The Flick (2017)

"The Flick" at Dobama Theatre

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

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

Center Mayfield (1981)
Photo: Cleveland Heights Historical Society

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

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

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

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

Center Mayfield (2016)
Photo: Cinema Treasures

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

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

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

Centrum Theatre (1998)
Photo: cleveland.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Detail.

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

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

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

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

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

The Bechdel-Wallace Test

Alison Bechdel (b. 1960) is a MacArthur Grant Awarded cartoonist, creator of the long-running strip Dykes To Watch For and the graphic novels Fun Home and Are You My Mother? As a young theater artist in the 1990s reading Dykes in the Gay People’s Chronicle was a primer helping me to see beyond coarse stereotypes about lesbians when my circle of friends were either largely straight or closeted.

Click on to enlarge.

An edition of Dykes titled "The Rule" featured two friends discussing what movie to see. One explains she has three rules which dictate whether or not she’s interested in seeing a movie:

1. One, it has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who, two, talk to each other,
3. about , three, something besides a man

Now generally referred the Bechdel Test, the cartoonist prefers joint attribution with the person who originally thought up the criteria, an old friend names Liz Wallace -- whose contribution, you will notice, was noted on the original strip. Though "The Rule" is thirty years old, the term has become a meme in the past decade and a starting point for discussion about gender parity across all spectrum of media.

Breaking Point (1989)

What do the results signify? You could deduce from the dearth of roles for women in film that the point is representation. You can also consider what those roles consist of; do the female characters exist merely as romantic foils or objects of sexual desire - do these female characters even have names?

The bigger question, and the question I have been asking myself of late, is what stories are we telling? It’s not about cramming more women into your movie, and it’s not even about employing more women writers - although that would go a very long way to ameliorating the discrepancy. We should be asking ourselves what stories we writers choose to present to the world.

Scripts written for the theater (call them plays) have a handicap when it comes to passing the test, if only because most plays by design will have fewer total characters. But the challenge remains the same, what story do we choose to tell?

The first play I tried writing was the one-act Breaking Point, based on my own college comic strip. One night, as I was conversing with my stage manager and fretting about the one female housemate in an apartment of four. She was as smart and smart-alecky as the rest of them in the strip, but distilling several months of story line into a thirty-minute play, I realized how all the male characters treated her like shit.

“I write terrible female characters,” I sighed.

“Yeah," she said, shaking her head somewhat sympathetically. "You do.”

The Vampyres (1997)

I didn’t have another play produced for the better part of ten years. When I finally started composing The Vampyres in the mid-90s (finally, as in, why wasn’t I writing plays before this?) I had a story I was burning to tell, about a cynical med-student and a couple of poseur vampires which also included a former crush of the protagonists and a teenage barista onto whom he transfers his affection.

No, the two women do not talk to each other. If they did, it would certainly have been about the men. However, by that time I was aware of sexism in my writing, even if I didn’t know exactly what to do about it. I strove to retrofit the character of Mary so that she was a strong women who had her own agenda as an artist, but really, in brief she fell in love with a male vampire because he was irresistible in the way we are all told we just have to accept.

The story belonged to the male characters. It was a struggle between he and the other two hes. And it was represented in a battle over possession of the two shes. Giving the female characters their own personal agendas does not change what was the central conflict of the plot.

More recently, I have been working on a two-hander, the as-yet unproduced The Way I Danced With You. There’s two people in this play, one man and one woman, so the Bechdel Test does not really apply. But is the story equally theirs? Is the pursuit of her goals on an equal footing with her pursuit of her own goals? I believe that it is, and it is important to me that it is -- and not merely to satisfy an agenda. As I reported previously, the reception of this play changed from the Valdez reading in June and the Cleveland reading in November.

My breakthrough in creating feminist plays, however, comes largely thanks to my work in children’s theater. Who knows why this is, perhaps because at a distance I can tell stories to children in which gender has the fluidity that children themselves possess.

White Garlic and Red Onion

Adventures in Slumberland featured a protagonist in the form of a five year-old boy, who could be a girl, and was, in fact, played by a woman, and probably usually should be. His hero’s quest ostensibly is to find the princess (this is eighty years before Donkey Kong) but that’s a McGuffin, it’s really about a child growing to appreciate their own personhood.

Rosalynde & The Falcon turns the princess story on its head, as a young woman is persecuted by her wicked stepfather the king, and escapes to the wood where -- instead of looking after a band of thieves (or dwarfs, what have you) she becomes the leader of the thieves, and eventually the ruler of her nation. There are two named female characters … I guess it’s funny that one of them doesn’t even speak until the very end, but they certainly do not talk about the men, they talk about governance.

My latest work, Red Onion, White Garlic, opens early next month. I hate to describe a play by what it is not, but I did not set out to create a feminist children’s play. It was not my intention to create a play which passes the Bechdel Test entirely and without qualification.

What I did do was investigate Indonesian folktales, arrive at one which centers upon the relationship of two sisters, and every moment I found myself searching for a new character to add to the narrative, she was always female. I even considered male characters, but they never made sense as part of the story. It is not that men are absent. The tale belongs to women.

Red Onion, White Garlic opens April 8, 2017 at Talespinner Children's Theatre.

Reception

re·cep·tion (n.)
1. the action or process of receiving something sent, given, or inflicted.
2. a formal social occasion held to welcome someone or to celebrate a particular event.
3. the area in a hotel, office, or other establishment where guests and visitors are greeted and dealt with.

During my twenties I was enamored of Alan Rudolph’s Lost Generation duology, The Moderns (1988) and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994). The first is an historical fiction, about American expatriate artists in Paris, the second a bit more fact-based and centering around the character of Dorothy Parker and those of the Algonquin Set.

As one who thought of myself an artist (of what I had not yet come to appreciate) and the member of a generation with much in common with those bright young things of the 1920s (we can have this argument later) the keen wit and desperate romanticism of Rudolph’s characters and the painful longing of Mark Isham’s scores filled this young adult with a deep heart hurt for which I had no actual life experience to deserve. Not yet. Not even close.

When my then-girlfriend Toni moved to Cleveland from New York City, we sat around my house, unbelievably big and comfortable for two people (so it now appears, with two ever-growing teenagers) drinking, smoking, and screwing and having delightful, indulgent fantasies about hosting a salon in our parlor, inviting all our friends who, like those in the Algonquin were not yet but but would someday be famous.

I got shitfaced in the Algonquin the night before I proposed marriage, you know. But that is an entirely other story.

Anyway. It’s like when I directed my first solo performance in 1998 and Chris Johnston said I should write a one-man show for myself to perform and I said, what do I have to talk about on stage by myself for one hour that would interest anyone? Be careful what you ask for.

Regardless, our salon never happened. Then Trump got elected.

Like so many, we wanted to do something, We felt alone, and wanted connection. The intent was not to create a political event, those needs would be satisfied by marches, phone calls and letter writing, and general wokeness. But making sense of the senselessness, to speak but also to listen, to provide a safe space for the free exchange of ideas, to begin and hopefully to continue a conversation.

It was Toni’s idea. I wish I could remember the first names she came up with, they all sounded a bit too clever, like the Be-Sharps -- witty at first, but less funny each time you hear it. I pressed her to come up with something that might last a while, beyond our current emergency, and she soon arrived at the name Reception. A fact, but also clever, but also open to interpretation.

But why this now? Almost two years ago Toni Morrison wrote an article in which she recalled Bush’s reelection in 2004. A friend asked if she was in despair, to which she replied, No! “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.” And so it is today.

Once a week, because once a month would not only be not enough, but would make it all the more likely we would cancel or postpone. Since the first weekend of December we have opened our door every Sunday (Christmas and New Year’s excepted) to share books, stories, articles, rants, scripts, artwork, ideas, poetry, video, song, whatever with whomever arrives.

There are drinks and snacks for pretty much exactly two hours and then we get on with our lives, hopeful in the notion that at least we have been heard.

@InTheCLE

Spending the week as the voice of @InTheCLE which is “a citizen voice social media channel that lets Clevelanders share and promote their love for Cleveland via Twitter.” Basically, they pass off the handle to a different person every week, whose responsibility is to tweet early and often about what’s happening in the city.

From March 6 - 12, 2017 that’s me, they even swap your face in and so when I go back through the timeline I am surprised to see my face attached to things I did not actually tweet. Other InTheCLE contributors have a greater interest in sports or civic engagement, mine has a lot to do with promoting area theater.

This is not the first time I have done this, I was on InTheCLE last January, too. It was quite an education in Twitter, which I rarely used. I didn’t know the difference between a "Reply" and a "Quote Retweet" and why you would rather use one than the other. I was also obsessed with creating my own original content, and was unaware you could get away with retweeting interesting local news without having to comment upon it.

Because I have been taking this seriously (a little too seriously) I have been on Twitter A LOT this week and it’s a little disorienting. It’s funny, people will ask InTheCLE for a recommendation for something - say, a good vegan restaurant - and I feel it is my job to find out a million suggestions right away. I even use Facebook to poll my friends there, who are all too happy to offer their opinions, and then report back. Before I know it, I’ve lost a half-hour.

In the late 1990s, someone did an experiment where they holed up in a hotel room for a week or a month or something, and their only communication with the outside world was the internet. No TV, no phone, just the “world wide web.” If this person couldn’t pay for it with a credit card and have it delivered via internet, they couldn’t eat it. Video streaming was nascent - no DSL, so no movies. Watched a lot of porn, apparently.

Okay, so I’m not in that situation. I move freely through the world, but in the interest of providing original CLE-based content (once an hour is a goal) I have spent a lot of time scouring for interesting things to report, even if they don’t necessarily interest me. And, because the point is promote the city, my commentary should be positive, supportive. It’s a challenge.

Some people think the Browns management have made some very good decisions today. Others do not. I avoid politics. I try very hard to avoid politics. Twitter is a political sewer.

But it has also been invigorating, catching all the responses to Mayor Jackson's State of the City address today, if not the address itself. Yesterday, it was all about discovering, acknowledging and promoting woman-owned businesses for International Women's Day. I have also tagged several professional theater productions.

Anyway, the weekend is coming up. If you know of any interesting activities or special events in the Cleveland area coming up, please let me know. Just tag @InTheCLE!

Apply today to be considered as an @InTheCLE Tweeter of the Week.

Objectively/Reasonable

Objectively/Reasonable

The common wisdom is that in order to present the appearance of fairness and balance you must provide “both sides” of the story.

The Guardian (UK) recently published the article Cleveland's dividing lines over race issues come to light under Trump by Chris McGreal (3/3/2017) an interesting, troubling profile of race relations in our city. The story includes interviews with two men - one white, one black. “Both sides.”

The problem in this article, as is the case everywhere, is that the considered, carefully stated opinions of Police Detective Lynn Hampton, who is black, are drowned out by the bellicose, defensive, defiant and cognitively dissonant opinions of retired steel executive Brian King, who is white.

With the election of Donald Trump, Detective Hampton worries about an escalation of tension between the Cleveland police and the African-American community. “What kind of society does (Trump) want to create? You can’t continue to back people into a corner without anybody eventually getting tired and striking out. That’s the very thing that I’m trying to avoid,” Hampton says.

A Trump supporter, King badmouths all other politicians for pandering. “They’re all snakes and getting rich off us,” he says. King hopes that “Trump puts sane people in charge of this.” But he also admits that Trump is “an asshole,” but that that is why he supports him. “He’s a shyster. He’s a crook. But I want him to be a crook for us.”

Asked for his opinion, King talks not only out of both sides of his mouth, but out of every orifice he has.

Anyone remember this speech?

The white man’s word so totally overwhelms that of the person of color. We saw this on full display at last week’s Oscars, when the embarrassment of white producers, the dithering apology of a white Hollywood legend and the several days of analysis and hand-wringing over dingbat white accountants entirely eclipsed the historic fact that this year the Best Picture was in fact awarded to Moonlight, a film starring, directed and written by people of color.

Last weekend, my wife and I went to see Objectively/Reasonable at Playwright’s Local, a play created by several local playwrights based on numerous interviews on the subject of recent police violence in Cleveland. Watching this performance, we did not hear two sides of the Tamir Rice tragedy and the Brelo case -- we heard the story from dozens of sides. From citizens, police officers, community organizers, city councilmen, journalists and family members.

The fact that each point of view we heard from, every unique opinion, was from the mind and mouth of a person of color does not make this performance piece “unbalanced.” The absence of white voices - the “other side” - meant that we could actually hear it, without the noise of that dominant party, always obfuscating, misrepresenting, and whitesplaining.

I am white. I am not the "other side." And I do not need the hear other white people explain anything to me, at all. Especially white men.

Loganberry Books

Objectively/Reasonable is a breathtaking performance, too, you should see it. The performers are uniformly excellent, the stories deeply affecting, director Terrence Spivey truly outdoes himself with this event. Our city needs to listen to these voices, without the sudden urge to respond. Listen first, and think without prejudice.

On a similar note, the folks at Loganberry Books have staged their own performance-art event in honor of Women’s History Month.

As reported in Cleveland Scene, Loganberry Books Shelves Men's Books Backwards as a 'Metaphor of Silencing the Male Voice' by Laura Morrison (3/3/2017) owner Harriett Logan and her staff reshelved every book written by a man so that their spines face the back of the shelves.

What do you see? Perhaps how few books that have ever been published have been written by women? You can also see more clearly all the books which are written by women. The picture of the shelves is quite striking, when the books are are presented that way.

Unfortunately for Harriett (who is a good friend) when being interviewed, she said that the display is a “metaphor of silencing the male voice.” And as you see, that became the headline.

Well. You can imagine how many men who happened upon this article on the internet took to the idea of being “silenced.” The social media blowback was ugly. They have called for a boycott, probably the same people who called for a boycott of the musical Hamilton.

The very idea, the suggestion of forcing a white man to be silent, to stop talking, to wit; to shut the fuck up ... and not even in reality! As a metaphor, as a display in a second-hand bookstore. Why it’s unconscionable! It’s unbelievable! It’s unfair, it’s discriminatory, it’s sexist! Sexist against men!

Honestly, white man. For the first time in your life, sit down. Take a deep breath.

And shut the fuck up.

Objectively/Reasonable at Playwrights' Local continues at the Creative Space at Waterloo through March 11, 2017.

Loganberry Books is located at 13015 Larchmere Blvd. in Cleveland.