Cleveland Play House
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| Formation | 1915 |
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| Type | Theatre group |
| Location |
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Artistic director(s)
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Laura Kepley |
| Website | www.clevelandplayhouse.com |
Cleveland Play House (CPH) is a professional regional theater company located in Cleveland, Ohio. It was founded in 1915 and built its own noted theater complex in 1927. Currently the company performs at the Allen Theatre in Playhouse Square where it has been based since 2011.
Cleveland Play House is organized like most American theater companies, with a board of directors and a number of administrators. The Board of Directors is chaired by Alec Pendleton. The Artistic Director is Laura Kepley and the Managing Director is Kevin Moore. The theater's national directors are Alan Alda, Austin Pendleton, and Joel Grey.
The theatre received the 2015 Regional Theatre Tony Award on June 7, 2015 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.
In the early 1900s Cleveland theatre featured mostly vaudeville, melodrama, burlesque and light entertainment. In 1915 a select group of ten Clevelanders met in the home of Charles S. and Minerva Brooks to discuss the formation of an Art Theatre. Those present in addition to the Brooks were Walter and Julia McCune Flory, Raymond O'Neil, Ernest and Katherine Angell, Henry and Anna Hohnhorst, George Clisbee, Grace Treat, and Marthena Barrie. Together, they formed Cleveland Play House and named Raymond O'Neil as the Director. Their initial productions were performed in a home donated by Cleveland industrialist Francis Drury located at East 85th and Euclid Avenue. O'Neil was a devotee of the artistic ideals of Edward Gordon Craig, and the Play House's earliest productions reflect this. The founders of the Play House were bohemians and suffragists, and were thus outsiders in conservative Cleveland society. As a result, the Play House in its early years performed for a select group of individuals interested in avant-garde art, rather than the larger community of Cleveland.
The Play House was founded midway through a decade of cultural renaissance in Cleveland. Through a partnership of idealistic vision and philanthropic largess, many of Cleveland’s major cultural organizations were formed between 1910 and 1920—Cleveland Music School Settlement, Karamu House, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
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