Lucia and Licia Colombi are Cleveland-born sisters at the helm of Ensemble Theatre, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary season this year. Lucia’s production of Our Town – featuring a panoply of well-known area actors, including Ron Newell as the Stage Manager -- opened on 9/11 and runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8PM through 9/26 at the Cleveland Play House’s Brooks Stage. Identical twins, the two nevertheless have different personalities and aesthetics that manage to complement each other. Lucia, Artistic Director and company founder, is ebullient, sunny, bluntly candid. Associate Artistic Director Licia is quietly professional. They talked with Cool Cleveland correspondent Linda Eisenstein about the long, strange trip it’s been. http://www.ensemble-theatre.comYou’ve been going for 25 years – what are your biggest milestones?
Lucia: That we survived 25 years! Incredible! I believe we’ve made it because we had a long range vision – building and building and building so we could become a small professional company.
How much has your mission changed since 1979?
Lucia: Not very much. From the very beginning I was interested in American classics and African-American Theatre. Then in 1989 Licia came back from New York and we started doing significant contemporary plays.
Licia: I would call from New York and say, “this is a play you HAVE to do”. I’m the one interested in new work. Adding significant contemporary work gives us more flexibility in things to choose from. I’m proud of the eclectic kinds of seasons that we produce. Classics, contemporary, drama, comedy – theatre tonight!
Lucia: This year we’re particularly emphasizing American classics, with a reprise of our prize-winning production of A Trip to Bountiful and O’Neill. We’re taking on Big Daddy with Long Day’s Journey into Night. I always thought we were the Italian version of the O’Neill family – crazed, with three artistic children. My only regret is that Kit [Chris Colombi, their late actor-brother] isn’t here to see it.
Licia: We’re also doing [Lanford Wilson’s] Talley’s Folly this year. It’s the 25th anniversary of its Pulitzer Prize, and that seemed like a good fit with our 25th anniversary. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a 2-actor show.
Lucia: Of course we’re opening with Our Town. It’s one of the great American classics of all times. Over 12 of the 20 actors has worked with us many times, so has the whole creative staff. It’s like a family reunion for us.
Licia: The Cleveland Play House did Our Town in 1940, right here on this stage.
What are some of the things you’re proudest of?
Lucia: Doing The Kentucky Cycle and Steelbound. Our celebration of the Eugene O’Neill Centenary in 1989, doing the cycle of O’Neill plays. We did a lot of O’Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra, The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, Thirst. There’s a picture of me acting in Thirst in our season brochure, I’m so pretty, nobody knows it’s me. And I’m very proud of our original Panorama of African-American Theatre. From the beginning it was important to me to do multiracial, multiethnic work, especially in this community.
I remember seeing one of those O’Neill plays, when you were still performing at Cleveland State in the 1980s – you cast the family multiracially.
Lucia: Yes. We’ve always had a commitment to culturally diverse casting.
We do plays that celebrate life. I’m not interested in all this theatre that dwells on the dark side.
Licia: Well, The Mercy Seat is pretty dark! That’s Neil Labute’s 9/11 play, which I’m directing this year. I’d change that to “plays that celebrate the human spirit”.
You were the first small Cleveland theatre to go Equity.
Lucia: Yes, that was in 1982. We pioneered the Special Appearance Contract, where we could have 2-3 Equity members in a show. We did Kentucky Cycle and Steelbound under the SPT Agreement, where you can have a half-Equity cast. But it’s too expensive for most shows.
How about your biggest challenges?
Lucia: Fat in the larder, coins in the piggy bank. I can’t say enough about our support from the Gund Foundation and the Cleveland Foundation. Being part of that BASICS grant was very important to us. Lots of people have sacrificed and cared, and we’ve all given up a lot. Nobody’s paid what they should be. We’ve built our board – that’s one of the most important things a fledgling theatre can do. Funding has to come more and more from individuals.
Licia: And we’ve had individual angels who continue to come to our rescue.
The move out of the Civic after all those years must have been traumatic.
Lucia: There were many times I didn’t think we would make it. That was 2 years of complete agony. But now that we’re here at the Play House, it’s been 2 years of complete joy. I feel like we’re in our second youth. We’ve made $11,000 more in ticket sales since we moved here.
Licia: We’ve loved this move to the Brooks. This was the original theatre in Cleveland. Now, to see a small professional theatre operating out of this complex again, a home base theatre full of local actors: it’s a wonderful rejuvenation of this holy space.
How has theatre changed in Cleveland since you started out?
Lucia: Theatre has become more of a business. Audiences are more spontaneous about what they go to, you don’t get subscribers the way you used to. We also have to try to reach out and embrace younger audiences. With arts education so cut back in the schools, many never get to experience a live performance. We need to shake up programming and do more partnerships – not just arts, but community-based. We’re one of the only theatres in the area that has a senior outreach program. I created a show called These Hats were Made for Talkin’. My friend Annette Capelli came in with a bird on her hat, and I thought, “hey, that would make a fun theatre piece”. We’ve built all these crazy hats – we’ve got the Eggplant Parmesan lady talking to the Matzo Ball Lady and the Fried Chicken Lady. We have 4 multiethnic actors that tour senior centers with it.
Licia: Having been away until 1989, I really see how the theatre community here has grown. There used to be no small professional theatres – nothing between the Play House and community theatres. Now there are more grassroots opportunities for audiences to try the performing arts without mortgaging their house for a ticket.
Lucia, what’s it been like, running a theatre here while trying to raise a family? We all know that making it as an artist in Cleveland is never easy.
Lucia: The first 10 years I worked lots of other jobs while I was feeding my habit. I worked at the ULA, taught up the waz – at University School and Cleveland State and Community College. You do without a dishwasher. I’m like Blanche Dubois, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” One year we didn’t have enough money for a Christmas tree, and then suddenly there were three trees on my front porch. I never made more that $16,000 until the past eight years. But my two daughters have had such a rich life! They’ve grown up around all these incredible people. They’re both in arts-related fields – one is in cultural anthropology and dance, the other’s in theatre.
I went into this with passion, a vision, and desire. I only had $1000 in my pocket, that I’d saved from a job I’d worked. I had no idea what was involved. I made plenty of crazy mistakes – doing The Price and The Great God Brown in repertory, changing the set every day. For one early show I made these actor masks out of clay and they were so heavy, the actors’ necks were bent over! Well, I learned from it, thank God. I went to FedAdapt, a huge conference in New York City, and came back and said, “I have to learn to do this as a business.” I taught myself to do Quicken, put together a board. Nowadays when you start out, it’s not enough to have passion, you have to think about the business side from the beginning.
You two are the only twin sisters running a professional theatre company in the US.
Lucia: Really? I never thought about it.
Licia: Maybe we should make more of it.
Lucia: Mother thought she was getting only one baby. She was going to be named Licia, after the great opera singer Licia Albanese. Then when she realized she was having twins, she decided to name me Lucia, after Lucia di Lammermoor – the crazy one, you know. Our parents took us to the opera since we were very little. I remember going to see La Boheme in Mayor Celebrezze’s box.
Licia: They took us backstage to meet Licia Albanese. I noticed she had all these tiny warts on her face. And she had looked so beautiful on stage! I thought, if theatre can do that, I want to be in it!
What do you want Cool Cleveland readers to know about your theatre?
Lucia: That we’re really cool! Fat, sassy, and cool! (laughs)
Licia: Don’t say fat and sassy! But yes, we’re definitely cool. Come check us out. You’ll get a potpourri of interesting plays.
Interview by Cool Cleveland theater correspondent Linda Eisenstein Linda@coolcleveland.com (:divend:)