Abstract
The early morning hours of September 27, 1937, were peaceful and quiet as the residents of East Cleveland slept, unaware of the mischief about to unfold. In the first hours of that Friday morning, a large, dark sedan crept up East 86th Street toward the north side of the Play House. A fuse was lit. Someone hurled a small object over the theatre’s brick edifice, and the car sped away. The dynamite exploded at approximately 2:30 a.m., ripping a four-foot hole in the roof of the scene shop, shattering windows of nearby buildings and waking residents throughout the neighborhood, including some reports that the blast was heard over ten miles away in Shaker Heights.1 The Play House’s ten-year-old home was under attack.
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Notes
John Vacha, Showtime in Cleveland (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 157.
Chloe Warner Oldenburg, Leaps of Faith: History of the Play House, 1915–1980 (Cleveland, OH: Published by the author, 1985), 49.
William F. McDermott, “The Play House,” Theatre Guild Magazine, vol. 7, no. 12 (September 1930), 44.
C. M. Streator, “What Readers Think of the Play House and Critics,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), January 24, 1932, 40.
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© 2014 Jeffrey Ullom
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Ullom, J. (2014). Catch These Vandals!. In: America’s First Regional Theatre. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394354_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394354_5
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