A Christmas Carol (2024)

James Alexander Rankin as Bob Cratchit
"A Christmas Carol"
(Great Lakes Theater, 2024)
Costume design by James Scott
Scenic Design by John Ezell
& Gene Emerson Friedman
Photo by Roger Mastroianni

Great Lakes Theater first produced A Christmas Carol in 1989. Then-Artistic Director Gerald Freedman wrote an adaptation that cleaves neatly to the original work. As a framing device, the Cleaveland family (the name is never spoken, you can find it in your program) gather together on Christmas Eve to read Charles Dickens’ classic work, a simple and elegant entry to the story.

Recently, I discovered my ticket for the first time I saw the show, surprised to see it was from that first year. Dated December 22, 1989, it may even have been closing night. I was twenty-one, home for the holidays during my fourth year at college. At the time I was most impressed by the Ghost of Christmas Present, performed by Kevin McCarty. Kevin was completing his MFA in Acting at Ohio University just as I was an incoming freshman. A big man with a stern brown and a deep and resonant voice, his ghost was full of life and joy but also quite intimidating.

Since that time, the Great Lakes production has grown into a true institution. I cannot imagine anyone intending this or any regional theater production to continue for five years, let alone thirty-six and counting, and I truly believe the city would be poorer with its absence. Part of that is due to Mr. Dickens, but also Mr. Freedman and the entire original creative team.

Because of the sincerity of the framing device – which includes the youngest of the Cleavelands wordlessly witnessing the events of the story, casting members of his household as the characters – this adaptation has avoided becoming dated. It is commonplace for us to ironically wink at the audience because, you know, it’s A Christmas Carol, after all. But it’s played straight, and so it stands, not stuck in the 1980s or 90s, but entirely Victorian in style and language.

Kevin McCarty as the Ghost of Christmas Present
(Great Lakes Theater, 1996)
Photo by Roger Mastroianni

Credit is due to this adaptation embracing Dickens’ message of social justice and economic disparity, including details from the novel which are often glossed over. I am especially touched by the scene when Christmas Present takes Scrooge around the globe, and even beneath the earth, to see miners, a lighthouse keeper, and a ships’ captain out to sea. The breadth of humanity and the wideness of the world is sublimely depicted here through traditional stage tricks of light and darkness and fog. The hand-tooled appearance of the set and effects contributes greatly to the sweetness and enduring popularity of this production.

From 1982 to 2008, Great Lakes produced exclusively in the Ohio (now Mimi Ohio) Theatre. Relocating the majority of their work to the Hanna Theatre sixteen seasons ago, A Christmas Carol remains in the Mimi Ohio, the theater for which it was designed. Retrofitting the show to the intimate Hanna would for all intents and purposes mean redesigning the entire production, which would make it something entirely different, and not necessarily for the better. In the stately Ohio the show is like a handsome and antique holiday picture postcard.

I started bringing my own, living children to see A Christmas Carol when each turned four years old. But this is a ghost story, and there are some remarkable frights along the way. Marley’s entrance is startling (it includes a dramatic reminder of from where he is arriving) which often produces squeaks and squeals from youthful audience members. I stayed particularly attentive to our eldest their first year (2007) as the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come made its silent, awe-inspiring appearance. After a few intense moments, our little one leaned to me and whispered, “... is that a puppet?” They were spooked, but even at that age they knew a thing or two about stagecraft.

During the 2015-2016 season, Playhouse Square renovated the lobby of the Ohio, restoring it to its original 1920s grandeur. That holiday season, however, due to the construction, it was necessary to take a long, narrow, featureless tunnel into the theater. But what I best remember was that that was the year my entire side of the family – my parents, my brothers and their spouses, my wife and children and our nieces – we all saw the show together on the same night. Father said he’d never seen it before, which surprised me. The memory of this evening is all the more poignant for me as our father died early the next year.

Nick Steen in costume as Ebenezer Scrooge
handing out awards for the
"A Christmas Carol" Writing Contest
(November 26, 2024)

As should be made evident, in addition to my responsibilities assisting with student matinees and facilitating the A Christmas Carol Writing Contest, I have also seen the show many times, watching with a kind of fascination as the tone changes with each director (technically, it has always been “directed by Gerald Freedman” as each subsequent director works to maintain his original staging) and the several – though surprisingly few – men who have assumed the mantle of Ebenezer Scrooge.

A week before Thanksgiving this year, and just as the show was about to open, I was asked to join the acting company, a necessary last-minute replacement. An understudy would take the first weekend, and I would join in thereafter and for the rest of the run. And so my entire holiday schedule this year has been turned upside-down, a crash course in A Christmas Carol and an altogether delightful experience, though at first a bit like jumping onto a moving train.

It was not surprising to me that several members of the company assumed I had performed in this show before. I have worked for Great Lakes Theater for some time. But I have not done this show, and I am very glad to participate in this way, grateful for the opportunity.

At a talkback last week, a student asked the company which moment in the show is our favorite, and I said the street scenes. There are three times when nearly the entire company crosses the stage – that’s a lot of people and not a terribly large space. The choreography is tight and I did mess up once or twice the first couple of times, crushed against a window or bumping into furniture. But by the end of Thanksgiving weekend I felt like an old hand, and am now truly able to breathe and enjoy those moments.

Myself, in costume emceeing the
"A Christmas Carol" Writing Contest
(December 3, 2024)

I’ve made new friends in the company, and am having the chance to work with others I’ve known for years but have never shared a stage with. Some members of the “young company” are the children of old friends, or even students I have taught in schools through the residency program. It’s a youthful, vibrant company – even for those of us who aren’t so young anymore.

And that may be why I love this season, and this production, and the lesson it brings. It is about our shared humanity, negotiating this one world together. No one is more respectful nor deferential than a player in a narrow backstage space, making way for a fellow company or crew member who needs a clear path to rush from point to point, holding a large prop or a basket of costumes, or sporting a voluminous, hallway-spanning skirt.

For closing thoughts, I give you nephew Fred:

“But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time … as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

“And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

- “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens, 1843

Great Lakes Theater's 36th annual production of "A Christmas Carol" continues through December 22, 2024

Disclaimer: I am employed by Great Lakes Theater. The thoughts and opinions expressed here are my own.

Salesman之死 (play)

Sonnie Brown, Sandia Ang, Claire Hsu
 in "Salesman之死"
(Yangtze Repertory Theatre, 2023)
Photo: Maria Baranova

The most recent issue of American Theatre magazine includes the complete text of Jeremy Tiang’s recent play, Salesman之死* which premiere at the Connelly Theatre on the Lower East Side in 2023.

This was my first introduction to the piece, and I was grateful to read the entire thing. Some ten years ago I read Arthur Miller’s Book, Salesman In Beijing, which were his director’s notes for a production of, well, Salesman in Beijing, in 1983, shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Yes, Miller directed the play himself, and his book is rich with Miller’s tales of how he was to encourage the performers at the Beijing People's Art Theatre (“Renyi”) to not only replicate but to comprehend this quintessential American drama. His is a story of reaching across a cultural divide to highlight a shared humanity.

Tiang’s script, which dramatizes the rehearsal process of his historic production and is inspired by not only Miller’s book but also extensive interviews with Shen Huihui, who served as Miller’s translator during his time in China, illustrates how the company endeavored to engage with the American style of performance Miller demanded from them, the American playwright had little interest in engaging with theirs.

Mi Tiezeng, Zhu Lin, Li Shilong 
"Death of a Salesman"
(People's Art Theatre, 1983)
Photo: Inge Morath

The Renyi company did the work and learned in a very short period of time what the “American Dream” means to Americans, while Miller was content to be a tourist, observing Chinese performance and customs but holding them at arm’s length, almost in contempt. They were doing the reaching, he was just there to direct his play, his way.

Another play I have recently been introduced to, The Motive and the Cue by Jack Thorne, also a 2023 premiere, dramatizes another historic production, in this case John Gielgud’s 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet, starring Richard Burton. That play is based on two texts, Letters From an Actor by William Redfield, and the ponderously if most accurately entitled John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet (A Journal of Rehearsals) by Richard Sterne.

I was finally able to obtain a copy of Sterne’s book (it took some time to locate an inexpensive edition) and it is an audacious work. Whereas Redfield’s tome is a collection of backstage gossip and high-flown elucidation on the craft by one of the company’s minor players, Sterne’s is an astonishing example of asking for forgiveness rather than permission – cast as a gentleman (at least Redfield’s character has a name) Sterne surreptitiously recorded the entire rehearsal process, even going so far as to hide himself under the set during closed rehearsals to which we was not invited.

Rather than being shamed and/or blackballed, once he had revealed to Gielgud and Burton that he was writing a book, they granted him interviews for inclusion, providing the entire endeavor a gloss of legitimacy.

Richard Burton, John Gielgud
in rehearsal for "Hamlet" in 1964
Photo: Bettmann Archive

There is more of Letter From an Actor in Thorne’s play, as Redfield’s book is a juicy backstage kiss-and-tell, while Sterne’s must be a pretty dry read for anyone not intimately familiar with the text of Hamlet. No internal squabbling between the legendary Gielgud and wildly-famous Burton to be found. In fact, a great deal of Motive hangs on a single quote attributed to Burton; “Don’t you dare give me a line read.” 

He may have said that, but in context it sounds more like a jovial aside than a warning, but Thorne uses that one phrase as the central conflict of his drama – Burton wants to find his own Hamlet, and not to merely replicate Gielgud’s.

Live drama is, after all, about the moment, and not wrote replication of a previous moment. Yes? No?  

While there have been countless fictional backstage dramas – usually comedies, actually – these two works, Salesman and Motive, focusing on two high-profile productions, these I found fascinating, dramatizing as they do the collaborative creative process unique to love performance that makes theater the art form which is central to my own life, and in the case of Salesman之死, a cautionary tale about humility, listening and collaboration.

* 之死 means simply “death of”

"Oh, Mary!" at the Lyceum Theatre

Cole Escola in "Oh, Mary!"
(The Lyceum Theatre, 2024)

Last month, my wife and I took a whirlwind, twenty-four hour journey to New York City. The past several years, since the quarantine, we have tried to get back at least once a year. Life is too short and we have the miles.

Why now? For my birthday she got me tickets to see Oh, Mary! Cole Escola’s outrageous, ahistorical comedy, centering on the character of Mary Todd Lincoln. I have had a fascination with this show (and Escola) since it opened Off-Broadway earlier this year, a fascination bordering on obsession.

Clips of the show and interviews with its creator had popped up on my socials, and I followed the show as it went from the Lucille Lortel to the Lyceum, a Broadway upgrade for an absurd, profane and deeply queer little drag show.

I was shocked when I received her gift – I hadn’t thought to actually see it! A limited summer run had been expanded into November (and just announced, through January) and anyway, I was thrilled. My love takes me to the best places.

We’d fly in Saturday night, stay in Times Square, see a Sunday matinee and pop out again that night. I worried that on a Sunday matinee there may be an understudy (spoiler, there was not) and things being how they are, we were both concerned about the dependability of air travel, but there were no unpleasant surprises there, either.

I have never stayed in the Times Square district before, my spouse is always very good at finding places in interesting and much less absurd Manhattan neighborhoods. But it’s not like the 1970s, our room was immaculate and stylish (and tiny, of course, who cares) set high above the chaos.

Riding along on a carousel!

We dropped our bags in our room, freshened up and sought out The Rum House for cocktails, live jazz, and the most expensive dish of mixed nuts. The band was lively and engaging, a trio of men all somewhat older than myself, piano, trumpet and washboard, that last doubled as the singer, a scruffy ringer for Bobcat Goldthwait with beard and pork pie hat. The drinks were creamy and excellent, she watched the crowd and I kept an eye on the passersby on 47th Street.

No one smokes. I watched maybe a hundred people pass by the window, none of them were smoking, it really is amazing.

The next morning we were able to lie about a while and relax and talk (there is no one I would rather do nothing at all with) before having brunch at the hotel and taking a walk up and out of Times Square and into Central Park.

There are those who refer to NYC as an urban hellscape, but all I could see were families playing, folks running or biking, musicians and magicians, all on a bright beautiful late summer day.

There was a meadow, too, like a natural, untended meadow we found, one that has been recently established, and walked through. It did my heart good.

We had a moment of crisis waiting for a ride on the Central Park Carousel when I casually mentioned that Trump owns it – I don’t remember where I heard that – so she did some research and found that thought Trump Organization had once paid for maintenance of the carousel, following the events of January 6, the city broke all financial ties with the former president.

We took a delightful spin on the carousel.

Caption: Romeo & Juliet, 1995

The Lyceum is the oldest, continuously operating Broadway theater, designed in the Beaux-Arts style, which basically means its very fancy, ornately decorated and very fussy. The lobby and staircases feature photographs of the many storied entertainers who have played that stage over the past 120 years – but also, if you are paying attention, you will notice there are also currently photos of Cole Escola starring in fictional productions of Doubt, Fun Home, Romeo and Juliet, and many others. Captions attributed to the artist explain how each of these shows were complete economic and critical disasters.

Several of these photos were also on display above urinals in the gentlemen’s toilet.

Oh, Mary! Is about a frustrated former cabaret singer trapped in a loveless marriage to a closeted man who happens to be Abraham Lincoln and she the sixteenth First Lady of the United States of America.

When Seth Myers asked them about how much research they had done to write the script, Escola replied, “I did less than no research. I actively forgot things I knew about Mary Todd Lincoln.”

They went on to stress that the show is a comedy, and that they wanted it to be accessible to everyone, that there are no “in-jokes” about the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, though there is one big “in-joke” where the audience discovers the identity of the acting tutor Lincoln has hired to occupy his manic spouse.

Post-show cheeseburger.

Cleveland playwright Thomas P. Cullinan wrote another chamber play about the life of Mary Todd. Mrs. Lincoln premiered at the Cleveland Play House in 1968 and, like this newer play, was also held over six months due to its enormous popularity. That is where the similarity ends, however, as Mrs. Lincoln (starring Evie McElroy in the eponymous role) is a psychological drama about the years after the assassination when the historical Mrs. Lincoln was institutionalized.

Plain Dealer critic Peter Bellamy was effusive, calling Mrs. Lincoln, "an absorbing, engrossing and literate play" adding that" nobody could portray the mercurial Mrs. Lincoln with more theatrical effect that Evie McElroy. Her performance is a truly great one."

In his review for the Cleveland Press, Tony Mastroianni called Mrs. Lincoln, “an evening of theater that is both entertaining and informative.” And it is informative, indeed. It is a challenge balancing the forward momentum of a plot with facts.

From Mrs. Lincoln:

MARY: I’d as soon dine with Billy Herndon as with that man!
SALLY: Now who’s Billy Herndon?
MARY: My husband’s law partner.

Escola said they didn’t want to be writing jokes thinking “that’ll get a laugh because that’s where she was born!” Or because that's her husband’s law partner! I get it now. Of course, Cullinan was not writing an historical comic play ... but I have, or I have tried to. And mine are all a bit too heady.

From These Are the Times:

VOICE: Looks like you’re quite a baseball fan!

CHILD: You see this letter “C” on my cap? That stands for Cleveland, and it’s a logo I can be proud of!

VOICE: And HOW!

Cringe. I'm working on that.

The fictional protagonist of Oh, Mary! fares much better than Cullinan’s factual one, achieving her dreams of returning to the cabaret stage, though, who knows? Maybe she has also gone mad. But what a way to go!

My wife and I were both also delighted with Conrad Ricamora, who plays Lincoln starting at an eleven and going higher from there. The entire ensemble is a master class in comic tropes and timing. I'm so glad I got to see this show.

GUESS THE SHOW: 

A. "The character of Mrs. Lincoln is at once tragic, funny, pathetic and unbalanced."

B. "An acting style that’s as expressionistic as a silent movie or opera ... while at the same time imposing an almost balletic control over gesture and pose."

C. "There were times when a movement or intonation reminded me of the late Ruth Feather ..."

Sources:

"Mrs. Lincoln's Torment Staged" by Peter Bellamy, The Plain Dealer, 11/2/1968

"Mrs. Lincoln's Fascinates Through Fresh Viewpoint" by Tony Mastroianni, The Cleveland Press, 11/2/1968

Late Night With Seth Meyers, May 7, 2024 (NBC)
Cleveland Arts Prize, Thomas P. Cullinan (Literature, 1971)
"What Makes ‘Oh, Mary!’ One of the Best Summer Comedies in Years" by Jesse Green, The New York Times, 7/11/1968

Guess The Show:

A. Mrs. Lincoln (Mastroianni)

B. Oh, Mary! (Green)

C. Mrs. Lincoln (Bellamy)

How I Spent My Summer (2024)

Puffball

What have I been doing this summer? I’ll tell you what I have not been doing, writing blog posts.

You may have noticed a considerable decline in posts since I received my degree well over a year ago. There is a very good reason for this, I have been writing other things. I’ve just changed; when I think of an idea for a post, I am suddenly struck with an urge to do something, anything else.

So?

This weekend, Labor Day Weekend, the official close of the season, we are lounging in A-Town with the out-laws, staying cool, sampling the scorpion pepper roasted garlic sauce the younger whipped up just before we drove him back to school a few weeks ago (it’s really hot and it’s really good).

After a year away, it was really nice having him home for the summer, getting to spend time with him and with his boyfriend. In late July we all went to Maine where I think I have finally embraced my destiny as the Old Man on the Porch. We were there for two weeks this year, longer than I have stayed in decades, playing host to my brother and his family from England, our friend Sarah and – oh my – a dog!

We came to home to find that one of our cats was ailing; the cats are both fourteen years old, and Puffball has had a variety of difficulties, with his kidneys, with his thyroid. But now it was much more serious, a blood cancer, and we said goodbye to him last week.

Fifteen years ago I lost a dear pet, the eighteen year old Rosencrantz. We met when I was twenty-three, living in an apartment off Coventry, he died when I was forty, with a house and two living children. Losing him was losing my young adulthood. We got Puffy when the kids were five and seven, now they are both away at school. So it goes.

But these are endings. We began the season with a celebration of our twenty-five years married, and also our thirty years as a couple. The wife surprised me with a couple extra events, tickets to see the Guardians, an excessive dinner at the Marble Room.

We’ve probably attended (and also watched, and listened to) more Guardians games this summer than any time previous. I’ve also seen a couple of films at the Cinematheque. Usually I might see one a year, now I am a member. I saw The People’s Joker in July, last weekend we saw the recently reedited (?) Caligula. I’ve put their calendar on the wall in the kitchen, there’s a lot of funky things to check out this fall.

Golden Girls - The Laughs Continue

I have also spent a lot more time at the Cedar-Lee, our local independent theatre. Two of the several movies I caught this summer were Ghostlight and Sing Sing, which are moving, each in their own way, and they are part of a genre without a name, a story through which someone who has never acted before is drawn into an amateur theatrical and it transforms their life. 

But! Speaking of the kitchen, ever since I bought this place (thirty-one years next month) I have wanted to redo the floor of the kitchen. Something else always came first – including getting new counters and cabinets and ceiling for the kitchen over fifteen years ago. We finally had the floor leveled, guys put in Marmoleum and I finished by painting the baseboards and trim around the doors. Another life goal accomplished!

Meet the floor.

What I’d like to be able to share is some great summer theater news, but there’s nothing to report, not really. Not much. I had the chance to take in a rehearsal of the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival production of King Lear before we left town. We also took in some high-camp hilarity at the Hanna with a performance of Golden Girls - The Laughs Continue.

The Toothpaste Millionaire revival at BorderLight went over well, though I was out of town for the festival this year. I had a reading for a new script I’m working on back in May, and that is something I have plans to rework through the rest of the year.

And that's really the thing, you know? Work. Happy Labor Day. Get back to work.

On Criticism

Too hot to wear the sweater.

Twenty years ago today, I woke up to find I Hate This (a play without the baby) had been reviewed in the New York Times.

We were presenting the piece in a walkdown apartment on West 11th at Greenwich that had been converted into a forty seat black box (the stage even featured a fireplace) as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. I’d had maybe a dozen audience members for that first performance, including several critics, and two days later I received a very nice write-up, front page of the Thursday arts section, below the fold.

Did this high-profile review alter my fortunes at the fringe? It did not. Audiences remained tiny, it was August, no one wants to see a show about stillbirth, etc. etc. However, many took note, and I was contacted by hospitals and bereavement centers around the nation, inquiring as to whether I might bring the show to them. Jason Zinoman’s review documented that this show existed, and gave it legs. I performed the piece, on and off, for the next several years.

Alan Barth said, “Journalism is the first rough draft of history,” but a theater review is the only draft of the history of a particular production. Decades from now, when I am dead and gone and all my social media posts have been deleted or wiped, that review will remain in the archives of the “Gray Lady”, the paper of record.

Last month, Cleveland theater critic Christine Howey attended several shows at the BorderLight Festival, and provided daily, online accounts of the proceedings for clevescene.com. That she attended and then turned around next-day capsule reviews for nearly a dozen shows was a feat, and provided a record of what was to be expected from the festival, as it was happening.

As a result, several artists received reviews, reviews which they may not even have been expecting! Reviews they can brag about for, who knows, maybe twenty years?

The Toothpaste Millionaire (production)

Kierstan Conway & Quincy Brame as
Kate & Rufus in "The Toothpaste Millionaire"
(Talespinner Children's Theatre, 2024)
Photo by Steve Wagner

Adolescence doesn’t need to be the worst time in a person’s life, but what a person goes through at that stage of development is exacerbated by our systems of education, which (often, though not always) sequesters kids who are eleven, twelve and thirteen years old on their own and all together. It was horrible for me, and it was horrible for my kids, in spite of our best efforts.

However, when working as an arts educator, whether it be in schools or extracurricular programming like summer theater camp, I like working with middle school aged students best. They respond to the work so powerfully, and it is because, as I see it, they are knowledgeable enough to delve deep into complicated concepts, but still young enough to want to play.

At the start of Jean Merrill’s book The Toothpaste Millionaire, the main characters, Rufus and Kate, are both entering sixth grade. My wife had asked why, if the play adaptation of the book that I was writing was intended for an elementary school audience, that the characters should be in middle school? And my answer was, because it is meant to be aspirational.

As Merrill said in a 2006 interview, “I hope (the book) inspires them to imagine themselves doing things like that. Just because they are kids, it doesn’t mean they can’t have good ideas.”

And after all, the audience for all those High School Musical movies and shows aren’t really high school students, right? Those are watched by the middle school students.

The first time I attended a run-through for the Talespinner Children’s Theatre production of my stage adaptation of The Toothpaste Millionaire, I was delighted by the sense of play that Ananias Dixon (Director) and Diwe Augustin-Glave (Assistant Director) brought to the proceedings. The kids, as written, are witty, and aware, but as performed, are excited and enthusiastic, and not jaded or snarky (as many TV tween characters can be). And so very playful! Which is the point, after all.

Quincy Brame as Rufus Mayflower
(Talespinner Children's Theatre, 2024)
Photo by Steve Wagner

When it came to adapting the book into a script, one of the things that really helped me was creating a calendar of events. The book was published in 1972, and needed to be set at that time. You could update Merrill's story to the 21st century, I suppose, but the world has changed so much in the past fifty years, media, technology, economics, the law, it would really be an entirely different story, and I wanted to tell this one.

Merrill’s plot is uncomplicated by personality conflicts, the kids – and their adult mentors – work together to make Rufus’s dream a reality. They set a goal, achieve it, and then set another, bigger goal, all within the span of two years, which in this version takes us from 1970 to 1972 not exactly an inconsequential period in American history, but what period is. And some of that history, which Merrill did not include – because to her, it was just the present – seep in around the edges of the play (see: references), but only to the extent that an adolescent might be aware of them.

I'm really happy with the design for this premiere production, featuring delightful period costumes by  Jaclyn Vogel (which includes Rufus's iconic blue sweater, mentioned on the very first page of the book), and a functional and colorful set designed by Ren Twardzik with projections by Josh Smith.   

Next Saturday, July 27 at 3:00 PM, The Toothpaste Millionaire will be performed as part of Family Day at the BorderLight Theater Festival in Playhouse Square. Last year I had a short, site-specific play produced at BorderLight, and it was so exciting to see all of the vibrant creativity going on in and around Playhouse Square for that long, summer weekend. This year BorderLight is featuring over fifty shows, and workshops, and the Family Day concept is a new addition. If you’ve got kids, come downtown to join in the fun!

The BorderLight Theatre Festival will take place July 24 – 27, 2024 in downtown Cleveland.

Nelia Rose Holley, Kierstan Kathleen Conway, Julia Boudiab
(Talespinner Children's Theatre, 2024)
Photo by Steve Wagner

Source: "The Toothpaste Millionaire, 35th Anniversary Edition" (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) 

Guerrilla P.R.

The other night I was at the Dark Room, and before the event began some of us were chatting about that eternal question, who do I have to fuck to get people to see my show?

Default promotion, in the old days, required purchasing advertisements in the paper. The quiet part was that if the theater didn’t pay, the paper wouldn’t review your play, and it was always the reviews which drove ticket sales, not the ads themselves.

Today, with the absence of print journalism, theaters pay for ads on Facebook or Instagram. Direct mail is also still a thing, and it is important, because at the very least you need to let people who have already shown an interest in your company about what is coming soon.

But, and this is the case for every single theater, from LORT A down to that immersive storefront production with ten folding chairs, to have a successful production you must go beyond. You need to appeal to non-regular theater goers, because there are never enough of those. There certainly aren’t enough theater artists to fill the seats at any house, and they shouldn’t be expected to, anyway, because they are busy doing theater.

So, how do you get the word out? How do you, as they say, let ‘em know?

As I have recounted before, I have always loved marketing, products and swag. In high school we started an improv troupe and I was much more interested in selling the buttons we had made for the troupe (buttons were big in the 80s) than rehearsing improvisation.

And who designed these buttons? I did, of course, using my brother’s brand new Macintosh computer. They did not go very well, however, not as well as the Guerrilla Theater Company pins we made years later, those sold very well though I still have a couple hundred of them in my attic.

At college, a graduate student who was put in charge of marketing for the school of theater approved of the comic strip I drew for the daily university paper, and especially liked when I would include references to current productions. He’d made an arrangement with a local pizza place to include flyers for the upcoming production of On the Verge by Eric Overmyer, but he wanted something original, that would engage someone who had just ordered a pizza.

I created a “chutes-and-ladders” style board game with paper cut-outs of the three main characters and you would roll a die and move your piece around a cartoon globe, traveling through time and space to opening night of the show!

Guerrilla Theater Company had a regular advertising deal with the Free Times, we’d buy the smallest advertisement we could, but we’d buy them pretty much every week. Not just to keep folks aware of the show, and not just to announce the theme of the weekend, but to continually flog the Guerrilla Connection.

The idea for the Connection came from Dial-A-Song, a service provided by They Might Be Giants since the mid-1980s, a phone number you can call to this day and hear an original song. We had a designated line which would have a different message every week, letting folks know the theme of the week, hear a short play, or important announcements.

It occurs to me only right now that we didn’t need a separate line to do this. The office line as xxx-9002, the Connection was xxx-9003. The message could have been the regular office line, why did we pay for two lines? I guess we thought it was to separate “business” from “the show.” Whatever.

But the advertisements weren’t enough to fill the house. That happened occasionally when we had a review, or when we were interviewed for the radio. We had a gorilla costume, and sometimes one of us, usually Torque, would don the suit and we would hand out small flyers for the show. On college campuses. At rallies.

Once, we mocked up fake parking tickets. They looked just like real City of Cleveland parking tickets, with VIOLATION in big letters at one end, and amusing fine print which promoted the show (and the Guerrilla Connection). Torque wore the gorilla suit and went around downtown, ticketing every single car we came across. No idea whether we attracted a single audience member through this gambit, but we did get one message to our office line threatening legal action, which we found hilarious.

When it came time to promote Bad Epitaph Theater Company’s first free, outdoor production, Kirk Wood Bromley’s The American Revolution, we returned to buttons. Only this time, we weren’t selling them. Company members were asked to wear large buttons featuring the first American President and the legend “ASK ME” in large letters.

The plan was that, when someone did, in fact, ask, said company member would not only fill in the inquirer about the details of the upcoming production, but would also take the opportunity to ask for a dollar to support the production – a Washington for Washington, as it were. Mind, this was in 2004, over ten years before the Hamilton $10 ticket lottery, known as Ham4Ham.

Yes, Bad Epitaph must have pulled in over fifty dollars through this gambit, but that wasn’t the point, it was to open a conversation about the show, with a random selection of people who may or may not otherwise have had any interest in seeing a play, this play, any play. And that’s what it’s all about, to move past impersonal modes of advertising, be they print advertisements, online invitations or email blasts, to get to the point where people, lots of people, are actually talking to each other about a show.

Note: The title of this post comes from the book Guerrilla P.R.: How You Can Wage an Effective Publicity Campaign...Without Going Broke (Harper Collins, 1993) which I unironically purchased after the disillusion of Guerrilla Theater Company, when I went to work as Director of Public Relations at Dobama Theatre. It was a handy primer on the basics of marketing though this edition is now almost entirely obsolete as it was written just before the rise of the Internet. Levine also produced a revision called Guerrilla P.R. 2.0, released in 2008.