A native of Cleveland, director Lester Thomas Shane returns here from New York City about once a year to direct. He opens a challenging production of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day – a controversial play which draws parallels between Weimar, Germany and contemporary US conditions - at Cleveland Public Theatre this weekend. He talked with Cool Cleveland correspondent Linda Eisenstein about theater, politics, and Cleveland’s place in the arts.

Cool Cleveland: You seem to have directed a lot of work in Cleveland lately.

Lester Thomas Shane: It’s been one show a year at least. I’ve done Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Sweet Phoebe, and Science Gets Serious at CPT. Not long ago I directed Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing at the JCC. I worked at the JCC when I was a kid, long before CPT was ever thought of.

How do you feel about getting to do the Kushner play?

It’s so exciting. It’s Kushner’s first play. Isn’t that incredible? Such a thrilling, amazing, resonant play – it’s like Venus springing full blown. I have a friend in New York – Sybille Schloss - who toured with The Peppermill, the German political cabaret of the '30s. She was a rising actress fired because she was Jewish. She fled to Switzerland, came to this country with husband #4. I met her my first week in NY. I talked to her a lot about this play. She said it feels like political cabaret of that era. It has scenes, songs, poems –

And all those interruptions from Zillah, the rants about Reagan.
Yes. In fact, the play is refracted through Zillah – I think it’s Zillah’s story, and the other characters seem to appear as she needs them to. By the end, past, present, and future have overlapped – tumbled into the lap of the present. Kushner wrote A Bright Room Called Day on the heels of the Reagan reelection, where he felt the country had turned to the right in a sinister way. There’s the moment in the play where a character says "Reagan = Hitler." Kushner couldn’t believe it could raise that much fury, that it could arouse that kind of “how dare you say that."

And now after Reagan’s death, there’s been this near-apotheosis of him and his record.
Maybe it’s my relationship with Sybille – but she was freaking out when Reagan got elected. Back then I got my passport updated and it’s still in my bag at all times. Is that paranoid? I don’t know. It freaks me out that they don’t even bother changing the metaphors – I mean, “Homeland” security? You want to shake people and say “don’t you get it?” When even reasonable people can make justifications for the kinds of things going on right now – it strikes me as a collective avoidance, unconsciousness, denial. I live in NYC. I smelled 9/11 for months – but you can’t attribute everything to 9/11. You can’t justify fascism because of 9/11.

In the production, we’re stressing the presentational, cabaret sensibility. There are the contemporary scenes with Zillah, then the scenes in Germany in the 30’s. We’ve added period songs by Kurt Weill and Hans Eisler – which come between the scenes and monologues. They’ll be singing the Bilbao song – “It was fantastic – beyond belief!” And then slides of the opening of Dachau come up.

To do this kind of work, moving from song to monologue to dance to scene -- the actors have to be able to turn on a dime.

They’re – wow! [makes an incredible face] They’re amazing artists. They are as good a level of talent that exists anywhere. Not "Well, for Cleveland, they’re really good." They’d be wonderful on any stage any time. I’ve been lucky enough to work with Chuck (Kartali), Jill (Levin), and Ali (Hernan) before. Randy (Rollison) did the casting, and – to have these people! The actors are really smart, so our discussions have been rich. There’s a great timbre of voices – Randy cast all these people with rich sounding voices, it sounds choral. They’re all so good! Holly (Holsinger) had me crying last night.

How long have you worked out of New York?
I moved there in 1973. I’ve lived 31 years in the same apartment, which is smaller than the lobby of the Gordon Square Theater. All hail rent-control! It lets me keep living there.

What’s changed in Cleveland since you left?
This is still the town with the lowest self-esteem on the planet. What’s up with that? It strikes me that the artistic community keeps getting more and more vital in terms of heart and spirit. Yet the surrounding stuff presents an obstacle.

What stuff?
Things like local government - [Cleveland Public Library] Issue 2 failing. There’s almost a sense that “we’ll support the big institutions, because that’s what they are.” So the Orchestra and the Museum will get support – but institutions like CPT, that are really driving the art scene forward - get crumbs. This is my favorite place to work – it’s doing really important work - yet they still have trouble getting people over from the Eastside. People have to get willing to cross the bridge.

We have to convince people the arts aren’t just entertainment but real sustenance. The United States doesn’t have the historical tradition to really support the arts. Didn’t France go on strike when they raised the ticket prices? We don’t have that kind of view of culture here. I think we keep doing everything to keep theatergoing a luxury event. It’s been turned into “the tourist event” – something only for a birthday or an anniversary.

In NY there used to be a lot of opportunity for discounts. When I first moved to New York, my day job was in a bookstore. I made $2.65 an hour and still had the money to go to Broadway theatre once a week. That was my reward: dinner at Joe Allen and see a Broadway show. Now that era is gone.

You work freelance a lot, doing lots of things – acting, writing, directing. What’s it like, the life of an artist as entrepreneur?
You have to be an entrepreneur. Look at the unions – the extent of unemployment – only 3% make a living wage acting. You might get a job on Broadway for a month, but it’s the nature of theatre that you’re always going to be unemployed. So you have to spend almost as much time trying to generate the next project as you do doing the project.

How do you put together freelance jobs to make a life?
I do mostly directing now – followed by writing – occasionally acting – some teaching. I’m on faculty on New Actors Workshop (Mike Nichols, Paul Sills) and TADA! Ensemble (a kid’s company), where I’m a diction teacher. I’m still touring Mortal Coil [his acclaimed one man show about working in a hospice] – the video still continues to sell. I get emails about it out of nowhere. That was a very personal project, so I’m glad that it does what it was intended to do, which is to honor all those people.

I have a book coming out which I co-wrote with my business/life coach Penelope Brackett. It’s titled Seven Keys to Success Without Struggle. It’s about trying to balance the hustle with keeping your life in balance and believing that you can do it with hard work, yes, but struggle, no. You have to start to think of the hustle as part of the work –- it’s like learning the choreography and then dancing. Working in the arts is about building relationships. You’re going to people not to ask for something, but to offer something. No just means “not now.”

What’s the last thing you want to tell Cool Cleveland readers?
Come see A Bright Room Called Day. It’s exactly the play that needs to be seen right here, right now -- during this election, in a swing state.
http://www.cptonline.org

A Bright Room Called Day '''is a critical examination of the current realities involving the compromised situation of our liberties, now showing at Cleveland Public Theatre's Gordon Theatre, 6415 Detroit Ave. http://www.cptonline.org

Interview by Cool Cleveland correspondent Linda Eisenstein
Linda@coolcleveland.com (:divend:)