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.

Circle Mirror Transformation (play)

Now Playing

I really did not think I was going to like this play.

I have read one play by Annie Baker, The Aliens, and that I did not expect to enjoy either, and I enjoyed reading that very much. I was looking forward to Circle Mirror Transformation at Dobama Theatre because it features one of my friends and co-workers and I was very proud of her and happy for her, and then I heard it was about a drama workshop in Vermont and I began to feel oogey.

The postcard did not help. Everyone on the floor, heads together. It took a moment for me to realize, okay, all right they are doing a floor relaxation exercise, and that it wasn’t just a horribly cliché group theater shot, but that only made me feel worse.

Are we going there again? Is this play a bunch of theater exercises, that theater people know only too well and can laugh at because ho-ho-ho, we’ve all done this haven’t we and “civilians” (ever since my first acting class in college I despised the use of the word “civilian” to describe non-theater people … I might be a beatnik but theater people don’t generally put themselves in mortal danger for the sake of national security and do not have the right to distinguish themselves from those who do) can just sit back and laugh because those touchy-feely, promiscuous theater nuts sure do a lot of craaaazy things.

I saw Alan Parker's Fame on cable, and that was my first experience with theater exercises. I was thirteen. I was enthralled but also found it humorous. Finding that those were things people really do, and then being asked to do them made me more self-conscious than if it had been a new discovery. 

We do, actually, need to feel self-confident enough to do, well, anything, really, to create performances that are worth people laying down money to watch. And these exercises help. Unless you feel like a clown doing them. So making fun of them as part of a play, a play about learning how to act … you get my point. It has the potential to make me unhappy.

Self, Betsy Zajko, Rich Wiess
Guerrilla Theater Company, 1992

Let’s change the subject for a moment. Dobama. The new Dobama. Just bizarre. It looks like the old Dobama, on Coventry, for the most part. Seating on three sides featuring red chairs ripped from a defunct movie house (different movie house, different chairs) so it has the illusion of being the same place. And my emotions for that house run deep. The old house, the one on Coventry, not this place, in the library, in the former Lee Road YMCA swimming pool, where we did so many amazing things late at night. 

I said goodbye to my 20s in that theater. I am glad I am no longer that person. But it was exciting.

Earlier than that, when I was in my early 20s, Guerrilla Theater days, no, before that, when I worked at Karamu House and started getting involved in local shows and meeting the crowd I would eventually become so familiar with, I was offended by all of these middle-aged people, in their 40s or older, who were in the thrall of this certain acting coach. We won’t name names, it’s not their fault, it is not about the coach per se, but their pupils, who reversed this person as one would a sensei, someone who taught them everything, how to taste flavors a anew, to see the world as a baby, how to feel deeply. So deeply.

Dan Kilbane, Sarah Morton, self
Dobama's Night Kitchen, 1998

I knew what they meant, even at 23 years-old I understood what was going on. I had experienced all of these things at college, in theater classes, at the age of 18, 19, 20 years-old, when it is okay to embarrass yourself because you are young and stupid. 

And these were accountants and environmental lawyers who were finally, in middle-age, getting in touch with their emotions and learning how to function like feeling human beings -- but because they were adults with children and mortgages, they weren’t discovering things that others my age with my training already knew, they were discovering things NO ONE HAD EVER KNOWN BEFORE and this acting coach was a GOD.

Because they were too mature to be so young and silly. This shit was important. It changed their lives.

And so, after all, I was touched my this play. Because it confounded my expectations. Annie Baker can take the slackers-smoking-by-a-dumpster play and give it heart. She can take the amateur-drama-workshop play and people it with characters who I am glad to spend two hours in the presence of.

One moment I was particularly struck by, in the middle of the second act when the coach asks everyone to reveal a secret about themselves. This is five weeks into a six week course. It is a dumb, dumb exercise. Dangerous, and pointless. I have engaged in that kind of exercise, 

I remember an undergraduate directing class my junior year. In order to get into the emotions of a certain two-person scene, the director of that scene (neither of us performing in the scene respected her at all) asked us to hide in the wings on the opposite sides of the stage and probe each others’ deepest fears. 

The Sandman #6: 24 Hours, 1989
Neil Gaiman, Mike Dringenberg

The actress in question and I, while not exactly trusting of each other, were unified in our disgust of what we were being asked to do and were able to a) say the most horrid sounding, spiteful things that we knew were already open secrets and didn’t sting when b) the MFA Directing Grad who was leading the course was in the room. 

The teacher stormed out of the space to visit another scene, but first admonished our scene work director in the harshest terms for engaging in “psychological bullshit.”

Of course, the actress and I were the ones experimenting in psychological bullshit, fucking over our student director in that way.

The scene, as presenting in Baker’s play, put me in mind, of all things, of a scene from the 6th issue of the comic book Sandman, where Dr. Destiny has Morpheus’s amulet and spends twenty-fours in a diner, influencing those present to live out their id until everyone has has sex with, mutilated and/or eaten everyone else in the joint.

Baker’s play is not literally grotesque in that way. But it did make me feel that creepy.

I would say I really liked the ending, only she stole it from my new play. The one I haven't finished yet.

God dammit.

The Sandman: "24/7"
(Netflix, 2022)

The Aliens (2010)

Annie Baker made my afternoon.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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