You Have the Right to Remain Silent! which was fashioned as a game show, with the audience playing games to select from a list of titles which of twenty-one short plays we would perform next.
If that sounds like the Neo-Futurists, you're not wrong. Anyone performing short plays in a random order could be accused of the same, but the plays were original, and so were we.
That night we actually recorded the show on cassette tape. The performance sounds a bit rough, but it was opening night and I am still amazed we got through it. We were so young, and callow.
The show started with two plays, back-to-back, about toxic masculinity. Like, they both feature men shouting horrible things at women. Makes me wonder if some members of the audience were concerned about what they’d gotten themselves into.
Then there’s Hamlet by Jack Kerouac, which some might have heard before, even if they’d never been to Guerrilla, as I cannibalized the entire piece for These Are the Times. It’s one of two pieces I had written which were in the half of the performance that was recorded. It’s just the kind of cerebral drollery you might expect from a theatrical hipster.
The less said about the other piece I had written, the better. Let’s just say the propensity for young Cleveland actors to complain about their being shut out of local professional theater companies is nothing recent.
I went up to the office during a break to check the election returns on CNN, where I was stunned to see the projected returns quite solidly suggested that Bill Clinton was going to win.
The idea that twelve years of Republican presidency, and specifically the Reagan-Bush Era, was coming to a close, was beyond my ken.
In 1980 I was twelve. Then I was twenty-four.
I came downstairs and announced the news, which led to a general cheer from the entire company.
Retro, our more libertarian member, sneered, “Man. What the hell are you people gonna write about now?”
The space was the Professor Street Theater. We’d signed the lease in August, $700 a month for two thousand feet of performance space downstairs and four rooms upstairs.
Four could squat for $175 each and we’d never need to generate a penny’s worth of profit for our work. We presented Silent! for eight months, closing in May to take a short break, produced a Shakespeare and then vacated for a different Tremont location.
Retro held onto the lease for a while, creating and presenting the Off-Hollywood Flick Fest there before the owner sold the place and it was a private residence and artists’ studio for nearly twenty-five years before the coffee shop Beviamo relocated there last year.
Professor Street Theater (above) and Beviamo Cafe (below)
Last April, I stepped into the space at 2275 Professor for the first time for the first time in almost a quarter century for a latte, and to get majorly freaked out.
It’s the same room, only so much brighter and different. Our early 90s landlord was adamant about our not changing a thing about the building, he pitched a fit when we painted a sign on the front door without his permission. It was easier to ask forgiveness.
The walls had been paneled all the way to the ceiling, the present occupants stripped away top level revealing fashionable brick, and painted the lower part white, brightening to room. We had papered over the windows for show privacy and to render the room entirely dark if necessary. Now the room is full of natural light.
Then & now.
While there are a few major alterations (the bathroom has been rerouted) what was startling was how the same the room felt. It was disorienting, sitting on a new platform in the window, sipping coffee and looking over the space like a hovering ghost.
Thoughts of a revival were inevitable. What if we staged a fundraiser, reading old scripts, or even writing new ones, right here where it all happened? No, really, maybe we shouldn’t. And besides, no one knows where the scripts are anymore. I don’t have them.
So what did we have to write about, now that "our guy" was going to the White House? We had only for two been weeks criticizing the George H. W Bush administration, would we now be praising and supporting this new president? Waving the flag for the status quo?
We did begin that way, we had to. He repealed the gag rule, that abortion could not be discussed in the military. And we would champion his attempts at health care reform and allowing gays to serve openly in the military … two agendas which failed, and failed badly in short order.
Much of our work turned inward, and by that I mean not only introspective (and also, unfortunately, at each other) but more local.
In the final days of 1992, an African-American man died while in police custody. He had been placed in a choke hold which rendered him unconscious, and was later determined to have been the cause of death. Then, as now, excessive force is an issue which plagues the Cleveland police department. Torque wrote a piece about that.
The choke hold play (title?)
There were audience members who openly objected to the political stuff, especially when it wasn’t funny. We took a stand against being portrayed as a sketch comedy group (or God forbid, improv) and intentionally threw in conceptual pieces for their own sake, with no punchline whatsoever.
The Scene Magazine reviewer, turgidly recounting every minute sexual reference from the performance he witnessed (even creating a few where they didn't existed) claimed the choke hold scene "backfired like a '62 Buick."
He also described Beemer as a "solid gold b----," so I guess that's funny?
After election day we retired a piece written by Jelly Jam, one I was proud to have had a hand in, creating a recorded soundscape of musical and nature sounds, and a weird voice-over (Lee's voice slowed down.)
With the lights dimmed, the entire company of seven crawled the floor, rose to their feet, came together but then fell away as the voice described and ancient ritual which made a people strong, but as more and more failed to participate, the civilization collapsed.
The ritual was called “voting.”
Yes, we were young and determined and optimistic and basic. We were also right.
Vote on November 6th.
Source: "Comedy for the Young at Heart" by Keith Joseph, Cleveland Scene, 2/18/1993 Thanks to Kim Martin for the 2018 photos!
Winter, 1994. Guerrilla Theater Company presents MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS at The Actors' Gym.
Loud, upbeat music, as always, blared from speakers upstairs and down in The Actors' Gym. Lefty sat in the box office reading a copy of the Weekly World News, Gooch wandered in and out, playing games with Digit. Torque was down in the Boutique with Beemer. I sat in the display, staring hard at the front door, but it failed to open.
At 8:00 sharp we canceled another early Friday evening show. This was even following our latest gambit -- declaring the 8 PM show on Friday as the Two-Dollar Show. It was always the least attended so we thought it might boost sales. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. It seemed pretty arbitrary.
There was an extended tug-of-war between those who felt we should cancel the 8 o’clock show, and those who didn’t. Those for cancellation argued that as there were no doubt a finite number of people on any given night who would be willing to weather the storm and city streets to drive to Tremont of all places just to see avante-garde funny people, why distribute that number between two shows? Why not force them to all come to one show, maybe one 10 o’clock show?
The other side stated quite clearly that since so many people of a certain age had expressed so clearly that they would have come to see YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT except for its going on when all sane, aging Baby Boomers (and theater critics) are home and asleep, we needed to offer the earlier show. If we stuck to this regiment, the audiences would grow. Our followers knew they could depend on our being open at eight and eleven, every single week of the year. They wouldn’t even need to look it up in the paper or call "The Connection", we’d be here, for them. The idea of a 10 o’clock show was declared “unfeasible.”
As the argument for maintaining an 8 o’clock show was so strongly set forth by Torque and myself, it was pretty much set in stone.
And so it was, as on so many other Friday nights shortly after eight, some of us drove off to West 25th Street in search of fast food. Others went back into the apartment to watch tee vee. I bundled up and walked down Professor Street.
The Winter of 1994 stretched on forever and ever. I couldn't be warm enough. We kept The Actors' Gym pleasantly toasty, there were fortunately no real drafts in the building, just through the front door and we hung a curtain over the doorway to the space to prevent too much heat from escaping.
Wind tore through my ancient army coat as I stuck my head into Edison's to see if anyone was there. It was crowded with people, but nobody was there.
"Hey!" Sandy yelled to me, "shouldn’t you be doing a show!?"
"No audience," I yelled back -- I was just standing at the door, I wasn't going to make the effort to push through. I had to shout over a dozen of post-graduates from Bay Village who were, you know, slumming it. In the Slum. Where I worked. She gave me a sympathetic smile. "Some of these folks are heading over at eleven."
"Great!" I said. Great, I thought, by eleven they should be plastered and either forget what they came here for or be having too much fun in this place to bother. I got resentful sometimes, thinking of all the people who came to Edison's after seeing one of our shows -- they came to this God-forsaken neighborhood to see our show. They spend five bucks to get in, quibble over the price of a T-shirt, and then drop a wad for alcohol and cigarettes here afterwards.
Bitter, bitter, bitter. I continued down the street.
Alcohol. That was another of the major changes that had taken place between the first and second years. We banned alcohol from the space. It goes without saying that drinking it was verboten among the company during performance -- besides, in the old days you hid your open container in the Green Room to pull on when you weren’t performing, out of sight. There was no out of sight in The Actors’ Gym, the entire space was open and actors watched every scene they were not part of in plain sight, standing there next to one of the seating sections. No more fist-fights. No more sloppy, unprofessional, bad actors.
But we also told the audience they couldn’t bring beer into the space anymore, that we would be happy to hold it for them in the box office until the show was over. We were adamant. And people either handed it over, or a surprising number of the them turned around and left. It wasn’t a party without beer.
I wandered to the former Professor Street Theater. Now christened "The Lab" by Retro, Geddy, and two of their associates, Bernadette and Annetta. The four of them were filmmakers, working for other people as editors, line producers, cinematographers, gaffers, camera operators, whatever. They had, as we all do, higher aspirations and had created a mound of their own independent work which they felt they had every right to show. And so they started The Off-Hollywood Flick Fest.
They gathered their own material, and that of friends and coworkers, put a tee vee monitor and a home movie screen at one end of the space, the end where the Boutique and Green Room used to be, set out maybe fifty chairs and floor pillows and carpeting, and invited their friends to come and see.
As I approached the building the night of the first Off-Hollywood Flick Fest, it didn't appear like anything was going on. The windows were still covered with black paper, there were still white, holiday lights lining the edges of those windows. Such an inviting looking building, it was much much warmer looking than The Actors' Gym. Windows. Lights.
The Actors’ Gym was one block to the east. Two doors down from Edison’s. That made it furthest outpost of Gentrified Tremont. The Frontier. How many people had driven to find our show, saw the uninviting facade, looked around at all the derelict houses, and simply moved on?
I pushed the door open. I could only get it open part-way, because three people stood in the tiny alcove. They were standing there, watching the show because there wasn't another seat to be had. I forced my way in to discover almost a hundred people, sitting standing, lying around in the dark, watching homemade movies.
"Hansen!" Retro called. He came over and gave me a big hug. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and holding a beer. "What's going on, don't you have a show?"
"Uh, it was canceled," I said. "Damn, Retro this is amazing!" I hissed in a whisper so as not to disturb anyone. For such a large crowd everyone was intently respecting the films by not talking.
"Isn't it?" he said, "we were hoping maybe our friends would show and I gotta tell you, I don't think I know a single person here."
"Sucks when your friends let you down like that," I said. I was happy for him. I was depressed as shit. "How much longer does it go on tonight?"
"We've got stuff to go until at least midnight." So much for asking him to plug our show up the street when the lights come on.
"You make any money?"
"Enough to cover our costs, just tonight," he said, "which is more than we were expecting. You want a beer?"
"Uh, no," I said, "I, heh, have a show tonight."
"Well, I gotta schmooze," he said. "There's another program tomorrow afternoon and tomorrow night -- maybe you could spread the word to the audience over at Guerrilla."
"This is great, Retro," I said, "I'm proud of you. Tell Geddy I said so."
And so I braced myself against the breeze and headed back to Guerrilla. And I did tell our 11 PM audience about The Flick Fest. I hope all eight of them checked it out.
