The Oral Tradition Lives On—Somewhere

If you ask a friend to go to a reading with you, he or she might look at you funny. After all, reading is a verb, it’s something you do alone, quietly, not a something you go to. Jean Cummins, founder of the First Mondays Reading Series, has been working to change this perception. A program that started in order to offer readings of new plays has expanded to included poetry and fiction readings. Now, after three years of working under the umbrella of Dobama Theatre and building an audience for new work, the First Mondays series is looking for a new home.

For a number of reasons, primarily the age-old decision of where to invest limited monetary resources, Dobama is no longer able to support the First Mondays Series. Cummins is searching for a new home—one likely candidate is The LIT—but that move is not definite. She says, “The main point is that we are leaving Dobama, and although we’d like to continue, what happens next is not clear yet.”

First Mondays started simply. As Cummins puts it, the series came about because, “I’m a playwright. I wanted to have a place to read my work and Dobama wanted an active presence in the library while they were struggling to build their new theater, but I think that it has continued because people genuinely enjoy sharing in the creative process.” One of the primary reasons the series was created was to develop new, interesting material with meaningful roles for sixty-something actors, a cohort that arguably makes up the biggest supporters of live theater. Cummins wanted better roles for actors in this age range. She adds, “By "better" I mean in relation to your own life and goals—not as someone's neurotic mother or dying father—but as you, your own person in your own life. We were aiming to serve aging actors and audiences, who are living in a different way than people of an earlier era. We don't want to be perceived in relation to a younger generation—as mothers, fathers, grandmothers—we want to continue to play the "leads" in our own lives.” She adds that First Mondays is not a "senior program" as those programs are usually defined, but it does cater to and reflect the interests of that demographic, whose interests are wide ranging and include material by artists of all ages.

The series has offered readings by a number of emerging and established area writers. In some ways, a play, poetry, or fiction reading serves the same purpose for a writer as playing out in a bar or a coffee shop serves for a musician. It’s an opportunity to test new work and see how listeners—or potential readers—react to that work. Cummins believes that readings give audiences a chance to share in the creative process and simply to see what new work is being written. She says, “We try to make the audience feel like they’re really a part of what’s going on—not onlookers but participants. One of the ways we do that is through discussion. But even if we never discussed anything, there is a current that runs between actors and their audience or between any kind of reader and their audience. You can feel people paying attention, you can feel them laughing or leaning forward in their chairs, you can also feel them being restless and looking at their watches and wanting to go to the bathroom. This live current is the essence of performance.” A writer who is paying attention can easily see what sections move and engage an audience and what sections don’t. She adds that readings are “a whole lot easier for playwrights because we don’t have to read our own stuff. We just get to sit back and listen and watch. Also, we know it’s not the way that we’re reading that is causing the audience reaction. Other people are reading our work—trained professionals, in most cases—so that takes the personal pressure off and makes it a wonderful learning experience.”

Over the last three years, Cummins and the First Monday Series have quietly been helping to build a culture of readings in a city that doesn’t have one. She believes it’s important to host readings not only because they enrich the community, making it a place where creative people want to live and work, but because readings emphasize the community nature of theater. “That live performance current I described earlier can create a culture, a commonality of experience that maybe wasn’t there before,” she says. “So readings not only enrich the community, they build it and help people recognize that they are part of a community. Maybe I love the community aspect of theater so much because I’m a writer and writers are by nature reclusive, so going to the theater, being part of the theater is a big treat for me. But I happen to believe that all good theater is community theater, that the audience has to own what happens on stage, that theater is a process, not a performance, and it requires a connection between actors and audience and constant feedback.”

Cummins has a number of favorite First Monday readings from the past few years. Among them was a recent reading by the poet Phil Terman, whose latest published collection is titled Rabbis of the Air. A young Klezmer violinist Gabe Rothman also played at that reading. Playwright Mike Oatman’s The Chittlin’ Thief is another personal favorite. She recaps the plot, saying, “It’s about a young black marketing exec who’s been hired by a white bread agency so he can help them pull in money from the hip hop generation. He’s expected to land a major rapper account, but he sounds like Barack Obama, so the one who does the talking is his white partner who speaks ‘rap.’ I had a stranger come up to me in the library a good week after that particular reading and tell me how much he and his wife enjoyed it, how provocative it was.” Another favorite reading was a baseball-themed evening last January, which featured an excerpt from a baseball novel-in-progress, an appearance by Plain Dealer sportswriter Bob Dolgan, and actor Joe Verciglio performing Throw ‘Em Smoke, a baseball monologue by Margaret Hunt and Dick Holody about Gaylord Perry inventing the spitball. Cummins says, “I loved that evening because it illustrates all the different kinds of writing and writers you can bring together in one place under a common theme. “

The final First Mondays readings will be Margaret Lynch’s For the Price of a Cow on Mon 1/1/10. While First Mondays is still at Dobama, the best way to get more details about these upcoming readings is to call the box office at 216. 932. 3396 and ask to be put on the mailing list. Cummins hopes that she’ll soon be able to inform people of a definite new home for the First Mondays Reading Series.

It’s appropriate that one of the last First Mondays readings at Dobama will be by Cummins herself. On Mon 12/7, the series is hosting a reading of her script, Pray for the Missing Girls, in two parts. Cummins describes it as being “about the crimes against women and girls in Juarez and along the I-45 corridor in Texas between Houston and Galveston. Many people know about Juarez, but I-45 is a kind of “Bermuda Triangle” for young women on our side of the border. These are all unsolved crimes, and it’s almost comforting to think of them as the work of a serial killer, but the victims number in the hundreds so we’re forced to realize that this is what happens to young girls in today’s world. If we’re talking about the Maquiladoras (assembly plants) in Juarez, we have to recognize that this is the true cost of cheap electronics.”

The play features a large ensemble cast, and actors for the reading include a number of local favorites, including Reuben and Dorothy Silver, Sean Derry, Dana Hart, Jacqi Lowey, Robert Hawkes, Michael Regnier, Jean Zarzour, Marcia Mandell, Allison Bencar, Joe Verciglio, Aimee Cummins, Lauren B. Smith, Tim Keo, and Roni Berenson.. The cast includes several newcomers as well. She is delighted to note that “One of our audience members, Roni Berenger has crossed over and joined the cast.”

Parts 1 and 2 of Pray for the Missing Girls (both Someone is Killing the Girls of Juarez and Crossing the Border) will be read on Mon 12/7 at 7PM in Dobama Theatre, 2340 Lee Road, just across the street from the main CH-UH library. http://Dobama.org

When Cool Cleveland contributor Susan Petrone is not writing an arts or culture article for Cool Cleveland, she writes fiction. Her first novel, A Body at Rest, was published in early 2009 by Drinian Press. An excerpt from the novel and some of her published short fiction are available at http://www.SusanPetrone.com.