[NEohioPAL]Writers Get A New Place To Play

[Bodwin Theatre Company]

List:  After participating in the inaugural night of the Dark Room at the 
Old Parish Hall, a hop, skip and jump from Cleveland Public Theatre on 
Lorain Avenue in Cleveland, I thought list members would benefit from a 
write-up of the activities.  I think the room is off to a promising start 
and Cleveland has an exciting new place to watch and enjoy, even 
participate, in the creative process.

As people on this list know, completed plays, songs, poems and short stories 
aren't born overnight. So what happens when the Cleveland Theater Collective 
sponsors a room to pull together ten accomplished writers, playwrights and 
poets, limit them to ten-minute scenes of new material and cut them loose 
with a handful of actors?  Judging from last week's debut of a new monthly 
series, you get a wide variety of wildly creative new ideas. Cleveland's new 
performance space, the Dark Room, is a cleaned up basement near Cleveland 
Public Theatre (the Old Parish Hall, located at 6203 Detroit Avenue). Writer 
Chris Johnston hosted a fast-paced romp of new material, with no break for 
judgments or comments from all the writers and performers in the room. 
Material ranged from an upbeat song of cynicism by Linda Eisenstein and Mike 
Martone's take on a geometrically doomed love affair, to new writings of 
love, never really won, but lost nonetheless, by Thom Huggins and Mike 
Sepesy's humorous takes on modern materialism and, later, the Abu Ghraib 
prison interrogations, with a handful of powerful new poems as well.  Actors 
grabbed roles with enthusiasm, style and humor.  Organized by writers Linda 
Eisenstein, Mike Sepesy and others under the umbrella of the Cleveland 
Theater Collective, the events will repeat on the second Thursday of every 
month.  For details, check in with the Theater Collective at 
ww.clevelandtheater.com.  For those excited by the creative process, as well 
as the product, I encourage you to stop in at the Dark Room, and watch what 
develops.


Kevin Cronin
Bodwin Theatre Company
a nonprofit theater organization
216.216.556.4996
On the web: http://bodwin_theatre.tripod.com

Bodwin Theatre supports the Cleveland Theater Collective (CTC ), your 
comprehensive source for information about professional theater in northeast 
Ohio.
www.clevelandtheater.com

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