A House in Search of a Home: A Contextual History of the Founding of the Cleveland Play House

Karen Zacarias became a part of American theater history on May 1, 2011. Following the conclusion of her play Legacy of Light, patrons filed out of the Cleveland Play House's Drury Theatre for the final time, leaving behind an eighty-four-year-old building filled with memories, accomplishments, and problems. The massive four-theater, 295,000-square-foot complex located on Euclid Avenue became too much of a financial burden for the Cleveland Play House to bear, requiring the nonprofit organization to budget $1 million each year for maintenance, never mind the backlog of $4 million in repairs that had gone ignored for years.¹ Having sold its 11.29-acre site to the neighboring Cleveland Clinic, the Cleveland Play House moved seventy blocks west, into a new performing arts complex—coincidentally named Playhouse Square—where the nation's longest-running professional theater opened its new performance space four months later. While audiences marveled at the ornate yet intimate 514-seat auditorium, most patrons were unaware that the Allen Theatre, in fact, was quite old, constructed in 1921 as a movie house and later converted into a theater before being left vacant.² This is not the first time that the Cleveland Play House claimed an abandoned space as its home; in its earliest years, the organization found itself moving from place to place to survive.

As it approaches its centennial anniversary in 2015, the Cleveland Play House's move downtown is cause not only to celebrate its future but also to explore its past and chart the difficulties that the founding members overcame in establishing the famous institution. The Cleveland Play House deserves recognition not only as the longest-running professional theater in the country but also because it is the only theater from the era to have survived. Joining the Toy Theatre in Boston and the Little Theatre in Chicago as part of the little theater movement in the 1910s, the Cleveland Play House's commitment to offering "art theater" (noncommercial) fare blazed a trail for other theaters in the 1920s and 1930s to follow. While many cities in Ohio boasted rentable performance houses for touring productions and smaller theater companies dedicated to offering popular plays or vaudeville shows, institutions modeled after the Cleveland Play House did not appear until nearly a decade later, making the founding of this type of theater even more remarkable.³

Surprisingly, insightful research into the origins of Cleveland Play House has been neglected by every publication referring to the institution's beginnings, including Joseph Wesley Zeigler's Regional Theatre and Cleveland's own legendary newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer.⁴ When referring to the creation of the theater (often in articles marking an anniversary), the Cleveland Plain Dealer simply repeats a standard narrative first described in a book written by a participant in the Cleveland Play House's earliest endeavors. Julia McCune Flory, wife of the organization's first president and author of one of the earliest histories of the Cleveland Play House, recalled the events leading to the founding of the Cleveland Play House, unknowingly providing a brief history that would remain unexamined for decades: "In the early fall of 1915, Charles and Minerva Brooks invited eight friends to meet in their drawing room at 1598 East 115th Street to discuss the forming of an Art Theatre. Those present at this first meeting were Charles and Minerva Brooks, Raymond O'Neil, Ernest and Katharine Angell, Henry Hohnhorst and his wife Anna, George Clisbee, Grace Treat, and Marthena Barrie."⁵ While Flory's account is certainly sufficient in listing the key participants, it remains an overly simplistic narrative. Scholars who research the founding of arts institutions know that such effortless descriptions gloss over the various struggles and challenges that every organization faces in order to define its own aesthetics and form a cohesive and effective group.

The context Flory fails to record in her brief assessment prohibits a complete understanding of the individuals involved with this landmark artistic endeavor. Even though the Cleveland Play...