“What ‘cha got?”

That’s the first question Raymond Bobgan, artistic director of Cleveland Public Theatre, asks the playwrights and directors he works with when he’s assembling a new season.

Instead of scanning lists of published scripts and hoping he can claim a show before another local theater, Bobgan and his staff often go directly to their sources in seeking out new, unseen material.

The result is a 2011-12 season in which CPT is mounting seven full productions of world premieres (out of a total of 11 shows). This is remarkable because, for most theaters in this region and around the nation, one or two premieres per season would be considered ambitious.

“We prefer to select directors and playwrights, instead of picking shows,” says Bobgan. “Then, they tell us what they’re working on that really excites them. That’s the stuff we’re interested in presenting at CPT.”

There’s also a payoff for Cleveland audiences.

As Bobgan explains, “Our new plays receive a great response here for one important reason: Invention and manufacturing are part of the Cleveland mythos, part of the city’s collective unconscious. So our audiences have an eager, natural curiosity. And that’s a perfect match for these shows.”

The string of CPT premieres, which features many local creators, began with the just-closed “Monster Play.” Like many of the premieres, it was a devised production (one that is not pre-scripted but put together by the director and his cast).

Next up in the premiere procession is “Ya Mama!,” a solo work created and performed by Cleveland actor Nina Domingue, which opens a two-week run Friday.

“This play deals with my changing perceptions of motherhood,” says Domingue, “about how I decided to be present for my children.” Her play was first staged in January in CPT’s Big Box workshop series.

Big Box is just one part of the multilayered development structure that CPT offers to playwrights, directors and performers. The latest edition of this series, Big Box ’12, opens Thursday, Jan. 5, and is a multiweek showing of 11 works-in-progress.

Other CPT steppingstones include Springboard, staged readings of plays in their infancy (which just concluded), and Leap/Conceive (Thursday through Saturday), a series that helps creators polish work at a midpoint in their process.

Another premiere production that is going through CPT development is “13 Most American Dreams,” which will open in May. It is conceived and directed by local theatrical innovator Pandora Robertson.

As she describes it, “My show looks at the Internet as a worldwide dream catcher, so we want to incorporate social media. We’ll probably invite the audience to keep their mobile phones on during the show as we develop interactive portraits of people and our culture.”

Three other locals — Jill, Frank and Meredith Levin — will launch the premiere of “Not The Flying Stupendas” in April. This show is for families (something of a rarity at CPT) and involves a circus where the headlining acrobats are out of commission. So staff members are forced to perform in the acrobats’ place, as clown acts and songs mesh with various personal dramas.

Director Matthew Earnest, whose “Wanderlust: A History of Walking” ignited the CPT stage last season, is returning in March with his new “Lulu Project.” It is based on two plays by Frank Wedekind, who wrote the controversial “Spring Awakening.” That 1892 play was recently turned into an award-winning Broadway musical.

As Earnest says, “This show will include graphic sexuality, as we follow a young woman making her way in a violent and debauched world.”

Thinking about that subject matter, Earnest, who is based in West Virginia, adds, “I consider myself very lucky to make some of my work here in Cleveland, where audiences embrace edgy and challenging material.”

CPT kicks off the new calendar year in January with “At-TEN-tion Span,” which offers a collection of fully produced, 10-minute devised plays by local artists.

And CPT’s season of firsts ends in May-June with “Akarui” by Iowan Jen Silverman. It’s a fantastical journey involving a transgender boy, a rave cave and forces that can transform dead bodies.

While new shows are not always great shows, innovation is critical to assuring theater remains viable by attracting young, adventurous and diverse audiences. In that effort, the energetic and daring Cleveland Public Theatre is an acknowledged leader — here and around the country.

– Christine Howey

Freelance critic Howey’s blog is raveandpan.blogspot.com.

[Original Cleveland.com Article] [PDF]

Published: Thursday, January 06, 2011, 11:15 PM     Updated: Thursday, January 06, 2011, 11:20 PM

By Michael Norman, The Plain Dealer

Cleveland Public TheatreDancer and cChoreographer Kenya Woods performs her “Through Her Eyes,” which will be presented Feb. 11-13, as part of Cleveland Public Theatre’s eight-week Big Box festival.

Time once again for Cleveland’s premiere festival of brand-new works: never before tested, gutty and brainy.

It is called Cleveland Public Theatre’s Big Box series, and it begins Friday, Jan. 14.

CPT executive artistic director Raymond Bobgan hands over the keys to 6415 Detroit Ave. to a group of artists who have the run of the place for a week, culminating in a weekend of three performances. The series runs through Sunday, March 6.

This year, the most ambitious yet, will see shows by Cleveland State University students and recent graduates, as well as out-of-town artists drawn by CPT’s reputation as an avant-garde theater that welcomes risk taking.

Shows are at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $15. Go to cptonline.org or call 216-631-2727.

Week 1: Jan. 14-16 “Ya Mama!” Written and performed by Nina Domingue and directed by Cathy Hartenstein, this one-woman show explores the life of an artist, wife, mother, Christian and black woman.

“She Cried at the Circus.” Jeff Glover writes a story about a woman who discovers at a young age that she has power beyond dreams, wealth beyond imagination and presence that inspires fear.

Week 2: Jan. 21-23 “Soliciting for Change.” Bitch, terrorist, dreamer. Those are some of the names people call playwright/performer Molly Andrews-Hinders as she goes after corrupt corporations and advocates for working-class families. Directed by James Langa and Erin McCardle.

“Seppuku.” Written and performed by Melissa Crum and BC Miles, this piece weighs the differences between suicide and ritual suicide. Directed by James Kosmatka.

Week 3: Jan. 28-30 “Mother/Tongue.” A family’s dysfunction surfaces as a workaholic mom obsessively makes Julia Child’s beef tongue, disappears for hours and speaks French. Written by Claire Robinson May and directed by Danielle Hisey.

Week 4: Feb. 4-6 Everything Is Everything Project. Two plays, “A Sleep” and “A Wake,” written and performed by Val Kozlenko and Eric Perusek, explore what it is to be truly awake or to sleepwalk through life. A third play, “30 Awkward Minutes With Pat and Glenn,” written and performed by Renee Schilling and Lew Wallace, imagines two people trapped in the void of unreality.

“Sick F- – -.”John Robert Armstrong (of Indiana) will be directed by Noe Montez (who recently moved to Cleveland from Indiana) in a play by Paul Shoulberg (of Kansas) about a terminal cancer patient dealing with resentment, regret and heartache.

Week 5: Feb. 11-13 “Through Her Eyes.” Choreographed and performed by Kenya Woods, this dance piece is about three women finding grace through being broken by fears and frustrations, crisis and the job of motherhood.

“Fast Forward-Rewind-Stop.” The Marquez Dance Project does a piece choreographed by Jennifer Sandoval about the pursuit of gender equilibrium.

Week 6: Feb. 18-20 “Sonic Cinema.” FiveOne Music performs a fusion of local films and new music composed by Michael Bratt and Jeremy Allen. Week 7: Feb. 25-27 “Cowboy Poet.” A country musical by Deborah Magid, directed by Douglas Farren, looks at a cowboy poet, a WASP socialite and an ex-con who throw a benefit gala for adult literacy in New Mexico.

Week 8: March 4-6 “Voice Over.” Conceived and directed by Pandora Robertson, this piece asks, “Who am I?,” “Do other people know who I really am?” and “Will I ever be the same person again?”

“Side Effects May Include.” Former “Seinfeld” writer Marc Jaffe and Cleveland Heights playwright Eric Coble write about a man with a lovely wife, a lovely kid and a lovely life, until Parkinson’s disease and the side effects of the medicines that treat it invade his home. Eric Schmeidl directs Nick Koesters.

[Original Article on Cleveland.com] [PDF]

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YOU’RE CORDIALLY INVITED
to an evening at XYZ & CPT to benefit GSAD
in the heart of the Gordon Square Arts District

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2010

The evening kicks off at the District’s newest establishment:

• 5:30 p.m. XYZ Tavern

6421 Detroit Avenue (next to CPT)

Cocktails & hors’ d’oeuvres
and continues to Cleveland Public Theatre

• 6:30 p.m. More cocktails and seating at CPT

• 7:00 p.m. “Connie’s Avant Garde Restaurant”

for a five-course dinner and theatre

This uproarious musical performance is a unique theatrical-culinary event mixing the ingredients of fine food, wine and ensemble theatre together in a hilarious parody of avant garde grandiosity. Comedy, death, violence and a five-course meal!

Individual tickets: $75

Reservations: Call Maria Asher @ 216.961.4242 x222 or masher@gordonsquare.org
RSVP: by Friday, December 3, 2010

Five-Course Menu

• (With local produce subject to availability)
• Roasted chestnuts and mushroom tartine
• Curried butternut squash soup
• Herbed apple and fennel salad
• Maple-glazed ham with cranberry compote
• Brown-buttered radishes
• Sage-roasted sweet potatoes
• Drunken chocolate Bundt cake

Dietary restrictions: Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant is able to accommodate food allergies and vegetarian needs. Please contact the box office to communicate dietary restrictions in your party. (216) 631-2727 or rcole@cptonline.org.

Tony Brown, The Plain Dealer

Photos by Peggy Turbett, The Plain Dealer

Most people try to look thinner.

Actor Kevin Charnas, who has a runner’s build (photo at left), wants to look like a man so obese he can’t get out of bed. Which means:

Fat suit!

For the world premiere of Turkish playwright Ozen Yula’s “Don’t Call Me Fat,” which opened Saturday night and runs through Saturday, Oct. 30, Cleveland Public Theatre called Alison Garrigan, one of Cleveland’s busiest and best resident costumers.

Charnas spends the 75-minute first act in the suit, lying in bed in a hospital gown (after he spends 15 minutes in the thing before the curtain goes up).

Then, in Act 2, he is slimmed down to his normal size.

That means the part couldn’t be played by a large actor with a little padding here and there, a la Harvey Fierstein as Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray.”

The length of time in the suit means it had to be as light (about 20 pounds) and comfy as possible. And his hands and face, his only acting tools besides his voice, had to be free.

Garrigan, a costume designer for 30 years and an actor-director, had to bring all of her skills to the project. Here is a look.

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Garrigan looked at photographs of morbidly obese people and did sketches before rehearsals started in mid-August.

After consulting with Yula, who is directing, and taking Charnas’ measurements, she made the suit out of high-density upholstery foam (for shape), toy-animal fiberfill (lighter than foam) and lentil beans (for sag).

She covered it in breathable “peach-skin” fabric, used for dancers and figure skaters whose costumes need a “nude” look.

Once the suit was built, Garrigan worked with Charnas (seen in photo at right last week during technical rehearsals) to fine-tune the fit.

Garrigan carved out spaces where frozen cold packs could be inserted on the actor’s tummy and under his armpits to help him keep cool.

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The last piece of the suit scheduled to go on every night will be the jowls (in photo at left).

Garrigan will apply pale makeup to Charnas’ face and dark circles around his eyes after he is in the suit. “He has to look really unhealthy.”

The actor’s supine position and the elevation of the stage meant that Garrigan had to use what artists call “forced perspective,” deliberately accentuating some body parts to make up for the audience’s viewing angle.

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The finished product is never, it seems, really finished.

In the technical-rehearsal photo at right, Charnas wears a bathrobe. But the next night, Yula decided to go with the hospital gown, which meant more adjustments.

Which is OK with Garrigan. “It’s been really interesting to take that kind of athletic body and turn it into the absolute opposite. And the hands-on work was not unpleasant at all, if you know what I mean.”

[Original Cleveland.com Article] [PDF]

Published Oct. 3rd. [Cleveland.com Article]
By Tony Brown, The Plain Dealer

Brutal and beautiful might appear to be strange bedfellows, but they are apt descriptors for Suzan-Lori Parks‘ engrossing play “The Book of Grace” and the stunning production of it that opened over the weekend at Cleveland Public Theatre.

Parks, who won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for “Top Dog/Underdog,” has a gift for capturing humanity, in our brutality and beauty, with her glancing dialogue, people talking to each other by talking past each other.

Less cryptic and more narrative than “Top Dog,” “The Book of Grace” turns on the dynamics of a family so dysfunctional and estranged it’s barely a family.

Vet, a veteran of the first war against Iraq and now a U.S. Border Patrol guard, is a brute who says he’s “on the good foot” with his second wife, Grace, but he’s dug a grave in the back yard as a reminder who’s in charge.

Grace is by all appearances his doormat, but she slowly reveals herself to be person of desires and of substance, longing for a red dress in a department store window, and having a voracious sexual appetite and a secret volume of rebelliously poetic observations under the floorboards.

Into this little world enters Buddy, who unlike Grace and Vet, is black. He returns after 15 years, and after serving in Persian Gulf II, with vengeance in mind and a grenade in pocket, to a set right some ancient wrong — but whether real or perceived is never made clear.

Although a kitchen sink is involved, this is no throw-back to 1950s-era domestic plays.

These characters are meant to be real people, but they are also symbols for America and its boundaries. Vet sees borders everywhere, on his TV, in the creases he irons in his uniform trousers, and even in that hole.

The CPT production, the first since the play premiered in New York earlier this year, is directed with a haunting touch, but with both feet planted firmly in reality, by Sheffia Randall Dooley.

She gets assists from set and lighting designer Trad A Burns, who encloses everything in fencing and provides a functional utlities, and from a cast that performs as if intent on outdoing each other and eliciting from each other their best work.

Rod Lawrence quivers with pent-up rage as the literally ready-to-explode Buddy. He gets his chance to shine when he faces his own camcorder to document, mass murderer style, what he believes to be his final words before setting off to claim fame and infamy and revenge.

As Vet, veteran Cleveland area actor Chuck Kartali — in a role at polar opposites with the dad in the Cleveland Play House’s long-running “A Christmas Story” — expresses his own rage with simple acts. Kartali tells us more with the spray button on an electric iron and few clipped words than many another actor could with wild gestures and paragraphs of prose.

As fine as those two performances are, Sally Groth’s Grace mesmerizing presence here. Seductive, poetic, trembling to make her escape, she is both spell-binding and liberating, completely lost in the moment and yet able to transport us miles from this world to the great beyond of human experience. This is wow time.

The play occasionally makes its argument too neatly (and life is never neat). And the ending, both in the writing and staging, verges toward the mawkish.

But “The Book of Grace” is one of those rare theatrical experiences — a rare experiences of any kind — that leave one forever changed for having had it.

[Cleveland.com Article] [PDF]

Dale Omori, Plain Dealer file photographDancers rehearse at the Gordon Square Theatre in 2005. The Ohio Department of Development today said it was providing $200,000 for removal of asbestos from the theater's ceiling.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Federal stimulus money will help with the continued renovation of the Cleveland Public Theatre, in Cleveland’s Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood.

The Ohio Department of Development said today that $200,000 from a new fund to clean up and revitalize historic sites is headed to the theater, for asbestos removal.

The theater is part of the historic Gordon Square Arts District, which has seen a multimillion-dollar redevelopment in recent years.

The new money should pay for asbestos removal in the ceiling of Gordon Square Theatre, one of three performance venues that constitute Cleveland Public Theatre, said general manager Denis Griesmer.

The work is scheduled from January to March, when the Gordon Square Theatre is typically closed, Griesmer said.

The project will not only make the building safer, but will also help in the job-generating restoration of the neighborhood, state development Director Lisa Patt-McDaniel said in a news release.

[Original Article on Cleveland.com] [PDF]

Published: Friday, July 02, 2010, 2:31 PM     Updated: Tuesday, July 06, 2010, 3:34 PM

VINCENT SACCO This scene makes it look as though it might be called “Tony n’ Tina’s Shotgun Wedding,” but it’s actually “Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant.” And even though it will be performed with a five-course meal next season at Cleveland Public Theatre, Miss Conni Convergence and the Avantgardists dare you to call it dinner theater.

Raymond Bobgan is cool. And five years into his executive artistic directorship of Cleveland Public Theatre, he just keeps getting cooler, mixing sound business decisions with risky artistry at the city’s leading dispenser of cool theater. After finishing the 2009-10 season with the strongest one-two programming punch of the year in Cleveland (“Open Mind Firmament” and “Wanderlust”), Bobgan has just announced the city’s most promising-sounding 2010-11 season. Dig all this:

• Four world premieres, including “Don’t Call Me Fat” by Turkish playwright Ozen Yula and “My Dog Barking” by Cleveland Heights scribe Eric Coble.

• Four Midwest premieres: The second production anywhere (after New York’s Public Theatre) of Pulitzer Prize-winning Suzan-Lori Parks’ latest; an avant-garde dinner-theater (!) offering; and a play co-authored by a creator of the upcoming Broadway musical “Spider-Man.”

• And a beefed-up new works development program to join CPT’s already strong Big Box and Little Box series, including a remount of Chris Seibert and Bobgan’s critically acclaimed one-woman tour de force, “Cut to Pieces,” which will then tour.

Bottom line: While most other theaters in the area are sticking to the reduced schedules and calculatedly mainstream productions instituted to cope with the recession, Bobgan and CPT are out at high noon on Detroit Avenue at West 65th Street with avant-garde guns blazing.

Meanwhile, in his spare time, Bobgan is also overseeing CPT’s partnership in developing the Gordon Square Arts District, including the ongoing renovation of CPT’s expansive campus.

So, take a breath and get a gander at what’s up next season at 6415 Detroit. If you want more information, go to cptonline.org or call 216-631-2727. Or you can catch Bobgan re-caffeinating himself several times a day next door to the theater at Gypsy Beans & Baking Co.

Shows open on a Thursday and close on a Saturday unless otherwise noted.

Saturday, Sept. 11: Pandemonium 10: The West Wild Side. CPT’s annual wacky arts, food and beverage fundraiser comes of age.

Sept. 30-Oct. 16: “The Book of Grace.” CPT regular Sheffia Randall Dooley directs Parks’ multilayered confrontation between Buddy, a veteran of the Iraq war, and his estranged father, a Desert Storm vet who now works as a border guard.

Oct. 7-30: “Don’t Call Me Fat.” Yula, who’s at CPT and Cleveland State University on a grant from the Cleveland Foundation, directs his satire about an obese man’s journey from sickbed to talk-show fame.

Oct. 14-30: “Kill Will.” Playing off the title of a Quentin Tarantino movie, husband-and-wife writers Josh Brown and Kelly Elliott edit the Shakespeare canon down to one evening of the Bard’s best fights and murders. Veteran CPT hand Alison Garrigan directs the world premiere.

Friday, Oct. 22 and Sunday, Oct. 24: “Il Tabarro.” CPT collaborates with Opera Per Tutti, a Northeast Ohio company whose name is Italian for “opera for all,” on Puccini’s tale of love, desperation and violent jealousy. Scott Skiba directs.

Nov. 5-7: Y-Haven Project. CPT stages the 11th annual collaboration with residents of an inner-city Cleveland center for homeless men in treatment for drug addiction.

Nov. 11-Sunday, Nov. 21: Little Box series. Staged readings of new plays by local playwrights are followed by audience discussions.

Wednesday, Dec. 1-18: “Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant.” CPT presents an audience-participation dinner-theater show (a la “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding,” but way weirder) served up by Miss Conni Convergence and the Avantgardists.

Friday, Jan. 14-Sunday, March 6: Big Box series. Eight weekends of new works as CPT opens its doors to area artists.

March 3-19: “Darwinii.” Glen Berger, now at work with “The Lion King’s” Julie Taymor and U2′s Bono on “Spider-Man,” collaborates with CPT regular Brett Keyser on a play about a thief who’s convinced he’s the great-great-great-bastard-grandson of Charles Darwin.

Friday, March 11-Sunday, March 27: NEOMFA Playwrights Festival. Three new works by students in the Northeast Ohio MFA Creative Writing Program, a collaboration of four area schools.

Thursday, March 24: Women’s Voices. The 12th annual female version of the Y-Haven Project, a collaboration with the Elyria YWCA’s Women’s Campus Project.

April 7-23: “Fever/Dream.” CPT staffer Beth Wood directs the Midwest premiere of Sheila Callaghan’s update of 17th-century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s “Life Is a Dream.”

April 7-23: “I Hate This” and “And Then You Die.” Local playwright, actor and director David Hansen presents his two previously produced one-man shows (one about personal loss and the other about personal victory) in repertory. Directed by Garrigan.

April 21-May 7: “Insomnia.” Holly Holsinger (Bobgan’s wife) collaborates with Karin Randoja and Seibert on a new play, starring Holsinger and Seibert and directed by Randoja, about a woman on the brink of something like death, mental collapse or self-discovery.

May 5-Sunday June 5: DanceWorks. Five companies perform world premieres in CPT’s 11th annual dance showcase.

May 12-28: “My Dog Barking.” Jeremy Paul, on loan from Theater Ninjas, directs the latest from Coble, about two lonely people’s lives taking a bizarre turn when a starving coyote appears at their doors.

May 26-June 4: “Cut to Pieces.” Bobgan and Seibert restage their shattering 2009 multimedia adaptation of the Persephone myth to lay bare Seibert’s soul.

Dates to be announced: Developing works. They include “My Hemisphere and Your Hemisphere Live Across the Street,” “People4Change” and Bobgan’s own “Rusted Heart Broadcast,” which he described as “a radical new play with an ensemble cast [that] re-examines religion, art and community in the heart of America.”

And, “I think it takes place in a tent and travels like a revival.”

How cool is that?

By Tony Brown, The Plain Dealer

May 20, 2010, 6:00AM

View full sizeSteve WagnerScholar Barton Friedman (John Stuehr, left) writes about Irish hero Cuchulain (Ray McNiece) and poet W.B. Yeats (Brett Keyser) in “Open Mind Firmament.”REVIEW Open Mind Firmament What: Cleveland Public Theatre presents a play based on the works of W.B. Yeats and Barton Friedman, adapted and directed by Raymond Bobgan.When: Through Saturday, June 5. Performances at 7 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Matinee at 3 p.m. Sunday; 7 p.m. performance Monday.Where: Cleveland Public Theatre’s Gordon Square Theatre, 6415 Detroit Ave.Tickets: $10-$21. Go to cptonline.org or call 216-631-2727, ext. 501. “I want to create for myself an unpopular theater.”

So said William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet, playwright, politician and playboy (1865-1939).

Cleveland Public Theatre’s “Open Mind Firmament” is nothing of the sort, yet is also true to Yeats’ vision of “a mysterious theater” that is more “a memory and a prophecy” than realistic.

Engrossing, hypnotic and viscerally literary, this homage to both Yeats and Cleveland State University Yeats scholar Barton Friedman entailed a year’s worth of hard physical and mental work by an ensemble of 14 performers led by CPT executive artistic director Raymond Bobgan.

Bobgan specializes in this sort of thing, having produced original adaptations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, “Summer and Smoke” and plays by Gao Xingjian.

As brilliant as those were, it is tempting now to say that “Open Mind Firmament” surpasses them all. But let’s just say it is everything theater ought to be but so rarely is: revelatory.

Yeats, determined to write plays about Ireland’s heroic age to compensate for what he saw as the portrayal of his countrymen as buffoons by other Irish playwrights, produced a six-play “Ulster Cycle,” five about legendary Celtic hero Cuchulain.

None of these plays is staged today because their pure poetry makes them all but unplayable.

Bobgan and company mix excerpts of the plays and Yeats’ muscular poetry, the subtle gestures of the Japanese Noh theater that fascinated Yeats, and the lectures and written works of Friedman (1935-2009).

The resulting swirl of words and actions — moistened by water, heightened by ladders, shrouded in sheer scarves, and lighted in stark lights and darks by designer Trad A Burns – is a dreamlike melange of playfully sensuous allures.

The story arc, if there is one, emerges from several directions and eventually builds itself into a meditation on the nature of the writer as hero of his own work, author of his own life and anticipator of his own death. Yeats is Cuchulain — and so is Friedman.

The ensemble functions as an organic, protoplasmic whole that ebbs and flows and oozes on the Gordon Square arena stage. But it has four ringleaders.

Brett Keyser‘s Yeats has both dignity and mischief in his eye. Chris Seibert casts spells as Cathbad (the chief druid of Irish mythology) and as a blind seer. Raymond McNiece embodies Cuchulain’s physical and poetic prowess. And John Stuehr haunts the sidelines as Friedman.

If you know little or nothing about Yeats and his work, just let the production pour over your senses, and afterward pick up one of the informative limited-edition programs ($5) in the lobby, take it home and pore over it. Then go to the library and get some actual Yeats (the cast whispers some recommendations to the audience at the end of the show).

Yeats finished his wish for an “unpopular theater” by saying he also wanted “an audience like a secret society, where admission is by favor.”

Do yourself a favor, experience “Open Mind Firmament” and become a member of Yeats’ secret society.

[Original Cleveland.com Article] [PDF]

LITTLE BIG SHOWS

We get our share of big, big shows in Northeast Ohio, especially since PlayhouseSquare is the country’s second-largest performing-arts complex. But sometimes the action shifts to a slightly smaller scale. Take “Wanderlust: A History of Walking” at Cleveland Public Theatre, right. New York-based director Matthew Earnest has crafted a world-premiere show from a nonfiction book by Rebecca Solnit that is in fact a history of walking. But the play is much more than that, theater critic Tony Brown insists — “a nonstop, highly choreographed dance-theater piece” realized by an “indefatigable” ensemble of seven. Through Saturday, May 29, at CPT’s Gordon Square Theatre, 6415 Detroit Ave. Tickets are $10-$21. Go to cptonline.org or call 216-231-2727.

Dobama Theatre, a small but feisty off-Euclid company, is wowing ‘em with “Humble Boy,” which critic Brown calls a “thoughtful production of a brilliant play that buzzes with intelligence and packs a sordid sting.” Full of family dysfunction and black humor, Charlotte Jones’ play concerns a group of five characters in the backyard of a dead British beekeeper stung to death by his own hive. There’s a big pot of gazpacho, too. Through Sunday, May 30, at Dobama, 2340 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights. Tickets are $10-$22. Go to dobama.org or call 216-932-3396.

Viktor Schreckengost was Cleveland’s quintessential Renaissance man, an “artist, teacher and industrial designer who transformed America through his own work and that of the generations of students he taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art,” as art critic Steven Litt wrote in 2008, when Schreckengost died at 101. Now the region’s first posthumous exhibit devoted entirely to his work is here, called “From Jazz to Design: The Art of Viktor Schreckengost” in the modest confines of Bonfoey Gallery. On view is a sampling of the master’s work in a wide range of media: industrial designs, sculpture, pastels and watercolors. Through Saturday, June 5, at 1710 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. Go to bonfoey.com or call 216-621-0178. Free.

By Plain Dealer staff May 16, 2010, 12:25AM

[Original Cleveland.com Article] [PDF]