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Dramatists have a guild, not a union, because we own our work and our ownership is inviolable. This distinction didn’t stop four Cleveland DG members from launching “Playwrights Local 4181,” a group devoted exclusively to supporting theater artists in Northeast Ohio. On their to-do list: new play development, staged readings, full productions, professional development, partnerships with other theatres, new technologies and community outreach.

The project is the brainchild of playwright/educator David Todd, who moved back to Cleveland in 2014. He noticed that many area dramatists were not being served by even the most supportive producing companies. Markets large and small had playwright centers, he thought. Why not Cleveland?

Early in 2015, Todd met with colleagues Tom Hayes, Arwen Mitchell and Michael Geither to create a “center of gravity” for area dramatists. Echoing the area’s blue collar vibe, they chose a worker motif. Everyone pitches in for the common good. (“4181” represents Cleveland’s latitude and longitude.)

The group hit the ground running, assigning titles and tasks. Todd is Artistic Director. Hayes is Managing Director. Mitchell is Literary Manager and Geither is Director of Education and Engagement. They quickly obtained non-profit status and found space at Waterloo Arts, in the city’s newly revitalized North Collinwood neighborhood. Arts organizations now offer an active schedule of programs, exhibits and live performances there.

By November, PL4181 had brought to Collinwood the first Cleveland Playwrights Festival. The two-day event featured staged readings of six short works, Michael Laurenty’s full-length Dye Jung, and a live performance/podcast of Geither’s Flame Puppy. There were workshops on craft and a professional development panel. By any measure, the event was a success, with more than 150 artists and area residents attending.

Now underway is a Spring Play Lab that offers writers three months of support with their full-length scripts. PL4181 provides directors, actors and dramaturgs as well as space for table readings, feedback, rehearsal and public staged readings. New works by Nivi Engineer, Claire Robinson May and Amy Schwabauer are the centerpiece of the April Lab.

PL4181’s first fully staged production comes this May with Les Hunter’s To the Orchard. Winner of a Foundation for Jewish Culture New Play grant, it had early readings at Boston Playwrights Theatre and Brooklyn College. It took a move to Cleveland to stage its world premiere.

PL4181’s second production is slated for this November. It’s a documentary-style piece about the November 2014 shooting death of twelve-year-old Clevelander Tamir Rice. Police opened fire after mistaking the boy’s toy gun for a real one—and compounded the damage by delaying a call for help. Neither officer involved will face criminal charges in a case that has gained national prominence. Six writers are interviewing community members, media, and law and government officials to reflect the impact of the tragedy and its aftermath. Following the play’s opening at Waterloo Arts, it will tour throughout the city and its inner-ring suburbs.

Plans are also in the works for a March 2017 weekend-long celebration of Cleveland-born playwright Mac Wellman. On the drawing board: a production of Bitter Bierce, Wellman’s homage to satirist Ambrose Bierce. Other Wellman plays (or Wellman-inspired scripts coming out of Wellman-style workshops) will be performed. The playwright is scheduled to attend the festivities.

The company couldn’t manage without partners. PL4181 relies on co-sponsorships with multiple organizations, including universities and theatres working on the Wellman festival. They now provide or curate live theatre performances at Waterloo Arts events. And their staff of educators lead writing workshops throughout the city.

Playwrights Local partners next with the Dramatists Guild, co-sponsoring our April regional meeting as part of its spring festival. The Guild benefits by welcoming potential members. And who knows? Guild members just might find solidarity in this new union.

For more information, visit www.playwrightslocal.org.

Logo for PL4181

 PL4181 founder David Todd. Photo credit: Steven Mastroiani

fsholiton@dramatistsguild.com

@dramatistsguild

Christine Howey takes the Cleveland Public Theatre stage in January with her autobiographical solo piece Exact Change and quite a story to tell. Her journey began as Richard Howey, who, growing up in the ‘50s, liked Roy Rogers but also liked Dale Evans. He ached to do what the girls were doing and devised ingenious ways to deal with well-meaning psychologists. Along the way, he discovered that the most tortured soul could be soothed through playing other people’s lives on the stage. Acting credits following his graduation from Kent State University included Richard Nixon (Gore Vidal’s An Evening with Richard Nixon), the title role in James Leo Herlihy’s Terrible Jim Fitch; and Givola in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Artuo Ui.

In fact, it was during a performance of Good, by C.P. Taylor, that Howey realized the shocking dissonance between the (male) role he was playing on stage and the one he was living in real life. A poem entitled “End Play” describes how he went up on his lines with four minutes to go in a seven-minute monologue, “Dark terror lit brilliant by ten overhanging suns. You want words?/Here are words: I don’t belong here! Not like this! This is not who I am!” Adding insult to injury, a fellow actor (playing the role of Hitler, no less) consoled him afterwards: “‘Don’t worry: nobody knew.’/ When Adolf is your comfort, how deep is your fall?”

By the time Howey made a first attempt at writing for the stage, it was the 90s and Richard had become Christine. Theatre now offered a vehicle to explore and share the inner byways of the transgender world. And so she penned the autobiographical one-hander Making Faces. She planned to play the 25 characters herself until her director (wisely) counseled against it with a simple “You’re not right for this.” The play had a New York Equity Showcase production in 1999 starring Lenny Pinna, with Jim Sterner directing.

While Howey’s performing voice would go silent for nearly 30 years, it was loud and clear off-stage. She spent 35 years as a copywriter and creative director in advertising. Her second career, now seventeen years old, is as one of Cleveland’s most respected theatre critics. But her first and ongoing love was poetry, the stuff that now fills her plays – and in August won a standing ovation at the National Poetry Slam in Boston as she read her poem “Passing.”

It was clear from a workshop production of her solo piece Like a Doberman on a Quarter Pounder, which ran last season at Cleveland Public Theatre, that Howey was ready not only to return to the stage, but to be “right” for this role. Audiences embraced both the work and the performance.

In assembling material for the upcoming Exact Change, Howey has pulled material from both Making Faces and Doberman and then digs deeper into her transsexual journey. As she points out, the rate of attempted suicides in the general population is around 1.5%; in the transgender population, it’s 41%. Violence against this particular demographic is equally staggering. In one poem/vignette from Exact Change, Howey remembers Cemia (“CC”) Acoff, a 20-year-old woman (born Carl) found in March 2013 in a pond in suburban Cleveland, her body tied to a block of concrete. News accounts that referred to her as “it” and offered irrelevant details about her apparel became a source of instant outrage in the LGBT community.

Howey hopes there is a future for her work on college campuses and with anyone wanting to know about the lives of transgendered people. She is prepared to talk forever. And it’s a role that suits her fine.

fsholiton@dramatistsguild.com