Cleveland Play House - History

History

In the early 1900s Cleveland theatre featured mostly vaudeville, melodrama, burlesque and light entertainment. But a select group of eight Clevelanders, among them Charles and Minerva Brooks, sought plays of substance on timely topics. Together, they formed Cleveland Play House. They found a home in a farmhouse donated by Cleveland’s industrialist Francis Drury located at East 85th and Euclid Avenue which ultimately became the site of a long-lasting home of CPH.

Founded in 1915, Cleveland Play House is America’s first permanently established professional theatre company. It 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 Museum of Natural History.

This 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-renown 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.