It tolled for the Play House. The building, that is, at 8500 Euclid Ave., one of the unmistakable landmarks in Cleveland's remarkable cultural cityscape.
It died Sunday at age 84. The cause, officials said, was a mortal hemorrhaging of money complicated by a terminally leaky roof.
Survivors, however, include the Play House. The theater company, that is, the city's flagship resident professional troupe and at 96 the oldest in the nation. It will move, on Sept. 16, contractors and climate permitting, to PlayhouseSquare's Allen Theatre.
The solemn tintinnabulation of the bell, which has called audiences from the bar at curtain time and from the restrooms at the top of Act 2 since 1927, was heard by a near-capacity crowd of 500 mourners. They came not to bury the Play House, founded in 1915 as an "art theater" alternative to the commercial fare at downtown theaters, but to praise it.
They stayed to join the cast for a traditional end-of-run bubbly toast in the soaring central rotunda after the final performance of the final Mainstage production at the Play House.
"Onward, upward and westward," said artistic director Michael Bloom, who led the services by hoisting a plastic cup of Andre California "champagne."
(Bloom later apologized privately by saying the Play House is a nonprofit, and trying to scrape together the $30 million or so for that 70-block trip west.)
All were there for the Sunday matinee of "Legacy of Light" -- snapping cellphone pictures in the lobby, hugging and remembering -- to mark the end of an era and the dawn of another.
The Play House leaves behind the largest resident-theater complex in the country, an 11.29-acre site, and a 295,000 square feet facility that comprises two of the most beautiful and functional theaters anywhere (as well two other, lesser venues), and enough theater lore and Cleveland heritage to fill a history book.
The place has been bequeathed to the next-door neighbor, the Cleveland Clinic, which bought it two years ago for $13 million but remains mum on the fate of the crenelated battlements that top the brick facade, located between two of the city's most-traveled eastern arteries, Euclid and Carnegie avenues.
The $30 million project to renovate the Allen and build two new venues beside it -- and to bring theater programs from both Case Western Reserve and Cleveland State universities to PlayhouseSquare's Middough Building -- is on-schedule, theater district real-estate executive Tom Einhouse said.
The Play House was born in 1915 in a living room of a house on East 115th Street, one of the first of many early 20th century institutions, including the nearby Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Museum of Art, that make the city the envy of many larger metropolitan areas.
It moved the following year to a house and then a barn at East 86th and Euclid. And there -- except for a 10-year stay at a church at East 73rd and Cedar, and a satellite operation in another church at East 77th and Euclid -- it has remained.
In 1927, the Play House opened a new facility at East 86th and Euclid: the 138-seat off-Broadway style Brooks Theatre and a 504-seat Broadway-size house dubbed the Drury Theatre, the workhorse venue.
"The Drury is the nicest and most intimate and yet most powerful theater space I've ever worked in," said Peter Hackett, artistic director at the Play House from 1994 until 2004 and now chairman of the theater department at Dartmouth College.
Passing on a chance to move downtown, the Play House expanded in 1983.
Architecture superstar (and Cleveland area native) Philip Johnson added a fortresslike, Romanesque addition that includes the 548-seat Bolton Theatre and 124-seat Studio One.
From 1915 until now, the Play House produced some 1,429 shows, according to the theater's marketing staff, including 862 Mainstage productions at 8500 Euclid. They were written by everybody from Aristophanes to Steve Martin, with George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams sandwiched in-between, and starred the likes of Margaret Hamilton, Paul Newman, Alan Alda, Joel Grey and Ed Asner.
The Drury hosted a stunning 517 shows alone.
Eventually, the Play House facility became too expensive to maintain, costing the company nearly $1 million a year just to keep open.
Things just stopped working. The louvers of the fire doors high over the Drury stage, for instance, have been stuck in the open position for years, allowing rain and all sort of other things to literally fall in.
"During the middle of a performance, with the actors portraying a family around the table, just as the wife is serving dinner, down from the ceiling dropped a dead crow," Hackett recalled. "Right on the table."
"Everybody stopped, nobody saying anything, everybody staring at this thing. The audience went berserk. Finally, an actress got a towel, wrapped the bird up, took it offstage and sat down. One of the actors said, 'Where were we?' And the audience went berserk again."
Fittingly, the warmly wood-paneled Drury was the site of Sunday's last hurrah. Just as fittingly, "Legacy of Light" ended with these lines:
"Everything changes. But nothing is lost. Ever."
Until the bell tolls in the Allen Theatre next September to call audiences to the first opening night curtain in the latest home of the venerable Cleveland Play House, that will serve as an epitaph for a building Cleveland should never forget.
Source http://www.cleveland.com/
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