"Manet & Morisot" at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Berthe Morisot
with Bouquet of Violets
etching, Édouard Manet, 1872

Last week, I was out with a friend, it was trivia night at The Bottlehouse. She was talking about the future, I was talking about the past. I have a future, at least I believe I do, but oh man, I have been overwhelmed by the past lately.

For example, on Saturday evening, I caught the Seat of the Pants production of The Book Club Play by Karen Zacarias, playing through May 31 at Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ in Tremont. In the 1990s I performed in a surprising number of shows in Pilgrim, beginning with the 1992 Working Theatre production of Jean Racine’s Andromache, and concluding with Eight Impressions of a Lunatic by Sarah Morton, and produced by Red Hen Theatre in 1998.

  

Lisa Lewis & David Hansen
"Andromache"
by Jean Racine
The Working Theatre, 1992

The Book Club Play takes place in a nice living room in modern America, and as SOTP specializes in site-specific plays, they found a pleasant sitting room at Pilgrim for the performance. This room is adjacent to the actual theater space (with a platform stage and traditionally seating) and was one we used as a dressing room for Eight Impressions.

I shared a bit about that production a couple years ago, one of those experiences I used to have, when I took myself seriously as an actor. I read several books on the character I was playing, Édouard Manet, and on the subject of the play, Berthe Morisot. For the first time in my life, I studied painting. I grew my hair out. I added to my shallow education in everything.

Manet & Morisot
David Hansen & Tracey Field
"Eight Impressions of a Lunatic"
by Sarah Morton
Red Hen Productions, 1998
Photo: Anthony Gray

It is a marvelous thing to be so prepared, so attired, so transformed. And I had it so easy; Morisot and her mother, speaking of my character before I entered, the great man, generating expectation and anxiety in them and in the audience. There is a particular moment, when the charming and confident man appraises the woman’s work, when he is surprised, sees beauty, originality, remarkable talent, and he is amazed, even threatened.

I have a good friend who has told me he was taken with that brief moment, that I succeeded in communicating all of those things. Good for me. What I remember is that no matter how much self-confidence, even arrogance, that I was able to maintain, it was only from the shoulders up. When Tracey Field, as Morisot, handed me a cup of tea, my hands shook so terribly. Every single time. My face can fool people. My hands, not so much.

Berthe Morisot Reclining
Édouard Manet, 1873

Last Saturday, I took myself on an artist date to University Circle. First, I explored the Cleveland History Center. I had been looking forward to checking out the Hollywood on the Cuyahoga exhibit, which held a few surprises (I want to know more about those Cleveland-based lithograph houses that were some of the biggest producers of movie posters during the silent era) but was padded out with a lot of photos of movie stars who grew up – or spent a some time – in Cleveland. That’s not really interesting, that’s just trivia.

But as long as I was there, I decided to just wander around. There's a lovely exhibit on community-based health care. I got fairly lost in the Hay-McKinney Mansion, a large wing of the museum I’d never taken the time to experience before. There were no other people around and I became concerned that I had entered some “employees only” area, especially when I encountered the servants’ quarters. But things were labeled for display, and marked “please do not touch” so I assumed the best.

" ... out of a DeLorean?!"

In fact, I saw the servants’ dining room before I saw the main dining room, and I thought, this is cozy. And there’s a lot of natural light. The Hay-KcKinney dining room was grand and opulent and dark and felt dusty.

And I hit the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum, which I have been to many times (we even attended a wedding reception there in the late 90s) not so much to see the cars, but the peer through the windows of the recreated Euclid Avenue storefronts located along one wall in the lower level.

I was reminded of Yesterday’s Main Street at Chicago’s Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, which my family first visited some fifty years ago. As an eight year-old, every exhibit made an indelible impression, and in idle moments, or drifting off to sleep, I would fantasize about what it would be like to live in a different time and place.

Or maybe just a different time. My kids tease me about my obsession with the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936. And it’s true, if you were to use the DeLorean they have at the Crawford Museum, to travel to any time or place in history, I wouldn’t choose the birth of Christ (that might settle some arguments) or Shakespeare’s London (that wouldn’t settle any arguments) I would choose the summer of 1936, Cleveland, Ohio.

For more information, check out the script for my play Cleveland Centennial! or read this blog from the beginning.

The story of Manet and Morisot is one of mutual respect and admiration, and it’s one that still interests me because I seek out such symbiotic artistic relationships in my life.

Morton’s play is a feminist work, one centered on Morisot, and her struggle to create art while also accepting her place in bourgeois society – she wants to be married, to have a child, she also wants to paint and for her work to be acknowledged. Like most of us, she wants happiness.

Self-portrait
Berthe Morisot, 1885

And Manet was just one part of that equation. A mentor, a colleague, even if you will, a muse.

Many of the works currently on display at the the CMA are Manet’s studies and paintings of Morisot, and they are lovely, tasteful portraits of a proper, middle-class woman, often dressed in black, occasionally reclining, though never the subject of a fictional work like Olympia or Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (no, those two aren’t here in Cleveland) though the very best painting of Morisot is the last one we encounter before exiting through the gift shop – a self-portrait, painted when she was forty-four. She painted what she saw in the mirror, a middle-class, middle-aged woman, palette and brush at hand.

She looks happier.

"Manet & Morisot" at the Cleveland Museum of Art continues through July 5, 2026 -- with free admission on Saturday June 6, to celebrate the CMA's 110th birthday.

Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage

Great Lakes Theater School Residency Program includes about a dozen (and growing) lesson plans, for students in first grade through seniors in high school. These five days residencies may cover a single play (e.g., Romeo and Juliet, recommended for freshmen) or in the case of elementary school students, a variety of classic children’s tales. Our actor-teachers are paired off in teams of two, who visit the schools bringing costumes, props, scripts, swords, stage blood, whatever is necessary to facilitate the plan. Our people perform keys scenes, put scripts into students’ hands and act with them, conduct relevant theater exercises, and hold meaningful discussions which connect the students’ own lives to the classic text at hand.

During September, which is to say right now, our actors are in training. We have five return individuals, and three people new to the program. They have a weight of new material to memorize and learn to facilitate before working with actual kids, and only three weeks to get it all in. Usually this means picking up one new residency a week, throughout the process.

On occasion, though not every not year, not even every other year, we take some kind of relevant field trip. When everyone is learning the elementary school residencies, we have visited the zoo to study animals and tell stories about them. In my time with the program, we’ve only done this twice, in 2004 and again in 2007. When there was a special exhibit at the Western Reserve Historical Society on Maurice Sendak in 2005, we went there as well. However, such journeys are time-consuming, often taking an entire day away from rehearsal, which is why they are so infrequent.

My favorite of all the lesson plans is the middle school one, which is called the Classic Drama Residency (CDR), as it covers several plays in the course of one week, each day addressing a different form of conflict in society, and how to cope and resolve conflict. Junior high is a powerful, sometimes extremely troubling period in human development (worst period of my life) and having the opportunity to address issues that directly affect students that age is moving, exciting, and important.

The work that gets the most attention through CDR is The Diary of Anne Frank. This is the story of an astonishingly self-aware girl. It is also a story of the Holocaust. our actor-teachers do not teach Holocaust history. But in order to appropriately understand the girl and her circumstances, you must understand the time. Part of my job is to bring our performers -- whose average age is 24 or 25 -- up to speed on an awe-inspiring period in human history, and to do that in a couple hours. We have so many lessons to prepare for, there isn’t time. I have tried long-form improvisations, sharing books, documents obtain from various sources ... it all feels woefully inadequate.

However, we have in Cleveland a remarkable resource in the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, and in preparation for this year’s rehearsal process we arranged a tour of the exhibits, requesting special attention on Antisemitism. What we received was a truly moving experience.

The permanent exhibit at the Maltz Museum is a must-see, which I especially recommend to my fellow Clevelanders, because it is not simply about Jewish history. These fascinating displays, many of them interactive, chronicle the immigrant experience in America, through the particular lens of European Jews, with an emphasis on (wait for it) Cleveland!

Our docent led us to particular points of interest on our journey to the extreme manifestation of hate. There is, in fact, a room labeled HATE, which includes a stirring film of Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit, the song about lynching, lyrics by Jewish-American Abel Merropol -- a man who events would have it adopted the orphaned children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (I heard that on NPR.) Several of our people took in the map of known hate groups in the US and were astonished to learn how many are in the Cleveland area.

The thematic connection of race-hatred toward American blacks and its relation to Antisemitism extended to the 1936 Berlin Olympics display, prominently featuring our own Jesse Owens.

Our docent kept asking questions of the group and it was my role to play Hermione, putting my hand up every time.

Docent: Does anyone know why we have Superman here?

Me: Glenville High graduates Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel!

Five points from Gryffindor for being an insufferable know-it-all.

Zap! Pow! Bam! (2009)

We eventually came to the Holocaust room, which is set off as an alcove from the main path of the exhibits. I had brought my son for the Zap! Pow! Bam! exhibition in January 2009. He wasn’t yet four years old, but enjoyed the Superman serials and the supermarket Batman car which you could ride for a quarter. Taking in the permanent exhibit, I guided him past this certain alcove.

The images are horrible. There are hateful cartoons of leering Jews, reminding me, for example, that Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was considered, in spite of modern revisionist thinking, supposed to be a hilarious comedy where the villainous Shylock gets what’s coming to him. Just because he’s a more interesting, nuanced character than say, Marlowe’s Barabas, only means Shakespeare was a better writer, not a better person.

Mounted on the wall is an article (which I will, someday, include in its entirety) written by my old nemesis, theater critic William F. McDermott. Poor Bill. He was supposed to be taking a summer holiday in Austria in 1938, instead was appalled to find the treatment of Jews there something he was unable to keep silent about, and on July 7 had penned an op-ed for The Plain Dealer warning America of what was happening, and what was next.

The three-minute film of the liberation of the death camps is simply unbearable.

This part of our tour, albiet all-too-brief, was not without hope, though we did, unfortunately, have to dash through one of my favorite parts -- the hall of inspiring Clevelanders of Jewish descent. It’s a list too long to cover here, but I am glad to say I know many of them!

We were hurrying to meet a special guest, Mrs. Betty Gold, formerly of Trochenbrod, Poland (now Ukraine) a city which no longer exists. Mrs. Gold was not one of those who endured the camps, but rather an 11 year-old girl whose family members lived for two years in a swamp, hiding from the Nazis before being rescued by the Soviets.

Listening to her story, it was impossible for my mind not to wander to my own girl, age 9. Mrs. Gold’s stories of her own father, whose determination and good sense and good fortune made his most of his family members of the only 40 people who survived out of a city of 5,000.

Sometimes I forget that, in spite of my own research, this time continues to slip further and further into the past. As I press on into my mid-40s, the actors-remain in their mid-twenties. Great books have been written, and films made, of this horrible time in an effort to ensure that no one forgets. Or that it is understood that these things do not simply happen. They were caused, intentionally, by people.

The next day, our actors were back at work, performing scenes from A Raisin in the Sun and The Glass Menagerie, playing theater exercises, eating sandwiches from various PlayhouseSquare establishments. But as we revisit the scenes from Anne Frank -- or even a new scene included in the Macbeth residency, in which Macduff learns the news that his entire family has been slaughtered -- our young actors can no longer say they have never met someone to whom this has happened.

“Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.” - Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

The Black Legion

The Black Legion was a KKK splinter group operating in the 1930s. Centered in Michigan the Legion was also active in Ohio.

AP described the organization on May 31, 1936, "as a group of loosely federated night-riding bands operating in several States without central discipline or common purpose beyond the enforcement by lash and pistol of individual leaders' notions of 'Americanism.'"

They were allegedly responsible for numerous murders of alleged communists and socialists.

Date unknown, paper unknown
Police Reopen Probe of Two Weird Killings
Anonymous phone call: “Look into the muders of those two men in the gully at E. 49th Street and you’ll find the Black Legion was responsible.”

Sources: Wikipedia
Eliot Ness personal scrapbook, property of Western Reserve Historical Society

How I Spent My Summer Hiatus

This is the problem with me. My obsessive compulsive disorder. I have to put things in boxes in order to be able to concentrate, to look at them and to understand them. This is fine when it comes to things that can be put into boxes, like paper or cats. It does not work well for me when it comes to things like time.

This year is my “Fellowship Year,” when I have been given a special responsibility by the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture to develop my career as a playwright. I have been able to manage this in many ways, including packing and delivering previous work to rights distributors, to apply for awards, to interest theater companies in producing my work. I have actually been successful at two of these three pursuits, so far, and you know what they say about two out of three things.

My relationship with my employer allowed me the opportunity to take time off to pursue a special project, the CENTENNIAL project. Four weeks to do, well, whatever. To do those things I cannot do working a nine-to-five.

Others have traveled around the country, or the world, to conduct research, to work with mentors, the get the lay of whatever land they wanted to write or create about. Silly me, I told everyone I wanted to write a play about Cleveland. That meant staying in Cleveland. Oops.

Seriously, however. For years I have wanted to spend time in the Cleveland Public Library, reading newspapers, or discover the library at the Western Reserve Historical Society. I have done these things. What I have not done - yet - is write. Anything.

I am trying not to feel bad about that.

What I have logged into this blog is only a small part of what I have learned, just by reading. And that is most of what I have been up to this month. Reading. Reading a single year’s worth of newspapers, and books, and plays. And in doing so I have retrained myself to read. I have always had poor reading habits, and have not read the smallest part of what most people who know me assume I have.

The number of plays I have ever read is shameful. I am still playing catch-up after blowing off Dr. Condee’s theater history class my sophomore year. To put it another way - I am still playing catch-up from blowing off all of my sophomore year.

The good news is I have successfully spent four weeks reading, and a lot. And I have connections to the time I have spent this month that will stay with me especially into the long Cleveland winter. Sitting crouched on a marble slab near the fountain in front of the 1916 wing of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Feeling the back of my neck bake at 9 in the morning on a bench further away from the museum, by the lagoon. Taking in the Ness family memorial, and walking over to Wade Lagoon to read there. The reading garden outside the Cleveland Public Library, where I first got the news about Pekar. The impossibly chilly microfilm rooms in the library, and at the Western Reserve Historical Society.

And where it all started, in late June, in the New York Public Library Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center. It took over an hour - seriously - to get situated, knowing which room to go to, who to hand reference slips to, finding out I needed to get a temporary library card, waiting for the materials to come. I think I actually looked over materials for ninety minutes.

But what a valuable ninety minutes. I found an article in Variety magazine about The Living Newspaper in Cleveland, which led me to the names of the authors of that plays, which led me to articles they had written, which pointed my research in an entirely new direction. I wasn’t aware of it yet, but those ninety minutes set me on the course for the entire hiatus, ninety minutes which gave this fragmented mind focus.

The other day I took a walk with someone from work down Euclid Avenue to Fourth Street for lunch. I have walked that stretch many, many times. It makes me sad, wistful, to think of this street, Main Street Cleveland, as it used to be. The recent restorations are promising, there is a lot of rehab going on, we have have hit bottom and are on the way back up. But seriously, it will never be the way it was, not in my lifetime.

Reading the daily newspapers - the Plain Dealer, the Press, the News - and the Call & Post, and the Gazette and Citizen, is to read about a large, teeming metropolitan city. Many were poor, struggling to get by, but they were together, there, in a city which no longer exists. I occupy the same space, but the earth has turned so many times since then and so much has changed. I would like to recapture some of that for the stage, to latch onto a story to tell, about real people in a real place, and make it feel like what I have felt reliving it for these four weeks.

When I draw, I remind myself to make my hand create my eye sees. Now in order to write this, I need to make my hand create what my heart feels.

Republic Steel

Founded in Youngstown in 1899, the headquarters of Republic Steel were relocated to Cleveland in 1936, and the company entrenched itself as the nation's Number Three steelmaker, behind US Steel and Bethlehem Steel.

Thomas Patton, a private attorney who worked on the merger that formed Republic Steel was hired in 1936 to form Republic's internal legal department. As general counsel in the 1930s and 1940's, he negotiated for Republic during the steel strikes.

Thomas Girdler became Republic's first president and board chairman. Republic became a major producer of light alloys, with profits exceeding $87 million between 1936-43. Girdler first supported Pres. Roosevelt's Natl. Industrial Recovery Act, establishing a representation plan for Republic's employees, but when the Wagner Act outlawed such plans and promoted negotiations with regular unions, Girdler lost all affinity for the New Deal. He refused to bargain with the CIO; though conceding the need for collective bargaining, Girdler refused to do so by government edict.

Source: Teaching + Learning Cleveland
The Western Reserve Historical Society
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
Wikipedia