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After announcing an ambitious $12 million capital campaign to renovate its campus earlier this year, Cleveland Public Theatre is now moving forward with plans to re-do its facade with a new marquee, LED window displays, and a signature blade sign to increase street presence and visibility. Recently, CPT received schematic approval from the Cleveland Landmarks Commission for designs that would also relocate the existing script sign to the side of the building and remove two trees that are currently blocking the facade. The project is slated to break ground in the spring.
It’s all part of a larger renovation project that includes creating an addition to CPT’s church building to make it accessible, adding new classroom space for the theater’s outreach and education programs, adding backstage space for artists including dressing rooms and bathrooms, and creating a new single entryway for both the Gordon Square Theatre as well as the James Levin Theatre (currently, they have two separate entrances).
Earlier this year, the theater announced a six million dollar gift from the estate of Joan Yellen Horvitz, two million of which would go to building renovations and four million dollars of which would go towards establishing a director fellowship. Horvitz was a costume designer and artist who had worked on CPT productions during her lifetime. Shortly after that, the theater announced a four million dollar challenge grant from the Mandel Foundation. CPT still has to raise additional dollars to reach its goal.
The facade renovations are far more than just a facelift, said Raymond Bobgan, executive artistic director of CPT, which is located at 6145 Detroit Rd. in the Gordon Square Arts District (part of the larger Detroit Shoreway neighborhood). They are about increasing the visibility of the theater and its mission of creating transformative art. “I think it is critical that the facade show what’s happening on the inside (of the building), and the design is, I think, gorgeous,” he said. “It unifies the property.”
The blade sign is actually based on a historic blade sign that hung from the original building before it fell into disrepair. “It’s historically accurate, but a little bit thinner because we wanted to make it more discreet,” he said.
The window signs, in turn, will be like a subtler version of the in-your-face displays frequently found in big theater districts like Playhouse Square or on Broadway. “We’re going to be using this cool material that is essentially a huge video screen that can become opaque, and there will be video across all the front windows,” he said.
The facade renovations came directly out of conversations he’s had with artists over the years, Bobgan said. “I was shocked,” he said. “What I thought we were going to hear from the artists was, ‘There’s an inaccessible bathroom backstage.’ Instead, the first thing they said was, ‘The church is unusable as a public venue. There’s no real bathroom there at all, and we want to be able to use this building.’ And the second thing they said, tied with first, was ‘We feel invisible.’ The majority of our artists are black, indigenous and people of color, just like the city of Cleveland. And they felt like, here we are doing this vibrant, inclusive work, and no one knows we’re here.”
“It’s like sleepy town,” he added. “That’s literally what one of the artists said to me.”
The facade renovation aims to change that by increasing the visibility of CPT’s campus, which produces multiple productions a year, provides rehearsal and performance space to artists, and teaches theater to kids in schools and public housing.
CPT got its origins when founder James Levin purchased the buildings that are now the James Levin Theatre and the Gordon Square Theatre. CPT later acquired these buildings from Levin. “At that time, (the staff) were all making low enough wages that we qualified for food stamps,” Bobgan reflected. “CPT started this organization with a bunch of radical artists who really believed in the power of art and in the neighborhood. We put a lot of our heart and souls into this.”
Levin’s first order of business when starting CPT was to save the buildings, Bobgan said. “The city wanted to demolish it at the time,” he said of the Gordon Square Theater. “The church was then in disarray. There were different people squatting in it. It was a horrible situation.”
Fast forward 30 years, and the artists involved in CPT are now effectively in the next stage of renovating these historic properties to serve the community.
Bobgan said theaters like CPT, which are diverse but don’t just serve one constituency, are rare across the country and should be valued for what they are doing. “There’s maybe five theatres of our size across the country that do almost all brand new work,” he said.
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Lee Chilcote
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