HUNKERED DOWN AT THE BAR

Tremont

Actors’ Summit

April 16-May 3

86 Owen Brown St., Hudson

330.342.0800.

actorssummit.org

Journalists in Cleveland — and probably all the Rust Belt
cities — have been telling statistical stories of people, jobs
and money leaving town for years. It’s easy to get lost in the steady
deluge of numbers as they become a blur of decline. It’s also easy to
lose sight of the fighters who stay behind. In the past year, though,
local theatres have begun to take up changing cities as subject matter
in a way that has something in common with gothic tales of the
postbellum South: There’s grandeur and pride in the past, poverty and
struggle in the present.

The husband-and-wife playwriting duo Bob and Pamela Noll were still
tweaking their play Tremont as it entered the final week of
rehearsal at Actors’ Summit, where it opens this week. Bob Noll is an
experienced playwright, with 26 scripts produced, at least one of them
in every state in the U.S. He and Pamela have directly relevant
experience that will help tell the tale, as both grew up in ethnic
neighborhoods of Cleveland.

“My wife and I thought, there’s a story about the ethnics in the
city,” says Bob. “I spent a lot of time in Tremont in the early ’60s.
It was all Polish people living there. I remember the steel mills
closing. My dad worked in mills. I remember when they built the
projects there, and at the time, a lot of people moved to Parma. So
it’s about these people that are still there.”

The Nolls built their characters and story from real people they
knew. There’s a guy named Zoltan who owns an old neighborhood bar and
lives upstairs. The bar — which Bob describes as “one of those
bars where you’d go in at noon and start drinking” — is the
setting for the story. Zoltan takes in his waitress, a 38-year-old
woman named Eva who’s afraid to stay in her apartment, which was
recently broken into. There’s an elderly couple who are regulars at the
bar: She wants to move to Parma because of the way the neighborhood is
changing, but he wants to stay, no matter what. There’s a character
named Tree who always wears brown pants but changes his shirt according
to the seasonal colors of the leaves. Tree has lost his job but
believes he can build a new career betting on the Indians. Eva’s
long-lost brother returns on the occasion of their parents’ death
because he wants his share of the inheritance. He was a drunk when he
left town and seems to have reformed, but he’s not fooling Eva.

Bob Noll says the cast is great because they’ve all worked together
before, and their familiarity serves the story well. He also credits
director Neil Thackaberry for having a strong understanding of the
characters.

“These were great people who worked so hard to make Cleveland the
great city it was,” he says. “I love all these characters because they
remind me of people I know.

mgill@clevescene.com

This article appears in Apr 15-21, 2009.