When Russ Schwartz, an apprentice at the Performance Network Theatre, helped build faux bricks for the set of the theater’s 2009 production of Fences, he found the sheer size of the task daunting. “You cut a board of foam into rectangles, and then carve each piece to make it unique. Then, they get painted, stapled to the wall, and painted again,” he recalls. “There were a lot of bricks.” When the show ended, the task of removing the bricks fell to another tired apprentice, Keith Paul Medelis.
At the downtown theater, apprentices work on sets, run the box office, promote shows, stage-manage, house-manage, and more. “We’re not the artistic director making artistic decisions or the executive director making financial decisions, but we’re actually keeping the theater running, brick by brick,” says Medelis.
In Chelsea, Jeff Daniels’ Purple Rose Theatre Company also hires apprentices, giving aspiring thespians hands-on training in the administrative and technical skills needed to run a theater. “The things you don’t know how to do, you learn to do,” says Medelis. That’s why apprentices are willing to struggle with long hours that include evenings and weekends and to do chores that are sometimes tedious, all for small stipends—just $300 a week at the Network.
And it’s also why both theaters have managed to produce more than the shows seen on their stages: former apprentices have gone on to perform, design, and stage-manage at nearby venues, enriching the Southeast Michigan theater scene. And they have helped found seven new theaters in the last decade, five within an hour of Ann Arbor.
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Last year, Medelis heard a CD by a local band, Match by Match, with songs that traced the story of a worker who lost his memory after a brain injury. As Medelis listened, an idea hit him. What if he told that story on stage? The theater company he founded just after finishing his apprenticeship, the New Theatre Project, had not yet done a musical, but Medelis was game. He asked the Project’s resident playwright, Jason Sebacher, to write a book; he invited members of Match by Match to perform; he cast some top acting talents, including Julia Garlotte and Jamie Weeder; and he directed and designed the set, calling on Janine Woods Thoma to design lights and projections. The show,
The American Crowbar Case, attracted audiences—and the attention of another producer.
Back in 2009–2010, the Network was Medelis’s life. “I don’t think I would have been able to start the New Theatre Project without that,” says the 2009 Albion College grad. He had already started a theater on campus, where it continues today. But that, he says, was a far cry from running a professional theater. “Academia is a sheltered paradise, where you can literally do anything you want with no care for paying rent, marketing, or even people liking it.”
His experiences at Performance Network were something else entirely. He was production assistant on a main-stage show. He even had a chance to direct, in the Fireside Festival of New Works, although he felt “out of my element, doing it with professional actors on that level.” Now, two years and a thriving theater of his own later, Medelis says, “it seems like what I know now I always knew.”
It was at the Performance Network that he connected to Thoma, the theater’s former technical director; she now frequently designs at the New Theatre Project and serves as its technical consultant. And it was at the Network that he created a nest egg for his theater. Living with his parents during his apprenticeship enabled him to save most of his stipend; using the “Mosh Pit,” the Network’s second stage, without paying rent was critical, too.
Although Medelis depends on the skills he learned at Performance Network, the parent theater’s influence stops there. “There’s no reason to start your own theater company if you think that everything is being said that you want to say,” he says.
Combining acquired skills and some parts of a parent theater’s approach with a personal creative vision is common among the apprentices-turned-leaders. The Tipping Point Theatre in Northville is not an offshoot of the Rose “the way Frasier is coming off of Cheers,” says James Kuhl, Tipping Point’s producing artistic director and a Rose apprentice from 2000 to 2001. Kuhl says each of the apprentice-run theaters is unique, but there’s one thing all have in common—each operates in a small, intimate venue. “Theater-goers of today are less inclined to sit in the hundredth row. They want to feel themselves immersed in the action.” And that’s a central part of Tipping Point’s aesthetic. For a production of The Lady with All the Answers, based on Ann Landers’ letters, Kuhl placed a couch in the first row so that Julia Glander, who performed the one-woman show, could sit with the audience at times; and when Glander directed Kuhl in the title role of The Importance of Being Earnest, characters confided their thoughts directly to spectators. “I want patrons to feel at home in the theater,” Kuhl says.
Tipping Point was founded in 2007 by former Rose apprentice Christina Johnson; Kuhl took the helm when she resigned two years later. He credits his apprenticeship with reinforcing “my belief in the need for a strong work ethic coupled with personal motivation. In order to not only survive, but to progress in this field, you need to have a craft, a discipline, and a reflective, curious spirit.”
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Tony Caselli’s career flowered at the Purple Rose as well. Now artistic director of the Williamston Theatre near Lansing, Caselli was one of the Rose’s first apprentices, from 1992 to 1993. He stayed on for twelve more years, as stage manager, literary manager, apprentice chief, and finally associate artistic director; during those years he also acted and directed. “The Rose launched my career,” he says.
In 2005, Caselli co-founded the Williamston with John Lepard, Chris Purchis, and Emily Sutton-Smith, all of whom had worked at the Rose during his tenure. Although the town of Williamston is even smaller than Chelsea, the four felt they could sustain a theater there because they had seen it done successfully at the Rose.
They have been proven right. “We have different challenges, since we don’t have the high-profile name attached—which every theater in the state would love for publicity and fund-raising,” Caselli says. But even without a Daniels, the Williamston has found enthusiastic audiences.
Caselli says he learned “the importance of being clear in your principles, what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, so you have a framework.” The productions he does at Williamston often share the Rose’s filmic style, but lately have been “a little more theatrical, a little more magical” than they were before. Both theaters, he says, understand that “the value of a well-told story is key.” Like the Rose, the Williamston always includes some new plays in its season; often these plays are written by Annie Martin and Joseph Zettelmaier, also former Purple Rose apprentices.
When Caselli isn’t working at his own theater, you might find him directing at other theaters in and out of Michigan, including Performance Network and Meadowbrook. Last year, Detroit Free Press columnist-playwright Mitch Albom invited Caselli to stage Ernie, his love letter to the late Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell; the hit show will return to Detroit for a second run this summer.
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GoComedy! in Ferndale doesn’t have much in common with the Rose. “We have a bar and waitstaff,” explains company manager Michelle LeRoy, “and we do 90 percent improv shows,” rather than the scripted plays at the other theaters. But every entertainment venue requires management skills, and LeRoy says she draws on lessons she learned as a Rose apprentice and, later, stage manager, including how to design lights, develop box office procedures, and manage a company. She says the connections she made there have been essential. “It’s great to have this support base of people … to call upon and ask ‘How do you do that at your theater?'”
Most apprentices acquired strong marketing skills from their parent companies. Russ Schwartz, who recently joined the New Theatre Project, co-founded the Penny Seats Theatre Company last year. He says helping with marketing at the Performance Network prepared him for helping the public understand just what Penny Seats is. “Working with the Performance Network staff, the goal was to maintain conversations with the community … to include audiences in the character of the theatre. This pursuit informed my contribution to the talks around our formation, affecting how we selected our first play, what we wanted the experience of our shows to be like, how we would engage with audiences, and how to begin promoting our work; it continues to inform our interactions, and the development of tools like our website and social networking accounts,” he emails.
Schwartz also honed his artistic talents at the Network: he wrote a play for the Fireside Festival, and after his apprenticeship ended, he was cast in Sonia Flew, a co-production of the Network and the Jewish Ensemble Theatre in West Bloomfield.
Last summer, Penny Seats opened with just one production, staged outdoors at West Park. This season, the troupe opens in the Performance Network’s Mosh Pit with What Corbin Knew, then returns to West Park with the musical She Loves Me.
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Former PRTC apprentices have also co-founded theaters outside Michigan. After going on to study at Brown University/Trinity Repertory Theatre, Aaron Rossini co-created the Fault Line Theatre in New York City. And Darcy Elora Hofer is executive director of the Appetite Theatre Company in Chicago.
Theaters founded by former apprentices are developing an awareness of what theater is and can be, both for audiences and for emerging artists. And in time, they, in turn, may spawn more theaters.
The New Theatre Project holds an “apprentice night” for each production, giving apprentices from theaters everywhere a chance to see its work at no charge. And the Williamston Theatre now has an apprenticeship program of its own.
