The Flick (2017)

"The Flick" at Dobama Theatre

Once upon a time, movie houses dotted the Cleveland Heights landscape like Dollar Stores do now.

My own children lament the loss of the Regal Cinema up at Severance. Sure, we can go to the Regal at Richmond for first-run movies or to Shaker Square, but they loved the idea of having a movie theater one block from our house.

Center Mayfield (1981)
Photo: Cleveland Heights Historical Society

I can remember the previous movie theater at Severance Center, which closed in 2000. When I was in college and just getting my east side footing, my new friends invited me across town to see Robocop, Dragnet … I must have been there a half dozen times during the summer of 1987 alone.

Never really liked the Regal at Severance and I don't like the one at Richmond ... mall movie theaters just make me unhappy. Like so many other hyper-business-structures, they redirected traffic from independent 35mm houses into their shiny multiplex madness, and now they too have fallen into disrepair, squalor and sadness.

The Center Mayfield was located not far from Severance, just up the street, a 1,200 seat house which was split and rather poorly, too, into three smaller theaters. The last time I saw a movie there was in early 1995, one of a few people in the house to watch Kenneth Branagh’s execrable Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

See, they’d cut up the theaters, but they hadn’t relocated the seats. In the middle theater, that may have been fine. But if you were in the left-hand theater (as I was) your seat would be angled slightly toward the right wall of the theater, you had to twist your spine a little to view the screen straight on. At that time I was awaiting a hernia operation and I do not remember ever being so uncomfortable in my life. And I was watching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Center Mayfield (2016)
Photo: Cinema Treasures

Not long after that experience, the Center Mayfield closed their doors. The following twenty-two years it languished, first as a Hollywood Video, then as a liquor store. A movie rental store with an actual marquee is not bad. A liquor store in a former movie house that couldn’t bother to remove the trappings of having more recently been a Hollywood Video, that was pathetic. January 2017, the entire building was bulldozed, and is currently a large, flooded pit.

The theater seats, however, had an afterlife. They were acquired by Dobama, and during the summer of 1995 were cleaned and installed in their former venue on Coventry until that company was evicted ten years later, in 2005.

A few years earlier, in 1992, business partners Charles Zuchowski and Morrie Zryl renovated the former Heights Art Theatre at the corner of Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry. Originally built in 1919, this movie house was best known for featuring pornographic films in the 1970s and 80s.

Centrum Theatre (1998)
Photo: cleveland.com

Rebranded the Centrum Theatre, I first saw a great many films from the 1990s there (Romeo + Juliet, When We Were Kings) as well as significant revivals. I had that rare opportunity few people have to first see Citizen Kane on a big screen, and also Orson Welles’s storied Othello.

Before we were married, my wife and I both worked at 1846 Coventry, in very the same building. I was down in the basement working as public relations director for Dobama (until 1998) and she was an editor for the Free Times up on the second floor. After work, we could walk around the corner to see a movie, just like that.

However, Zuchowski and Zryl sold the place shortly after the renovation, and the national distributor which had bought it sunk slowly into debt, giving up before the decade was out. The poster for the last film I saw there, Being John Malkovich, remained on display for the better part of 2000. Another company tried to revive the house but with little success. The Centrum has its final screening in 2003.

Meanwhile, Dobama Theatre had found a new home in the former YMCA space, now part of an expanded complex for the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library. But they needed theater seats!

Guess where the theater seats came from? That’s right.

Annie Baker’s play The Flick follows the theme of disappointment in contemporary America set by her previous works like Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens. The story takes place in a rundown, independent movie house (in my mind I imagine the last days of the Center Mayfield) and the characters are an unlikely trio who manage and maintain the theater - we never see the owner - and set in the theater itself.

I am a great admirer of Baker's writing and was very excited when I first learned that Dobama would be producing The Flick. This new work created some controversy when it debuted at Playwrights Horizons in 2013. Some complained to the artistic director that the play is too long.

Seats go into the new Dobama Theatre on Lee Road (2009)
Photo: cleveland.com

That wasn’t the controversy, though, audience members will complain about anything. No, the controversy was when the artistic director sent a letter apologizing to their subscribers for not having warned them of the play’s length, which is bullshit.

Anyway, The Flick went on to win Baker the Pulitzer Prize, and you know what they say is the best revenge.

Dobama is where I have seen both Circle Mirror and Aliens, and each time I was first uninspired by the premise (evening theater classes, slackers slacking behind a convenience store) only to be compelled and moved by the characters, their stories, the plot, the performances. Last Thursday I had the opportunity to catch The Flick before it closed, which was a blessing.

One of the most interesting features of this play is where it is set. As I said, it takes place in the theater itself, not the lobby or at the concession stand, but in the house. Wherever this play has been produced the audience is first subjected to the somewhat disorienting picture of something which is at once completely familiar, but also not.

Detail.

You are looking at the back of a movie theater, facing the seats, the door you would have normally entered through to see the movie, you can see into the projection booth and what’s inside of it.

You are the screen. The absent movie going audience is facing you.

In the Dobama space, you may or may not notice that the seats on the set are identical to those you are sitting in. Not just the red fabric of the seats themselves, but the sides of the seats at the end of each row, are blazoned with interlocking “Zs.”

Two Zs, for Zuchowski and Zryl, seats custom-made for the late Centrum Theatre.

The Flick by Annie Baker was produced at Dobama Theater, March 3 - 26, 2017.

The Aliens (2014)

Alexander V. Thompson in "The Aliens" at Dobama Theatre

Too much information? Or too little? How much do you want to know about a play before you see it? On our drive back from a performance of Seven Ages at Lorain High School, Emily was all excited to learn we are producing The Tempest at Great Lakes Theater next year because she has never seen it. Never even read it. And she decided right there not to read it, to experience an entire Shakespeare from beginning to end with no foreknowledge. That will be an adventure!

(Why so excited about The Tempest without knowing anything about it? See: Neil Gaiman.)

I whole-heartedly support her decision. I like to be surprised. However, it is also true I do not like to be confused, or left confused. A little confusion is a good thing, it can be a mystery, it makes you think.

It also makes people talk during movies. Who is that guy? What are they talking about? Is she gonna die? When we get to talky bits in SHIELD, the kids get distracted and that’s when they make comments and I have to shush and remind them the talky bits is when we learn what the hell is going on.

Seven Ages was written to stand alone. Yes, you might get more out of it if you are familiar with As You Like It, you already have an idea of who these characters are. But the introduction explains all you really need to know; four people, hiding from danger, telling stories. One woman is dressed as a man and three of them must keep her gender a secret from the fourth. That’s it, easily spelled out, and on with the storytelling.

The first two performances a few adults in the audience expressed concern that the kids might be confused by some of the segues from one tale to another, because they include oblique references to As You Like It. I found only one such reference to the court of Duke Frederick, removed it (one sentence) and since then no one has expressed any confusion with the segues at all. To the contrary, the writers have been praised by audiences for how it all hangs together.

However, Lisa wanted to provide some context to the student audiences, explaining the origins of the play, how it was written, where the inspiration comes from. I told her I thought this was too much information to be providing the students prior to the show, that they would have the wrong impression from the get-go. She reluctantly followed my request, and our first student audience was confused and disengaged.

I was wrong.

Since then, each of our student audiences have received a very basic explanation of what it is we are trying to do with this play, how Jacques’ “Seven Ages” speech was the inspiration, and what they could expect -- seven stories. Those matinees were very successful. The students at Lorain High were most attentive, they got all the jokes and had many interesting questions or comments about the stories after the show.

Last night Brian and I went to see The Aliens by Annie Baker at Dobama Theatre (strong recommended, remaining performances tonight and tomorrow afternoon only). We arrived early to hear Nathan Motta, Dobama artistic director, and the director of this production, provide what they are calling a pre-show “conversation” though it’s not really a conversation, it’s a pre-show talk. For a half-hour, Motta provided very interesting background on the playwright, the history of this play and Baker’s other works, their importance and significance.

He also described the characters in the play, in some cases using the playwright’s stage directions, which gave the audiences clues as what to look for. This is what we strive to accomplish when presenting key scenes from Shakespeare in the classroom, as part of GLT’s residency program -- give the students something to watch for in the scene they are about to see. In that way, we make them active viewers.

But last night’s audience wasn’t full of students (though I was delighted to see a pack of teenagers there, on their own, seeing this play) we were adults. Granted, adults who voluntarily showed up forty-five minutes early for this information. Some of the information the director provided might be called spoilers -- not major plot points, but just the kind of things I like to figure out myself when watching a play or seeing a movie.

And yet, I feel this is an important step in keeping theater relevant in the 21st century. What media do we consume for which we have absolutely no foreknowledge? We have seen the trailers for films, that is largely how we choose them. And those are chock-a-block with spoilers. We read blogs, see commercials, have recommendations from friends, on books, TV shows, radio programs.

Why walk into a play and expect a modern audience to be satisfied to jump in with complete ignorance? Doesn’t make sense.

In my own works, I have tried to create “trailers” for plays, but they are devilishly difficult on a shoestring budget. We all know this. Even look at the online trailers for The Velocity of Autumn, they avoid showing actors speaking lines on stage as much as possible, because it just doesn't play the way it's supposed to on video. We get punchlines and audience reaction, which is the real selling point -- others enjoying it, not the work itself.


Tomorrow the tour visits Cleveland Heights-University Heights Main Public Library on Lee Road. They are usually quite a discerning crowd, because, you know. Heights. And yet, I believe I will be encouraging our moderator Khaki to be providing some much-appreciated pre-show context.

The Aliens (2010)

Annie Baker made my afternoon.

I hate plays. I hate them. I never liked plays. When I was a kid my parents would take me to the Play House, or Lakewood Little Theatre or Huntington or a touring show at the Hanna or something. I liked musicals, but I hated plays without songs. They were usually boring or at least entirely over my head. Even the comedies, because they were all written in the 1930s or supposed to take place in the 1930s and so I just didn’t get them at all.

I liked Jesus Christ Superstar and Annie and The Music Man. When my dad took me to the Palace to see Cats was the first time I ever saw a musical and thought, “Wait a minute, this show sucks. Is there something wrong with me?”

My junior year in high school our drama director chose a drama, not a comedy for the fall play. For some reason he cast me - instead of a senior. Seniors were always leads in the plays. There were a lot of pissed seniors that year. And I got a swelled head because it was a drama, and I was the lead (well, the male lead, the show is actually about the woman and her journey but screw that) and I got to learn how to appreciate a story that is told onstage and not only for laughs.


Because, and here’s the thing about plays, you have to repeat them. Over and over again. And it is the novelty of people saying the same words, live, night after night, that makes a play different from a movie, right? Not only the “just this one way, just this one time, just for you” aspect which makes it rewarding for the audience, but the we-will-recreate-one-moment-time AGAIN aspect of performance.

This makes sense when you are performing Oedipus. Or Hamlet. Or even Death of a Salesman (yes, I said it) because these are moments in time that are larger than life. THIS moment is the ONLY moment. And that is why it is important, and worthwhile.

But Bogosian’s Suburbia? No, I’m not getting that. This Is Our Youth? Hells, no. These are movie scripts. Do I say that because they are contemporary? Because the characters are uninteresting? Because nothing really happens, or at least, nothing of consequence? Not sure. But I can say that if a play has one set, which is the back of a business establishment, if there is a dumpster involved, I can pretty much assume I am going to check out over all the slacker-hipster-sarcastical-ironical that is about the hit me like a stiff, hot, dumpstery smell.

But I got my American Theater in the mail yesterday and if I have made one New Year’s resolution that I have not kept, it is that I will read every new play that appears in American Theater magazine. Somebody smoked a pack of cigarettes so I could resume my TCG membership and I really owe it to them.

So there’s Annie Baker on the cover and I’m thinking, “What’s Kate Nash doing on the cover of American Theater magazine?” No, I’m not thinking that, I’m thinking oh fuck that has to be this month’s playwright and she’s not Asian or my age or anything, I am going to hate this.

And then I see it has three guys in it and in the garbage area out back of a coffee house in Vermont and I’m thinking I am in for such pain.

Because, really, what is going to HAPPEN? THERE?

No, I am not going to say anything about what happens there in Ms. Baker's new play The Aliens. But something happens. And experiencing it on the page, I laughed - out loud, here on Coventry - and I cared, and I wanted to know what was going to happen next. Even though it mostly amounted to chatter, reading, some singing, tea-drinking, a lot of smoking and a few fireworks of the literal, someone-was-blowing-off-fireworks kind. Only not right there, off in the distance, because it was the Fourth.

Here’s a spoiler - no one gets beaten up. No one gets raped, with a screwdriver or anything else. People aren’t mean to each other. (The dumpster gets turned over - that part rocks.) But the playwright creates a moment in time that I would watch, and watch again. To feel that moment again, what it was like to be him. Or him. Or at least near him. To pay better attention, because maybe I missed something important the time before.

Because that is what makes a play worth doing, worth seeing, or worth writing.

And it's daunting, man. It's daunting.