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  • The Value of InactionUnions, Labor Codes, and the Cleveland Play House
  • Jeffrey Ullom (bio)

In 2015, Lynn Nottage premiered Sweat at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and soon the play took the American theatre by storm.1 Following a stint at the Arena Stage and then a six-week Off-Broadway run at the Public Theater in 2016, the production transferred to Broadway. Nominations for multiple awards followed. The play won the 2017 Obie Award for Best Play as well as the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.2 Given Sweat’s meteoric rise, numerous professional theatre companies across the country jumped at the chance to produce the compelling drama. New York Times theatre critic Charles Isherwood described Nottage’s work as “a trenchant and insightful analysis of the consequences of the sharp decline in factory work in the country, and the gutting of once-mighty unions.”3 Patrons of the Cleveland Play House easily could assume that artistic director Laura Kepley chose Sweat for the 2018–2019 season because of the city’s celebrated history with manufacturing, industry, and unions. However, when theatregoers gathered in the Outcalt Theatre on October 13, 2018, to watch the local premiere of Sweat, they were likely unaware of the Cleveland Play House’s unique and troubled history with local unions, including one event in particular that only recently came to light.4 The 1930s found the Cleveland Play House engaged in a decade-long conflict with local unions, resulting in legislative battles and even a firebombing. In the midst of the heated tensions and facing pressure to respond in the press and in legislative debates, Cleveland Play House director Frederic McConnell chose a path of inaction, and his choice potentially altered the landscape of professional theatre in the United States.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, various theatrical unions struggled to cement their position in the industry, and their desire for leverage often resulted [End Page 53] in conflicts with producers and artists at theatres of every size and location. Perhaps one of the most infamous battles between a union and an institution occurred in Cleveland and involved a local attack on the Play House. Founded in 1915, the Cleveland Play House remains the longest-running professional theatre in America, and it certainly endured growing pains. The six years following the founding of the Cleveland Play House were tumultuous. By 1921, the theatre was in disarray and searching for administrative and financial stability—not only had the organization occupied six different performance spaces in four different buildings (two houses, a barn, and a renovated church), but the Cleveland Play House also suffered from substantial debt, decreasing membership, and a vacancy in leadership as its founding director abruptly quit the group to pursue work in New York.5 In dire need of immediate support, the Cleveland Play House abandoned any agenda it may have pursued as an art theatre and resorted to becoming a community theatre in order to survive.

The board of trustees’ first step toward recovery was one of the wisest decisions made in the Cleveland Play House’s entire history—hiring three professionals from outside the organization to helm the theatre. Thomas Wood Stevens, the dean of the School of Theatre at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, recommended to former student Frederic McConnell that he consider applying for the position as director of the Cleveland Play House. While en route to California, McConnell stopped in Cleveland and viewed a production of three Eugene O’Neill one-act plays.6 According to Julia McCune Flory’s personal account of the earlier years of the Play House, “There is no record of McConnell’s thoughts concerning this one performance; however, he must have enjoyed it because he not only accepted the position, but he married the leading actress of the show.”7 As a student at Carnegie Institute of Technology, McConnell befriended K. Elmo Lowe (a director and actor) and Max Eisenstat (a designer and production designer), and these three men became knowns as “the triumvirate” when hired to manage and grow the Cleveland theatre.8 As a leader, McConnell provided the theatre with much-needed stability through a coherent and unified vision for the...

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