[NEohioPAL] A Personal Reaction to The Cleveland Playhouse Move

[James Harris]

I have been very interested in the responses to the proposed relocation of
The Cleveland Playhouse to PlayhouseSquare and I would like to contribute a
thought or two.
 
I knew many of the rep players already mentioned in some earlier NEOHIOPAL
emails, and there is no doubt that the reparatory nature of the company
exemplified by the likes of Patterson, Halverson, Oberlin, Joseph, and
others were abandoned by later directors and boards.  Though there is still
a company at The Cleveland Playhouse, it is not an identifiable ensemble of
actors that has interacted in production after production, season after
season, year after year.
 
What did remain, however, was The Cleveland Playhouse's physicality.  I have
many positive memories associated The Cleveland Playhouse as a complex and a
series of stages.   As first a Curtain Puller and then an Apprentice, I
relished the freedom I had going backstage and onstage; exploring the 86th
Street rehearsal rooms, passages and design spaces; I appreciated that Joel
Grey, Ray Walston and Margaret Hamilton performed on these very stages.
 
When (or if) The Cleveland Playhouse company moves to PlayhouseSquare, The
Cleveland Playhouse will cease to exist as a unique performing arts
organization with its own distinct physical, architectural presence.  It
will become "The Cleveland Playhouse at PlayhouseSquare" and a tenant in a
complex not its own, as wonderful as that complex undoubtedly is.   
 
As such, The Cleveland Playhouse at PlayhouseSquare will not be master of
its own historic performing arts space (such as is still the case at
Karamu), but be subject to the dictates of a lease agreement.  This will
restrict the company's access to its physical plant, if only as a matter of
logistics, competing use and overall security.
 
So, though this move may be necessary to try to save a local performing arts
organization with a storied past, this is an historically significant
architectural loss for Cleveland as well as a personal loss to the many
thousands who thought of The Cleveland Playhouse as a distinct, standalone
physical entity (Cleveland's Globe, as it were) and as one of the country's
oldest continuous regional theater complex, if not the oldest. 
 
Alas, Cleveland's House of Plays will be no more.
 
James Harris
H/L Communications
 
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