[NEohioPAL] Cleveland Play House (history)

[Tom Kerr]

I donT know how interested you are in any of this (perhaps not at all), but given the attention given to the sale of the Cleveland Play House in the last week or so, I thought I would share.
    I was an apprentice at the Play House during the 1985-86 season.  Basically, I was a slave, appearing in three productions (On The Razzle, A Christmas Carol, and A Streetcar Named Desire) and working on ALL of the productions in one capacity or another.  I was there 50 hours a week, sometimes more.
    The joke at that time (among everyone who worked there) was that the Philip Johnson building (only two years old at that time) was Johnson's "revenge on Cleveland".  Horrible design, terrible acoustics in the Bolton Theater (which was the new one) and basically just plain UGLY!
   There was large concensus on this subject.  From almost everyone.
    Also, the Play House company was in its last throes.  Actors such as Wayne Turney, Richard Halverson, Sharon Bicknell, John Buck, Jr., James Richards, and others were slowly realizing that their regular work was about to end...no more resident company was fast approaching on the horizon.  And it did, indeed, come to pass (under Josie Abady).
   Will Rhys was the acting artistic director at the time (his toddler son, Evan, had just died due to a horrible plunge through a stairwell right in the Cleveland Play House building), and he told me "this theater will be gone in 30 years or less....it will probably move downtown.  The Board won't make this work."
    He was right.


Tom Kerr


      
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