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ETC’s Off-Center/On-Stage Series playwrights
include (clockwise from top left): Ronald Mielech, Mark
Friedman, Janet Vogt and Elizabeth Logan Harris.
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Lynn Meyers is hearing voices. Lots of them. She's not getting her head examined, even though she's feeling a little off-center these days. And with good reason: Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati (ETC), where Meyers is the artistic director, is about to launch into its most creative and innovative period, the annual Off-Center/On-Stage Series, and Meyers has chosen four plays to present in simple, workshopped productions.
The shows are, to her way of thinking, about as diverse as they can be.
"If one of them really hits," Meyers says, "there's no reason why it couldn't develop into a (full-scale) production. We're going to make sure every show has a response form in the program, so the authors have something tangible to take home with them. I would be shocked if any of these four playwrights didn't get to New York on these plays."
Meyers sees the Off-Center series as a chance for audiences to audition shows. This year she's focused on local playwrights for the three-week June series, which includes Ron Mielech's The 4-H Club (June 7-11), Elizabeth Logan Harris' Skirmishes and Boo Friedmann's Whisperings (a double bill of one-acts running June 14-18) and a reading of Green Gables (June 21-25), a musical based on the children's favorite, Anne of Green Gables, by Janet Vogt and Mark Friedman.
Meyers is excited to have so many shows rehearsing simultaneously, when other theaters in town are winding down their seasons. It especially satisfies her to showcase local writers.
"For playwrights to have an audience in process," she says, "there's no better tool than that. I just feel very strongly it's what we should be doing."
Meyers directs many of ETC's shows, but for this series she is playing the role of producer. "I've hired fabulous people to direct, so my job right now is to work on each of them and make sure they get the casting needed, the production values that they need, and that they understand it's a workshop." She has brought in some of Cincinnati's best talent to stage these productions, including directors Jim Nelson, Gyllian Raby, Drew Fracher and Michael Burnham. Also on hand for Green Gables will be professional actresses Pam Myers and Deb Girdler.
Nelson is directing Mielech's 4-H Club, a play centered on a dysfunctional family reunion on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Mielech heads the drama program at Thomas More College in Crestview Hills, Ky., where Nelson is also a faculty member. (In fact, Nelson and ETC's Meyers are TMC grads whose theatrical drive was nurtured by Mielech.)
Several of the readers who helped Meyers select plays warmed to Mielech's play, likening it to the work of Nicky Silver, a contemporary and darkly cynical writer. They asked Meyers, "Who is this guy? Like a really young, cool guy?" Meyers didn't quite know how to tell them Mielech is Yale-educated, a well-established writer and "perhaps the happiest man I know, because he knew who he was and he knew what he wanted."
Meyers likes Mielech's work and would love to produce other plays he's written. But this show is different. "When he gave me this play," she says, "I couldn't believe he wrote it. This is a very dark, bleak, sarcastic comment on today's society. It's a very young look at society from somebody who isn't 15."
Meyers acknowledges Mielech's mentorship in her own career, but is quick to say, "If he hadn't written the play, I would (still) be doing it. It just shone out of all the other dark plays I got. This one was the funniest and had the most impact."
For the second week of the series, Meyers selected one-acts by Harris and Friedmann, both writers and actresses. Harris produced This Train, Aralee Strange's full-length feature film shot locally last summer, while Friedmann has acted recently with Stage First Cincinnati and The Know Theatre Tribe.
Harris' Skirmishes is the tale of a young woman's discovery of her great-grandmother, a woman from a previous century. Through research, interviews and soul-searching, the central character explores her heritage, says Meyers. "She's put in a place where she can actually converse with her ancestors. It's a very interesting look at women, and the changes in women's roles in the last century. And it's also a very personal look at what happens when you try to reassess goals."
Skirmishes will be directed by Gyllian Raby, Meyers says. "Gyllian is such a visual artist. (Raby and Harris) are a marvelous match. There's a lot of symbolism in the piece, and a lot to just come in and wrap your arms around." The cast includes Naomi Baylis, who soloed in Raby's previous ETC outing, an Off-Center production of Sabina's Splendid Brain, the most satisfying work of the 1999 Off-Center series.
Friedmann's Whisperings, according to Meyers, "started out pretty much as a poem. It is utterly poetic in nature, about a woman's view of the Holocaust. There was something amazingly honest about the piece and the language was so utterly different."
In selecting each Off-Center, Meyers says, "What I looked for were different voices, somebody who just needed a place to say something. (Friedmann) is very devout in her Jewish ancestry and in her belief and her faith, and I think this is a very courageous thing for her to do."
Friedmann will play the central role in her one-woman show, with five dancers representing the many voices silenced by the Holocaust. Michael Burnham, a CCM professor of drama who recently directed The Oedipus Trilogy for the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival, is staging the piece.
Meyers is pleased Friedmann and Burnham are collaborating. "She has really listened (to him). For someone so precise in what she thinks, it's refreshing that she can also listen."
For the final production, Meyers had to overcome her own resistance herself. "If anyone had told me that in Off-Center I was going to do a musical of Green Gables, I would have told them they were totally crazy." The series more typically offers edgy material, and a musical based on the children's classic novel by L. M. Montgomery was an unlikely prospect. But it's on the docket for June 21-25.
Composer Janet Vogt and writer Mark Friedman, who have been collaborating for 25 years, have previously written everything from advertising jingles to liturgical music. Meyers has been impressed with Vogt's and Friedman's serious approach to their show work, to be presented as reader's theater, with actors reading and singing from scripts.
"I have never met anybody who worked that hard. They've really understood this material." Vogt and Friedman auditioned two songs for Meyers and read some dialogue. She told herself, "I have to not be prejudicial about the fact that I want to be hip and out there: This is really a good piece of writing."
Knowing a workshop of Green Gables at ETC would really help Vogt and Friedman move their work forward, Meyers decided to present it. Actresses Pam Myers and Deb Girdler, who starred in Love & Shrimp at ETC a year ago (Myers was named to CityBeat's Entertainment Hall of Fame at the 1999 Cincinnati Entertainment Awards), are involved in the project, another assurance this will be a high-quality show.
"The playwrights," Meyers says, "are two of the most open souls I have ever met. They believe it's time for a story about acceptance. They are taking this very classic, calm, children's book and saying the reason this was written all these years ago still counts.
"They have just busted forth with this creative process. I've had five versions since the first one, every one better than the other." To match their energy, Meyers asked Drew Fracher to direct, a creative talent best-known for staging action-oriented shows such as CSF's 1999 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and ETC's Wild Oats in 1998.
Meyers loves being the ringmaster in ETC's three-ring circus. "It's a very powerful group in here. You talk about people choosing paths of least resistance. Well, I've gone down into the lion's den. You get all these people into this room and you think there's going to be this major fire break out. Instead, all this diverse energy and passion comes at each other. If you see the building's gone up in flames at some point, you'll know what's happened."
Indeed we will: It's called Off-Center/On-Stage at Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, a local theatrical opportunity not to be missed.
THE OFF-CENTER/ON-STAGE SERIES, presented by Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati at 1127 Vine Street in Over-the-Rhine. The series opens on Wednesday with The 4-H Club. Whisperings and Skirmishes will be performed June 14-18, and the staged reading of Green Gables will be June 21-25.
