While the Cherry Lane Mentor Project is now in its second decade, several larger, bigger-budget (and male-run) companies have only recently put playwright development on their agenda. Lincoln Center Theater, Roundabout and the Public all launched emerging writers programs in the past two years. But most of them don’t give the writers the in-depth, long-term coaching that the Mentor Project does, according to Fiordellisi. “They don’t take an entire year and develop the writer and the material,” she says, acknowledging that her approach is more typical of women. “I wanted to take the time and not push plays through a process where you have to have an end product. Some men want to do a new play factory: When it left here, it got done everywhere. I was like, ‘Whoa! We are about a process.’”
Fiordellisi first got involved in play development—with the Indiana-based New Harmony Project and Carnegie Mellon University’s workshop—while she was living in L.A. in the late ’80s and early ’90s. “Watching a play grow was more exciting to me than performing,” says Fiordellisi, who prior to her 1987 marriage had toured with Zorba and Annie. But her husband, TV writer/producer Matt Williams (Home Improvement, Roseanne, The Cosby Show), needed to be in L.A. “Being the traditional Italian woman that I am, I started having children and stayed home,” says the Detroit native.
The couple moved back to New York with their son and daughter—now college students—after the 1994 Northridge earthquake and planned to establish a workshop on property they’d purchased upstate in Putnam County: Fiordellisi would oversee development of plays, Williams would run a program for film scripts. But their neighbors fought the plan, claiming a “sitcom factory” didn’t belong in the town. She later heard the Cherry Lane was available. “When I walked in here, I had this vision of what it could look like. I just got such a beautiful spiritual rush,” remembers Fiordellisi.
Before she bought the theater, it had been allowed to deteriorate by the then manager, who figured he could buy it cheap the worse condition it was in. She spent a quick $30,000 to clean it up, then started renting out the space. From the first show she booked in, 1996’s The New Bozena (directed by a pre-Office Rainn Wilson), rentals helped meet expenses. With that income flow, Fiordellisi could realize her dream: “Now I can found a nonprofit and do new play development.”
A full renovation of the Cherry Lane, which occupies a three-story building on Commerce St. in Greenwich Village, wasn’t completed until 2006. Once the work began, Fiordellisi discovered how many things in the 1836 building—bricks in the walls, part of the floor beneath the theater aisle, the second-floor bathroom, to name a few—were on the brink of collapse. The $3 million rehab was funded in part by the City of New York.
Ah, funding...the bane of every artistic director, male or female, in expensive NYC. And a mightier struggle than ever in the present economy. This season, due to the economic crunch, Cherry Lane will not produce anything of its own on the mainstage, filling the 179-seat house instead with other companies’ work. Foundry Theatre’s widely praised Telephone played there in February, and the American Actors Company has just opened the NYC premiere of Craig Wright’s The Unseen. Cherry Lane has also rented out its 60-seat black box: INTAR is wrapping up its double bill of In Paradise and She Plundered Him this weekend. That studio theater is usually reserved for Mentor Project plays; Housebreaking, by Jakob Holder (mentored by Charles Mee), begins performances there March 24.
For the 2009-10 season, Fiordellisi may rely on coproductions to ease her company’s financial obligations. Later this year she hopes to coproduce Sheila Callaghan’s Lascivious Something (developed in the 2006 Mentor Project) with the Women’s Project, then bring in The Lady With All the Answers, a solo biographical show featuring Judith Ivey as Ann Landers, in a coproduction with Northlight Theatre, which premiered it last year in the Chicago area. Next year, Cherry Lane plans to stage Rebeck’s as-yet-untitled new play—which it commissioned—and Fiordellisi is looking to Naked Angels and possibly New York Stage and Film as coproducers (they co-presented Fault Lines at Cherry Lane last fall). “We love working together, and economically this makes sense,” she says.
Box office is usually healthy when the Cherry Lane revives one of the contemporary classics that it premiered decades ago. “When we go back into the Cherry Lane history and we pull out those gems, it sells itself,” says Fiordellisi, who is looking forward to directing Desire Caught by the Tail, written by Pablo Picasso and first presented at the Cherry Lane in 1952, next year. Since 2005, the company has revived Edward Albee’s The American Dream and The Sandbox, Dutchman by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Beckett’s Happy Days—all of which world-premiered at the Cherry Lane in the early ’60s. “This theater stands for so much, and I just gotta keep it going!” Fiordellisi exclaims.
Her company’s acclaimed mainstage productions include Fugue; Bhutan, for which playwright Daisy Foote was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award; and Women on Fire, which earned Drama League and Lucille Lortel Award nominations for Judith Ivey’s solo performance. They all came out of Cherry Lane’s Celebrating Women Playwrights initiative, which involves forums, master classes and play development. Fiordellisi says she created Celebrating Women “when I saw that such a small percentage of the submissions for Mentor Project were women. I also saw there weren’t that many black writers being submitted and created Celebrating Black Playwrights,” which focuses on established and emerging writers and also serves to diversify the theater’s audiences.
“I’ve had a number of male playwrights come through Mentor Project, and I’ve worked with a number of male playwrights that I adore,” says Fiordellisi. “I just care more about women’s subjects, for obvious reasons. I’m tired of all the rehashing of male themes; I don’t want to know about another man having an affair.”
Her programming is not dictated just by her personal preferences, though. It’s also responsive to the marketplace—which happens to echo her personal preferences. “I feel that New York is more of a feminine audience,” says Fiordellisi. “Telecharge did a study four or five years ago: The largest number of ticket buyers are women between 48 and 55. I’m a part of that group.”
Photos, from top: Angelina Fiordellisi during our interview in the Cherry Lane Theatre; Edward Albee’s The Sandbox, with Jesse Williams and Lois Markle; Hoodoo Love, starring Angela Lewis and Kevin Mambo, which was developed in the Mentor Project and later played on the mainstage; Judith Ivey in 2003’s Women on Fire; Dulé Hill and Jennifer Mudge in Dutchman, revived at the Cherry Lane in 2007; Fiordellisi, actress turned artistic director.
