The Right Room | Actor Biographies

Nicole Coury (Mathilda)

 Performance credits include I’m Alive … and Always Will Be (Lang) with Nightbloom Theatre Company, Aida (ensemble/fight captain) at Karamu House, Language Archive (Emma) and Ada and the Engine (Ada Byron) at Clague Playhouse, Bedroom Culture (Mia) at Cleveland Public Theater, Acts of Clay (various) at Wizbang Theater and Executing Eve at Convergence Continuum.

Rachel Gold (Fanny)

Rachel is a Cleveland-based actor, director, fight choreographer, and educator. Acting credits include The Body Play (CPT), Grand Concourse (Seat of the Pants), Little Women (Dobama), and multiple roles with Great Lakes Theater and Cleveland Shakespeare Festival (CSF). She serves as Artistic Director of CSF, where she directed King Lear, and has also directed The Tempest (Beck Center) and radio plays with Radio on the Lake Theater. This fall, she will guest direct at her alma mater, Baldwin Wallace University. Rachel’s work spans classical and contemporary theatre, with a focus on dynamic physical storytelling.

Bradley Hughes (Leif)

Bradley is currently a BFA Acting Major at Baldwin Wallace University. His recent credits include: Twelfth Night and King Lear at the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival; Three Sisters, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, Measure for Measure, and The Dining Room at Baldwin Wallace University; and The Rescue of John Price (workshop) at The Oberlin Wellington Rescue Theatre Project.

Evan Joslyn (Steven)

Evan was most recently seen as Malvolio in Cleveland Shakespeare Festival’s production of Twelfth Night. He spent the past school year as an Actor-Teacher with Great Lakes Theater, and will spend the next with Montana Shakespeare in the Parks as part of their educational outreach tour of Richard III. As an immersive playwright, Evan’s second collaboration with Columbus Children’s Theatre, In the Land of Oz, will be produced this fall. He received a degree in theatre from Denison University and furthered his training at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey and Gaiety School of Acting. 

Kayce Kvacek (Lucille)

Kayce is a Cleveland based actress and playwright. She received her BFA from Boston University and has trained at The Academy for the Performing Arts and LAMDA (London). Some of her favorite roles have included Viola in Twelfth Night, May in Fool for Love and Camille in Horse Girls. Her first one act play, Ships in the Night, was accepted to the Boston Playwrights 24 Hour Play Marathon and has since been published & performed across the country.

Zach Palumbo (Charles)

Zach is a Cleveland-based performer whose favorite roles include Eugene in Broadway Bound (Beck Center), Feste in Twelfth Night and the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz (Ohio Shakespeare Festival), Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors, and SpongeBob in The SpongeBob Musical (Blank Canvas Theatre). He’s premiered works at Cleveland Public Theatre, including Savory Taṇhā and Experts in a Dying Field, and performed with Karamu House, none too fragile, and others. He’s also a music director with credits at Clague Playhouse and CWRU. His rock opera Future Perfect, co-written by David L. Munnell, premiered at BorderLight Festival in 2024.

Dani Schmaltz (Aubrey)

New to Cleveland, Dani is an Actor-Teacher at Great Lakes Theater. Previous acting credits include: The 39 Steps at The Appalachian Center for the Arts, Energy Game Changers educational tour with The National Theatre for Children, world premiere musical The Suffragist at Gallagher Bluedorn Performing Arts Center, 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and The Nerd at St. Croix Festival Theatre, and Dry Land at Rising Fire Theatre.

Cole Tarantowski (Mason)

Acting work in Cleveland includes A Midsummer's Night Dream with Cleveland Shakespeare Festival where he played Demetrius, Acts of Clay at Wizbang Theater, and he played a role in Karfuffle in Parmadoro 2 as part of the 2024 Micro Theatre festival. Cole also has begun his journey as a playwright, with his first full length play, Handlebar Brakes being recently presented as a staged reading at Cleveland Public Theater as part of their Test Flight theater festival.

BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. 

The Right Room | Character Biographies

Fanny was born in 1910, in Vermillion, Minnesota, the fifth of eight children. Her mother, a school teacher, passed away when Fanny was fourteen years old. A home-girl (in the former meaning of that term) she had two sons – the first she had placed for adoption when she was 25 – before marrying at the age of 36, to a man with whom she had a third son. She died in 1979, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, at the age of 69, and was buried in her hometown. She was never reunited with her first child.

Mason was born in 1913, in Hastings, Minnesota. He fathered a child that was born in 1935 before marrying another woman the following year, and together they had three children. A career in the Minnesota state house was brought short by his alcoholism, and he pursued a life in teaching and high school administration. He died in 1999, in Bellingham, Washington, at the age of 86. There is no evidence to suggest he was ever aware of the existence of his first child.

Lucille was born in 1904, in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1932, at the age of 28, she married Leif. They suffered two miscarriages and a stillbirth before adopting sons from the Willows Maternity Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri in 1935, and again in 1938. A registered nurse, she was employed by the Maternal Health Association, the forerunner of today’s Planned Parenthood of Greater Cleveland. She died in 1982, in Bay Village, Ohio, at the age of 78.

Leif was born in 1904 in Fevik, Norway, immigrating to the United States in 1927, and receiving American citizenship in 1931. He married Lucille in 1932 in Lakewood, Ohio and they adopted two sons. As a younger man he was a merchant seaman, later a member of the IBM Division of Cleveland Trust Bank. He died in 2005, in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the age of 101.

Mathilda was born in 1935, and brought up in Lakewood, Ohio. She married Charles in 1959, with whom she raised three boys in Bay Village, engaged in a traditional, suburban lifestyle as housewife and mother, supporting school organizations and a local food pantry. Following the death of her husband, she resumed a relationship with Archie, her high school sweetheart. Archie was holding her hand when she died in 2020, at the age of 84.

Charles was born at the Willows Maternity Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri in 1935. His adoptive parents raised him (largely) in Lakewood, Ohio. Graduating from Miami University, he was employed by Cleveland Trust/Ameritrust before forced retirement at the age of 53. He married Mathilda in 1959, and they raised three sons in Bay Village, Ohio. He died in 2016 in Lakewood at the age of 80, never having shown any outward interest in his biological heritage.

Aubrey was born in 1970 in Athens, Ohio, to a teenage mother, who raised her as a single mom after Aubrey’s biological father left when she was four, before her mother remarried in 1980. She graduated from high school a year early, moving first to Atlanta, and then to New York City before she turned 18. She moved to Cleveland in 1995, where she established herself as a writer and editor, a high school teacher and bookseller. With Steven she bore three children, the first stillborn.

Steven was born in 1968, in Cleveland, Ohio and raised in the suburb of Bay Village. Shortly after graduating from college he entered into a brief, two-year marriage. He married Aubrey in 1999, with whom he had three children, the first stillborn. He has been an underground theater artist, an arts educator, marketing director, actor, director and playwright. Since 1991 he has lived in Cleveland Heights, the city of great writers.

BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. 

The Right Room | Playwright's Note

The Willows Maternity Sanitarium

Once upon a time, the birth of my father was a tightly held secret; held by his biological mother, by the Willows Maternity Hospital, by the state of Missouri, and by the man himself, for he did not want to know.

Shortly following the death of my dad, through science and fortune, we learned the identity of his biological mother. And through recent investigations of my own, we also know the identity of his biological father. This came as something of a breathtaking revelation.

My mother once suggested I write a play inspired by the letters dad’s adoptive parents wrote to each other when my grandfather was a merchant seaman. And in part, I have finally done what she asked, and much more.

The Right Room is inspired by this lineage and these discoveries; how a child was conceived, adopted, chose a mate and how I came to be.

BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025

Our Mid-South Road Trip (2000)

"Big Mo" Cave City, KY

The summer of 2000 we were in a good place. Newly wed, she had just stepped down from a gig as an editor for the weekly Free Times and started pursuing her first Masters degree. I was the artistic director of a new theater company coming off a string of very successful productions, most recently Lysistrata. And we were in deep negotiations about having a baby.

Assuming we would not have such an opportunity again, not for a long time, we planned an extended, three-week road trip. A week to the Outer Banks, where we would meet up with some friends for a week at the beach, and then a week to get home.

For the journey I made her the second mixtape in the ongoing Music From the Big Love series (1997-2000) and we had duped a number of episodes of The American Life, “streaming” them onto cassette using the RealAudio app.

Roadside attractions were on the schedule, including one of the great American attractions, Graceland. First, however, we were to check out Mammoth Caves in the appropriately named Cave City, KY.

Wigwam Village #2

Also on the agenda, unique quarters! That first night, we stayed at Wigwam Village #2, a circle of fifteen conical, cement tepees. Most young people would recognize the place as the inspiration for the “Cozy Cone” motel from the Pixar movie Cars. A remnant of the county’s two-lane car culture of the mid-20th century, there were once seven of these places across the Southeast and Southwest.

Wigwam Village #2 is still in operation today, twenty-five years ago it was owned and operated by Ivan John, a man who was unironically of Native American ancestry. Built in 1937, our little, circular room featured original hickory furniture, air conditioning and some very poor cable. I remember the TV in particular because we were trying to catch a re-run of Freaks & Geeks with little success.

But we also watched the local news and learned about a brand new phenomenon: The fourth book in the Harry Potter series (I had heard of that) was due to be released the next day, and children were dressing in costumes and waiting up until midnight to purchase them at their local bookstores. Can you imagine such a thing?

The next day, we took the “Grand Avenue” tour of Mammoth Cave National Park, a four-hour trek underground. 

Saturday, July 8, 2000 

“Near constant 54° temp, wore jeans and a sweatshirt, still got rather cool. Large tour group (60? 100?) moving swiftly through the subterranean corridors. Would like to have lingered in places, just as well we kept moving. Very few jerks in that group. I had a theory that with a post four to four and a half hour time span, a lot of cranky folks simply wouldn’t come. I was right."

We had lunch in the Snowball Room (yes) enjoying the bad coffee they sold, and sandwiches, cheese and crackers we had brought ourselves, which was wise given the selection we saw offered. Emerging into the light and excessive heat left us disoriented, and we took an afternoon boat ride down the Green River that we had made reservations for. It was pleasantly dull.

Big Mike's Mystery House

However, on our drive back to our tepee we stopped at Big Mike’s Rock and Gift Shop, home to the world’s largest fossilized Mosasaur skull. My real interest, however, lay in Bike Mike’s Mystery House – my first mystery spot!

Only one dollar (today they charge four) to “feel the force of gravity!” Yes, you can feel that for free. But can you walk on walls? See water run uphill? Witness cheap executive desk toys under black light? It was like a tilted headshop, featuring the kind of forced perspective and mirror tricks you can currently pay thirty dollars to experience at the Museum of Illusions off Public Square.

The next day we left bright and early, and had plenty of time for an unexpected stop: The Belle Meade Plantation. That’s not what they call it today, today it is the Belle Meade Historic Site & Winery. Twenty-five years ago, they still called it what it was, but things were beginning to change.

We took the tour, and learned the intimate details of the ten white people who lived in the house, but nothing of the 136 people who occupied the “slave’s quarters.” However, they had recently reconstructed one of those buildings which had previously been destroyed – and have since reconstructed more, which are today part of the Jubilee Tour where they “aim to honor those who were enslaved, formerly enslaved, and contract laborers by telling their stories.”

There’s also a wine and bourbon tour.

That night we arrived in Memphis, where we had a very difficult time trying to find an independent restaurant near our hotel. When queried, our concierge recommended two different chains. Good Lord, it’s Memphis, please don’t send your guests to Friday’s.

Graceland

The next day changed my life; we visited Graceland. I was prepared for something tacky, or ridiculous. I was not prepared for the place to be (relatively) small, homey and less than opulent. Toni observed that it reflected the tastes of a man who had grown up dirt-poor, and was struggling to be normal.

I found the oft-ridiculed Jungle Room (many cringe because it has shag carpet on the ceiling) to look fun and cozy. It has a wall fountain! The man definitely had a sense of humor. And everything was human-sized, modest. Even the swimming pool is just a small, kidney-shaped pool. A standard-sized kitchen. An intimate rec room. It was charming. It was touching.

That’s just the house, there was also a much larger area adjacent to the mansion that featured all the stuff – the planes, the cars, the clothes, the instruments – those things weren’t as interesting. It was interesting to note that the entire time we were there, with every tour guide we listened to, Tom Parker was mentioned exactly once.

We picked up his gospel LP How Great Thou Art at the gift ship ("Run On" is a banger) and a copy of Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick, which we began reading to each other for the rest of the trip. It’s an incredible book and key to my now burgeoning appreciation of the singer.

The following morning we visited the Hotel Peabody, to witness the daily, morning march of ducks from the elevator, and across a red carpet to the lobby fountain where they splash around until 5:00 PM when they march back to the elevator.

I don’t know where they spend the night. No one does.

We took a walk around Confederate Park (now Fourth Bluff Park) and the statue of Jefferson Davis (removed in 2017) before driving to Sun Studio. Long live Sun Studio. So many legendary, early rock and roll records were recorded there, including the Delta Cats’ "Rocket 88", "Raunchy" by Bill Justis, and of course, "That’s All Right" as performed by Elvis Presley.

Rock City

But how do you “tour” a one-room studio? With sound and a charismatic young tour guide, in this case a guy named Mick with spiky black hair, chunky glasses, a huge smile and an apparent love for the art form. He told us the story, showed off the equipment, and played several session outtakes that put us right back into that time and place.

Then we went to Rock City.

I had seen road signs for Lookout Mountain (a natural formation) and Rock City (wait for it) through many road trips, but had never had the chance to see what it was all about. The main attraction of Lookout Mountain is the specious but nearly impossible to verify claim that from its summit you could see seven different states.

The attraction had been developed by a couple named the Carters, whose main claim to fame – outside of all the SEE ROCK CITY billboards – was franchising Tom Thumb Miniature Golf courses throughout the land. Their talent in creating diminutive, curated tableaus, augmented by artificial flora is also represented throughout this park, which was also a legitimate garden with well-identified plants and flowers.

We were greeted by Alvin, the singing, animatronic gnome and a mute, waving pig. We followed the Enchanted Trail, listening to elevator music pumped through hidden speakers. Back at Mammoth Cave, I had remarked to my wife how all the place needed was a few well-placed garden gnomes. Well, we finally found where they had all gone to. All the garden gnomes.

I learned an important parenting tip on our walk, as one small boy had a pop gun with the legend ROCK CITY burned into the stock. He was relentlessly popping it and his father kept saying, “Logan, cut it out.” Dude. You literally just bought him that, what did you think was going to happen.

Chattooga River

Our next unique accommodations came in the form of the tree house. Not an actual tree house, but a small, secluded apartment set high among the woods in Highlands, NC. From the vantage point of our deck we could see no other people (and we were strongly urged to keep sound to a minimum; no TV, no radio) with a view of the mountains and, we believed, Georgia. We heard the rain, the wind in the trees, a far-off motorcycle. There was a diffuse brightness that next morning, thick mist gathered over the trees. Then our journey took a nasty turn.

Thursday, July 13, 2000

“We went to see two waterfalls. It was a strenuous hike we both said we liked very much. It felt great to be so aerobic after being on the road for six days. I took pictures of each waterfall, stood, watched, meditated …

“We left for another beautiful, scenic location; the headwaters of the Chattooga River. On our way we got lunch from the Rosewater Cafe. String beans, chicken salad, a veggie wrap, two lemon sodas and a slice of buttermilk pie. We searched for a nice location, right by the river. I said, “What we need is a big, flat rock.” Lo and behold, there was a big, flat rock, right by the path, in the river!

“We walked to it with no problem. Sat, ate, shared everything. We took pictures. Toni put her feet in the water. A fish nibbled her toes. We put on our shoes, and collected our baggage, and turned to go. Toni was wearing sunglasses, looking into the woods, mistook her first step off the big rock, stumbled and crashed onto several rocks there. She tried to keep from hitting her face on another rock, and only glanced it with her cheek. A large branch in the way, however, cut her face, right in the middle of her left eyebrow.

“I didn’t know this. I knew she fell, and I panicked. I figured she may have badly hurt her knees, and that’s what she thought at first, but almost immediately I saw the blood, a lot of it, gushing from her brow. Her cheek appeared banged up, I whipped off my new Land’s End shirt, imagining I would mop up the blood with it. She told me to use Kleenex from her purse.

“Thank God we packed a first aid kit. I said we would need to go to a hospital. I knew this would upset her, I even knew she would say she didn’t need to. But I could see differently. It wasn’t until she looked at herself in the mirror in the car that she realized I was right.

“I drove back to town, not so fast as to make her nervous. I had fucked up, I thought. I had panicked, and she had to take care of herself. She kept having to calm me down.

“The hospital was great. The Highlands was established as a resort community by the Woodruffs – the Coca-Cola family. I assumed, with so many rich, older people here, the hospital must be top-notch. The waiting room was almost empty, the entire time in the hospital was about an hour.

“The doctor was a kind man. The worst part of the ordeal was injecting painkillers directly into her open wound, she was in terrible pain for the first two shots. The wound began to swell a bit, and the gash in her brown looked like a little mouth. Blood continued to seep from it. He cleaned it gently, removed some dirt or a bit of tree bark, a small piece, and made sure there was no eyebrow hair in the wound.

“The nurse said it would take two stitches, but the doctor put in six. With her all numbed up like that, it wasn’t any more of an ordeal. And it means the scar will match up much more evenly. I watched as much as I could stand. I didn’t watch the needle go in, but I watched the stitching.”

He did such a careful job, today you can’t even tell she has that scar. After that ordeal, we returned to the treehouse. She napped, took a bath. We decided to keep our dinner reservation at the Lakeside Inn; after all, we had to eat. It was awkward. She may have felt self-conscious about the bruise on her cheek and the large bandage on her face, but believe me, I felt worse. I knew what they were thinking I had done to her.

We spent a long day driving to Greensboro to hook up with friends, stopping briefly in Asheville (still hoping to get back there someday) reading Last Train to each other, and holing up at a gas station for a half hour, waiting out a torrential downpour. The next day we all got groceries and headed for the coast, to spend a week in the Outer Banks. Toni’s injury was healing well, our vacation continued without further incident.

So, for the moment, sightseeing was at a minimum, though – and I mentioned this as a historical reference as much as for any other reason – while we were staying in Rodanthe, Toni and I left our friends behind to visit the mainland and take in opening night of the first X-Men movie. Was Hugh Jackman ever so young? Were any of us?

Monticello

Our journey home from North Carolina also took several days, with stops at Monticello (we would return eighteen years later – with children) and the University of Virginia. The main difference between Jefferson’s home and Presley’s is that Monticello has a clock in every room, and Graceland has a TV in every room.

One July 26, 2000 – my 32nd birthday – we visited the Mummies of the Insane in Philippi, West Virginia. I learned a lot about Philippi; site of the first land battle of the Civil War, home to the only covered bridge that is part of the U.S. Highway system, and a charming and very full historical society, which is also home to the mummies.

The museum is free, the mummies were a buck. One hundred and thirty years previous, amateur embalmer Graham Hamrick experimented in mummifying fruits and vegetables, animals and yes, humans, acquiring the “unclaimed” bodies of two women from the WV Hospital for the Insane (now the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum).

We concluded our circuit with my in-law’s in Athens, lazing on the porch, enjoying margaritas at Casa Nueva. My wife’s sister was sixteen, she’d been reading these Harry Potter books. I picked up the first and read it in one afternoon. I read the next one the next day. It was a different time.

Saturday, July 29, 2000

“With a baby in our future, I wonder when we will get to hit the road again.”

Sooner than you wish, young man. Sooner than you wish.

Unruly Grandeur | The York Plays

Chelsea Cannon as the Angel Gabriel

Next weekend, the Cleveland-based company Unruly Grandeur will caravan to the University of Toronto to perform a brace of medieval mystery plays.

This weekend, they are presenting dress rehearsals out-of-doors in Lincoln Park. You can attend, and I recommend you should, today, Sunday, June 1 at 2:00 PM. A couple dozen of us braved to cooler temps to witness the event yesterday.

The York Corpus Christi Plays are a series of short scripts which, taken together, tell the story of Christ. Festival organizers describe these seven hundred or so year-old plays as “Bible fan-fic” as they depict moments from the Bible and expand upon them, often with great humor, and they are certainly still, after all these centuries, entertaining.

Those who performed these works then, and those who will be presenting them in Canada next weekend, would and will take all day to do so. There’s almost twenty companies participating who will cycle through all the plays, using wagons to cart their ensemble to three different locations across the university campus.

When you attend today, and I recommend you do, you will see just the two pieces produced by Unruly Grandeur, and it will only last an hour. The first, Joseph’s Troubles, plays like a mid-century sit-com. The hapless and no-longer-young Joseph (Stuart Hoffman) presses his young and pregnant spouse (Chennelle Bryant-Harris) to tell him who the father is.

Michael Montanus as King Herod

The second, Herod Antipas is a broad clown show with overt modern political imagery and honest-to-God red noses, in which Herod (Michael Montanus) interrogates a silent Jesus (Jailyn Sherell Harris). Directed by Charlene V. Smith and Kelly Elliott, their two scenes are bright and colorful, big and broad and beautiful.

Sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of Tremont, I was reminded of that Good Friday in 1993, when Guerrilla Theater Company were engaged to perform a series of medieval monologues on the steps of Zion United Church (right up West 14th Street from the park) as part of a “prayer walk” inspired by the seven last words of Christ, in which the faithful would walk to each of the many churches in the neighborhood. That day, I was Pilate, in a fresh charcoal gray, double-breasted suit and floral tie, and I condemned a man to death.

Civilization has come such a long way in the past two thousand years.

Unruly Grandeur presents the York Plays, today at 2:00 PM at the gazebo in Lincoln Park, Tremont. Admission is free. Donate to send Unruly Grandeur to Toronto!

Here Are The High School Plays! (Revisited)

To paraphrase what a traffic court judge once said to me, this blog has hair on it. Which is to say, it’s been around a while. When I began this blog on January 1, 2010, our kids were six and four. Now the younger one is entering his junior year at the University of Cincinnati, the elder just graduated with honors from my alma mater, Ohio University.

Seven years ago, I wrote a post about the kinds of plays being produced in American high schools. The elder (Zelda, I will name them, they are an adult now) a freshman in high school, was in their first evening of one-acts, which included Don Zolidis’s omnipresent 10 Ways to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse. Later that year, Zelda would play Poppy in a very good production of Noises Off.

One of my biggest regrets, if not theirs, was that they were cast as Celia in As You Like It their junior year, a production cancelled due to COVID-19. I hope to someday see them do Shakespeare.

Most plays chosen by high school drama departments, be they contemporary, classic or sometime in between, aren’t about high school students. I have been led to believe teens don’t want to play teens, they want to be something other than who they are. It is also true that many shows that have featured teenage characters feature poorly drawn teenage characters (I’m looking at you, Bye Bye Birdie.)

Recently, however, there have been several musicals that have broken through, due in part to their freshness and accuracy in addressing the concerns and interests of modern young people; musicals like The Prom, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and Ride the Cyclone. And in just the past few months, I have had the chance to take Zelda to see two recent plays that are very present and particular to the current moment.

The first was last spring’s Dobama Theatre production of Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, an 80 minute play about a competitive high school travel girl soccer team (I think I got those adjectives in the right order). I read it in 2020 and I loved it – as a soccer dad, I felt it rang with truth – and I thought, oh man! Zelda needs to read this! Then I thought again. They were in the thick of it, and this story might come as an unwelcome intrusion.

"The Wolves" by Sarah DeLappe
Directed by Nell Bang-Jensen
Philadelphia Theatre Co. (2020)

I did watch a production of The Wolves produced for Zoom in late 2020 by the Philadelphia Theater Company, which was surprisingly effective given the limitations of the technology. When Dobama announced their production, I thought, perfect! I can now take them to see that. It had been over four years since the quarantine-era match that took Heights out of the playoffs, and the flagrant foul that took our child, the keeper, out of the game.

So we attended the performance together. I was sure Z would be particularly drawn to the character of 00, the goalie for the Wolves, and in this production played by Jasmine Renee, who is also directing The Right Room for BorderLight this summer. Z said they loved the show, and also that they never need to see it again. I don’t know it, but I get it.

More recently, we saw John Proctor is the Villain on Broadway. The moment they went on sale we got tickets – I just had to take the family to see this show. And then I got very concerned. I loved the script, I also loved the Performing Arts Academy production two years ago, But … Broadway? Would it work? Would it be successful? Would the market bear a play about the very real concerns of people who were not yet adults?

The marketing campaign was interesting. I kept getting texts that were written (I guess) like an actual teenager was sending them. I forwarded one to the rest of the family and Zelda thought I’d been hacked.

Long story short, the production is not only successful but very successful, and nominated for seven Tony Awards. Having seen Oh, Mary! last fall, this is only the second time I have had the chance to see two Tony nominated shows before the awards drop – the first was two years ago when we saw Merrily We Roll Along and Purlie Victorious on the same weekend in late 2023.

The evening we attended John Proctor was a Tuesday night, and the place was packed. So many young people! So many young women! Attending a play! And they were rewarded, too, as the entire company who played the teenage characters signed everyone’s program at the stage door.

This is a fascinating time in American theater, where challenging new ideas are making their way onto professional stages across the nation. That the voices of young people are represented with honesty and accuracy, and in a way they have not been before. Will plays like The Wolves or John Proctor is the Villain supplant chestnuts like Twelve Angry Men or The Crucible on our high school stages? And would it be such a terrible thing if they did?

See also: 

Here Are The High School Plays! (2018)

Play a Day: John Proctor is the Villain

On Site-Specific Theater

BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025

Let us define our terms.

Dr. Suzy Woltmann defines immersive theatre as “a performance art movement that aims to transform audience members from passive recipients to active participants.” Furthermore, she highlighted features of immersive performance which may include:

• Blurring the line between audience and performer
• Leaving the stage behind
• Including sensory experiences
• Shifting between the personal and the collective

An immersive experience can often be described as site-specific theatre, though those terms are not necessarily mutually inclusive. The folks at the Australian Performing Arts Conservatory states that site-specific theatre “breaks free from the confines of a traditional theatre where actors perform on stage. The performances take place in unexpected locations, from bustling city streets and historical sites to warehouses and parks.” Site-specific performance can:

• Create a more immersive experience
• Add a layer of authenticity and depth to the performance
• Allow creative teams to innovate and experiment with storytelling techniques

Site-specific performance is not, of course, a recent thing. By any basic definition, we may assume theater originated any place people were, and only later did everyone decide it needed to happen primarily in what we call a “theater.”

Sleep No More (2011)

But it is because of this codification of theatrical traditions that producing a play in a non-traditional space became something of a novelty. In early years of this century, for example, Charenton Theatre Co. produced a string of site-specific performances across the city of Cleveland, staging Albee’s Zoo Story on a park bench, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology on a tour of cemeteries, and James McLure’s Lone Star in a number of local drinking establishments.

Site-specific and immersive cross over when they engage the audience in some unique, sensory way. Perhaps the most famous recent example of this was Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, which was set in a vast warehouse made to resemble a stately and crumbling hotel through which a masked audience was welcome to freely wander, handling sets and props and even on occasion, the actors – this last was not specifically encouraged, but it happened. A lot.

Inspired by this, a team of us created the Love In Pieces project in 2014, in which we produced Sarah Morton’s play of that name inside an actual house. Due to space limitations, an evening’s audience was between sixteen and twenty people, and they were split into four groups, each group of four or five experiencing one of the four, ten-minute scenes, before being escorted to the next one.

In 2023, the Give Me Your Keys company presented my play Step Nine as part of the BorderLight Fringe. Director James Rankin had asked for a play for two men to be performed in an actual bar, and I provided him one. Thirty or more crammed into the Snug at Parnell’s in Playhouse Square as two actors spoke at normal, human volume, forcing the crowd to lean in, as if eavesdropping on a private conversation.

I had not planned to apply for BorderLight myself this year, until I read the application and found this note about submitting a site-specific adaptation.

Site-specific Adaptation
Are you willing to adapt your performance to a site-specific location? For example, an alley, a hotel room, a park, a car, a loading dock, or a public street. Artists are also encouraged to suggest a site-specific adaptation/production. (emphasis mine)

Nicholas Chokan, Jason Leupold
Step Nine (2023)
BorderLight Theatre Festival

A hotel room? I have spent the past year writing a script that takes place in a hotel room! I took it as a challenge – a challenge to them. If they could really find a hotel room in which to produce my new play, then by God, I would present my play there.

And so, I am happy to announce that my new play, The Right Room, will be performed as part of the BorderLight Theater Festival 2025 this summer, and produced in a room at the Crowne Plaza Cleveland in Playhouse Square. One single hotel room will represent four different hotel rooms, in four different cities, in four different eras, to tell one very epic narrative. Epic – but intimate.

Source: 

“What Is Immersive Theatre?” by Suzy Woltmann, Backstage, May 8, 2023
“The Role of Site-Specific Theatre in Contemporary Performance Art,” Australian Performing Arts Conservatory, September 19, 2024