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CEA 2004

Yin and Yang
Ed Stern and Buzz Ward have a partnership that's fostered great theater in Eden Park ... and all over town

INTERVIEW BY RICK PENDER

In the local theater community, a hushed reverence surrounds Michael Burnham, but the director/actor would rather be considered a son of a bitch.

Buzz Ward (left) and Ed Stern Photo By David Sorcher

Early last May, Ed Stern, producing artistic director at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, had an early morning call from an actor in New York congratulating him on winning the Regional Theatre Tony Award. Stern almost didn't believe him. But he went to the official Tony Web site, and there it was in black and white. Despite the Playhouse's ongoing success with Cincinnati audiences, Stern had concluded that the annual award would probably go to a theater in a larger city, as had been the case for several years. But this time he was wrong. A dozen years after Stern's arrival in Cincinnati, the Playhouse was finally being recognized for fostering new plays, building a subscriber base envied by theaters in larger cities and reaching out to several hundred thousand young people annually -- the audiences of the future.

Stern is quick to deflect praise from himself to those he works with and to the community the Playhouse serves. But he's played a leading role in tandem with Playhouse Executive Director Buzz Ward, and their contributions were cited earlier this fall by the League of Cincinnati Theatres, which bestowed on them the Award for Continuing Excellence. As a result of that recognition, the pair will be inducted into the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards Hall of Fame Monday.

But Stern refuses to upstage everyone else involved.

"The best thing for me with the Tony was how this community received it," he says. "It wasn't about congratulating Ed Stern. It was, 'Isn't it great what we did?' The community embraced it."

Ward extends the thought: "That's why we did the celebration with so many people passing the Tony!"

In a ceremony the day after the New York City festivities, Stern and Ward brought the small trophy back and arranged to have it passed down a long line of individuals who have been Playhouse supporters, participants and advocates.

"It really took all of us," Ward points out, "everyone working in the same direction, to even get to the level of consideration."

But when he and Stern arrived at the Playhouse in 1992, they weren't thinking about Tony Awards. They were taking over to a theater that needed help, after several years of administrative challenges and erratic artistic leadership.

Stern had a good track record: He had founded the successful Indiana Repertory Theater in 1972 and ran it for eight years before heading back to the East Coast where he taught in New Jersey and New York City and guest directed on many stages around the U.S. Many of his friends wondered how long he'd last in Cincinnati, which had earned a reputation for intolerance after the debacle over the Contemporary Arts Center's 1990 exhibition of photography by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Stern saw the potential for the Eden Park theater but knew he needed a good financial manager to get the Playhouse healthy again. Through Ben Mordecai, another Indiana Rep founder who had moved on to teach and run a theater at Yale University, Stern met Ward, then general manager of the Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre and an instructor of theater administration.

The two clicked immediately, started work on the same June day in 1992 and to this day have a relationship peppered with the comic timing of Abbott and Costello. They finish each other's sentences and throw metaphoric elbows as they try to top each other's corny jokes. It's clear they love working together as the yin and yang of the Cincinnati Playhouse.

Stern jests, "Always take over theaters that aren't going well! If you're just so-so, you're going to look great."

"You can be mediocre," Ward chimes in, "and thought of as a god."

Of course, they've been neither so-so nor mediocre.

"I talked to a few people," Stern remembers of his search for an executive director. "There are some bean counters who really have no interest, idea or conception about theater and art -- they're just going to be purely bottom-line conscious. That isn't Buzz. He's said time and time again, 'If we're not doing good theater, it doesn't matter if everything looks great on paper. It has to be great onstage.' Not everyone believes that."

Ward says, "We both believed philosophically that fiscal responsibility and artistic excellence must go hand in hand. The other theaters where I was interviewing, that was not necessarily the case, so it was going to be more of a battle than a partnership."

Ward suggests their strengths and weaknesses are complementary. (Stern looks at him with mock astonishment: "Weaknesses? I have weaknesses? We'll have to talk about this," he says, before bursting into his characteristic cackle.)

"The finances," Ward persists, "are clearly not Ed's strong suit, and they are a strength of mine. His strength is in picking a season, in casting, in getting the right people. Those are terrific strengths that I don't have."

Stern and Ward have a formula for sucess that's actually the studious avoidance of formula. Each year when Stern fills me in on his new season, he takes pride in the fact that it doesn't follow any discernible pattern. He typically avoids a lot of safe choices. Last season, when the Playhouse scored its Tony, three of 10 shows were world premieres -- not the course taken by many theaters in lean financial times when pleasing audiences frequently means taking fewer chances.

In fact, Stern says, winning the Tony has proved to be a double-edged sword. Some subscribers and board members have said to him, " 'You got the Tony Award -- obviously you have arrived, don't change!' No! We wouldn't have gotten the Tony Award if we'd just sort of settled in on something, on a formula. A theater is a living, breathing organism, and you have to evolve."

Stern and Ward have also supported the city's larger theater community, nurturing the scene by lending both their staff and their personal expertise whenever needed, and encouraging the establishment of the League of Cincinnati Theatres.

A healthy theater scene, Stern maintains, keeps everyone honest.

"When you're a solitary institution in a city, you can get lazy," he says. "It's not good for the artists, not good for the audiences."

He applauds Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival for staging Arthur Miller's All My Sons during the Playhouse's run of The Crucible, and recalls that when the Playhouse premiered Carter Lewis's Men on the Take, Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati staged the local premiere of a the writer's bookended play, Women Who Steal. Two seasons ago while the Playhouse produced the award-winning Proof, Stern guest-directed a production of another top-notch script, Copenhagen, at ETC.

"It's great to have this way of connecting with other theaters," Stern says, "reinforcing this notion that you don't have to go to theater just five or 10 times a year -- you can go 15, 20, even 25 times a year. It should be exciting. If it's not as good elsewhere, let's figure out how to make a healthy scene for everyone."

Stern and Ward like to laugh. ETC Producing Artistic Director D. Lynn Meyers dubbed them the "macaroni and cheese" of Cincinnati theater when they were recognized at LCT's Curtain Up season kick-off in September. But they're dead serious about the importance of theater.
"Theater is a place where community comes together," Ward points out. "In the age of the Internet and everything else, there are fewer and fewer places where people come together: The theater is one of those. It's a live experience, with the actor on the stage. This is a more serious coming together, (meeting) a real need for our country and society to come together. People feel comfortable doing that at the theater."

Stern, an outspoken liberal, takes it even further.

"I've never seen our country more torn apart than it is right now, post-election," he says. "There is a deafness on everybody's part, conservatives and liberals. People do not want to listen. Theaters are inherently in the business of dialogue. And dialogue demands not only speaking but listening. Listening to everything. Theater is needed now, so audiences can come together and listen and then decide for themselves."

At the 2004 Cincinnati Entertainment Awards, Stern and Ward will join the ranks of previous inductees into the theater wing of the CEA Hall of Fame -- actresses Pam Myers and Dale Hodges, designer Paul Shortt and director Michael Burnham. As with this esteemed group, Ward and Stern have enhanced theater in the Cincinnati area. It's a reason to celebrate. ©

Big Joe Duskin

Jumping to Amazing Conclusions
Big Joe Duskin proves good things come to those who wait

INTERVIEW BY DALE JOHNSON

"What's goin' on, Big Joe?" bass player Ed Conley asks. "Ain't nothing goin' on but the weather, time and old age," Big Joe Duskin replies.

Big Joe Duskin Photo By: Dale Johnson

With all due respect, Duskin's wrong. At least in this case.

There's plenty going on for Big Joe these days. One might be tempted to call it a comeback, but in order to "come back" you have to go away, and that certainly doesn't apply to the King of Cincinnati Blues, Big Joe Duskin. Besides, he knew about coming back years ago.

Duskin was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Feb. 10, 1921, to Perry (a Baptist minister) and Hattie Duskin. Some time later, Perry got a job with the railroad that brought him to Cincinnati.

There was a piano in the house, but it was to be used solely for church music. Joe began to pick out notes on it at a young age. By the time he was in his teens, he was involved in the thriving Cincinnati Blues scene of the era, as were Bluesmen like Walter Coleman, whose song "I'm Going to Cincinnati" goes, "Now when you come to Cincinnati, stop at Sixth and Main/ That's where the good hustlin' women get the good cocaine." Which probably comes as a shock -- or a pleasant surprise -- to today's Federal Building employees.

And back then, that kind of music -- the "Devil's music" -- was most certainly not the kind of thing your Baptist minister father wanted to hear, and Perry Duskin was no exception. If he caught Joe playing Boogie Woogie or Blues on the family piano, he didn't hesitate to beat him.

It's the classic "Blues Story" -- the choice between God and the Devil. Between what you're supposed to do and what you feel you must do.

Some, like Blues guitarist Robert Johnson, supposedly sold their soul in order to play better. Others never quite worked it out and played both sides of the fence.

But Big Joe was different. He struck a deal with his father: When he was around 17 years old and his father was 79, Joe agreed that he wouldn't play the Blues until his father was dead and buried.

And, in a twist that makes the Devil seem downright reasonable and fair when it comes to bargaining, Big Joe didn't play the Blues for another 26 years. His father lived to be 105.

During the interim, Joe was drafted into the infantry to fight World War II in Europe. When he returned to the States, he became a Cincinnati Police officer and then worked for the Post Office.

His father passed in 1963, and Joe ironically found that he just couldn't recapture the Blues piano style he had as a young man, when he played in West End clubs and juke joints. But, when something is born into you, it has a way of rolling around again, much like a piano run in a Blues song.

For Joe, it rolled around again in the early 1970s, when Steve Tracy -- Blues fan and later the author of Going to Cincinnati: A History of the Blues in the Queen City -- hunted Big Joe down. Tracy got Joe playing again locally and in Europe, where Joe headlined Blues festivals to fans who wanted to hear and see traditional Blues, the roots of Rock & Roll.

Today, at the age of 83, Big Joe is as vital as he was back in the '30s and '40s, albeit a little slower but no less exuberant. Recently, I was struck by his performance of "Laughing Boy Blues" (popularized by Woody Herman's band back in 1938), a (literal) "laughing to keep from crying" number with several verses ending in a mournful belly laugh.

The laugh Big Joe supplied in his version was indeed rueful, but it also was run through with a half-crazy note that was both humorous and more than a little chilling. It was a laugh that said, "I've been there, done that, I've pretty much given up ... but I'm taking you with me."

Very few performers of any age can summon that kind of emotion in their lyrics, much less in their laugh. It takes an artist who's connected with the here and now -- bringing along all their attendant history -- that can provoke that kind of response in people.

Recently, what that particular guy has done is release the excellent CD Big Joe Jumps Again!: A Cincinnati Blues Session, which features such old friends as bassist Conley (a former co-worker of Joe's and King Records session player), guitarist William Lee Ellis (co-producer of the CD and late '80s bandmate of Big Joe's) and Larry Nager (co-producer of the CD and champion of Cincinnati music, especially the Blues). There's also new friends like vocalist Shawna Snyder, who has her own Alternative original band as well as being an expert classic Blues shouter, and Cincinnati resident Peter Frampton, a legend in his own right. King Records session drummer Phillip Paul rounds out the lineup and provides solid back up.

The session is a living, breathing representation of an artist with a big voice, fast hands and the instincts to reach into your soul.

It's been an amazing year for the Bluesman. Besides the new album, this past July, at the 2004 Queen City Blues Fest, Big Joe was given the key to the city and honored with a proclamation of "Big Joe Duskin Day" in Cincinnati. Last weekend he jammed at a crowded Southgate House to celebrate the CD's official release.

And now he's being inducted into the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards Hall of Fame for making significant and meaningful contributions to the Cincinnati arts and music community.
There's a lot more going on than the weather, time and old age. Here's to you, Big Joe. ©