Cleveland Play House

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 Jonathon Bloomberg. The Artistic Director is Michael Barakiva. The Managing Director is Rachel Fink. The theater's honorary 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 Katharine Angell, Henry and Anna Hohnhorst, George Clisbee, Grace Treat, and Marthena Barrie. Together, they formed Cleveland Play House and named 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.

After moving through several facilities in its first two years, the Play House purchased and renovated a church at Cedar Avenue and East 73rd Street, and opened the Cedar Avenue Theatre in December 1917. The new facility seated 160 and marked a turn toward professionalism. Soon after this, the Play House began to struggle financially, and the Board of Directors became increasingly dissatisfied with Raymond O'Neil's leadership. The resulting arguments led to O'Neil's resignation in 1921. The board subsequently hired Frederic McConnell as the next Director, along with his associates K. Elmo Lowe and Max Eisenstat as assistants. The three transformed CPH into a popular regional theatre, ushering in a long era of growth and prosperity.

A new Cleveland Play House facility, built in 1927, housed the Brooks Theatre and the Drury Theatre. To accommodate its growth, CPH in 1949 opened the 77th Street Theatre in a converted church, which featured America's first open stage – the forerunner of the thrust stage that was popularized in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1980s, the 77th Street Theatre was closed, Cleveland Play House purchased the Sears building and the world-renowned architect Philip Johnson designed significant additions for the complex, including the Bolton Theatre. With the 1927 buildings, the Sears building and the Johnson buildings taken together, the complex for CPH became the largest regional theatre complex in the country.

In 2009, through a collaboration called "The Power of Three," CPH partnered with Playhouse Square and Cleveland State University to create the new Allen Theatre Complex in downtown Cleveland. In July 2009, CPH sold its building at 86th Street and Euclid Avenue to Cleveland Clinic. In September 2011, CPH kicked off its 96th consecutive season in the transformed Allen Theatre at Playhouse Square. Two new venues adjacent to the Allen Theatre came on board in January 2012, the Second Stage (renamed the Outcalt Theatre in 2014) and the Helen Rosenfeld Lewis Bialosky Lab Theatre. A new production center is now located along the lakeshore in Cleveland, and administrative offices and education center are on East 13th Street.