The Shock of the New
New Productions By CPT, BNC, 4WP Offer Cool Risks, Rewards

Here's a dirty little secret: most theaters just can't make themselves book untested new plays. Which means between all the "classics", "old favorites", "literary gems", and "audience pleasers" you'll see on theater seasons, a frequent playgoer can start to feel like she's stuck in Summer Rerun Hell. That's why it's important to give a shout-out to three venues that are taking risks this week by programming fresh, unseen work by area authors. New plays are kind of like trick-or-treat. You don't know which you're going to get, but there's one thing you can be sure of: it won't be the same-old, same-old...

CPT -- Goldstar, Ohio and Little [Box]

First and foremost in our area for novelty is still Cleveland Public Theatre. On the main stage is the premiere of the much-lauded documentary play Goldstar, Ohio, a penetrating look at families of Ohio Marines killed in Iraq. Meanwhile, upstairs in the James Levin Theatre, are works just getting on their feet: two weekends of staged readings in the Little [Box] series.

"We couldn't be more thrilled to be opening this play at CPT," says Goldstar director Andy Paris, who with playwright Michael Tisdale has been in residence at CPT for the past 6 weeks getting the work on its feet. The pair met in New York via the Tony Award-winning Tectonic Theater Project, originators of The Laramie Project and I Am My Own Wife, but both are Ohio transplants -- Paris is from Cincinnati and Tisdale hails from Lakewood. They had workshopped Tisdale's play in New York, but they became convinced it needed to premiere somewhere in Ohio.

"We shopped it around to several major theaters," says Paris, "and though there was some interest, mostly what we got was notes on how to 'fix it'.

Then Tisdale gave a copy to CPT Education Director Chris Siebert, an old pal he's known since they did kids' theater together at the Beck Center over 20 years ago; she read it and passed it along to CPT Artistic Director Raymond Bobgan. "Less than two weeks later, I got a call from Raymond, saying 'I want to produce your play in our next season.'"

"He's a creator himself, so he truly understands the process," adds Paris. "Everything about the production is exceeding our wildest expectations."

The Little [Box] series is in its 3rd year, featuring one-night-only versions of 6 new works-in-progress. On Thursday, CSU Professor of African-American literature Adrienne Gosselin presents an adaptation of one of her favorite Harlem Renaissance novels, The Conjure Man Dies, a noir detective story. On Saturday, Jacqi Loewy directs two contrasting solo shows about loss: Jeffrey Grover's 5:40 AM, a man's pre-dawn musings about his mother's death, a recent divorce, and lessons learned; and Mike Geither's quirky It's Okay to Cry: A Personal History of Cleveland Baseball.

The Bang and the Clatter -- International House of Hamburgers

This weekend The Bang and the Clatter opens its second world premiere: International House of Hamburgers by Cleveland playwright Cliff Hershman. With one foot in Mamet-land (think Glengarry Glen Ross) and the other in The Office, Hershman's work always seems to deal with the dark mix of comic and dramatic consequences of "dudes behaving badly", with charming but flawed protagonists on a desperate chase of the American Dream. In this piece he paints a picture of workplace backstabbing and opportunism set in the fresh hell of a restaurant kitchen.

Besides his playwriting, Hershman is BNC's Sustainability Director and the go-to-guy-behind-the-scenes chiefly responsible for bringing the cutting-edge company to Cleveland. After Herschman got the two Seans (McConaha and Derry) to a reading of his play A Narrow Bridge, which they eventually produced in their Akron venue, he fell head-over-heels for the company's take-no-prisoners style and risk-taking aesthetic. With his real estate developer connections, he brokered a super-sweet deal with The Marons (East Fourth/House of Blues) to get BNC a drop-dead gorgeous rent-free storefront just steps from Public Square and East 4th. It's a space that any off-Broadway company would kill for: check them out.

Fourth Wall Productions -- All's Fair

As a thematic bookend, over at Fourth Wall Productions there's another new look at one screwed-up day in the American workplace: Cleveland playwright Matthew A. Sprosty's All's Fair, "where sexual inequality and true intentions collide." In the itinerant world of theater, where desperate playwrights mail their scripts and SASE's into the void praying someone, anyone, will read them, it's a luxurious pleasure to be able to type the words "resident playwright". Which makes Sprosty both a lucky man and a fiendishly hard worker in the vineyards of do-it-yourself theater -- he is both Fourth Wall's resident playwright and its literary manager, reading scripts, recommending them for production, and working with the writers to get them stage-worthy.

Sprosty has a pungent, off-beat sense of humor and an acute ear that flawlessly gets the rhythms of "dudespeak". His Malicious Bunny, about a couple who decides to off their parents, was one of the area's most engaging premieres two seasons ago, and he just keeps getting better. All's Fair runs through Nov. 2 at the Enterprise Center on the border between Bratenahl and Glenville.

Learn more about these and other productions at the websites for The Bang and the Clatter, Cleveland Public Theatre and Fourth Wall Productions

From Cool Cleveland contributor Linda Eisenstein lindaATcoolcleveland.com (:divend:)