Suzy Bassani, a native South African married to an Italian executive at NCR, was a flamboyant Johnny Appleseed, planting arts venues wherever she went. In 1977 she founded the English Theatre Festival. In 1979 she founded the European Centre for Theatre on Lake Como and in 1982 she founded the MUSE Machine in Dayton.
Transformation was the idea: Children influenced by the arts would become the passionate arts audiences of the future. From the beginning, the Dayton Philharmonic, Opera, Ballet and the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company were on board. Although Bassani’s own background was in theater, theater was the only performing arts component missing.
In 1978, Scott Stoney directed his staged-reading adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine” at the Dayton Playhouse. The show was a hit. Stoney, with fellow Bowling Green University alumnae Kevin Moore and Marsha Hanna, then started Illumination Theatre. They created their own material and always in that elaborated form of reader’s theater.
They had been at it for four years when in 1982 Bassani saw them perform as part of the Once in a Lifetime Festival at the Dayton Arcade. She liked what she saw and asked if they would be the theater component of the Muse Machine. They were eager to do it. A year later she asked them to help her start a professional theater company. Having struggled to make Illumination Theatre a going concern, they jumped at the opportunity.
Dayton dentist and arts aficionado Burt Saidel, a founding member of the Human Race Board, said, “It started out, as most important things did, in Suzy’s kitchen ... . Whenever I got a phone call that started out, ‘Dahling ... ’ I knew I had to cancel something. She had a special genius. I remember her saying, ‘Oh, let’s call it the Human Race!’ Which had no bearing on a theater company.”
She had founded the European Center for Theatre, Dance and Music. She needed a title of equal weight. So on April 28, 1986, the Human Race Theatre Company incorporated.
Show time
More than 200 local actors auditioned for the first show, “Count Dracula,” which opened on the Victoria stage in September 1986. Wright State University theater professor Robert Hetherington directed, and Stoney took on the title role.
Bassani’s original concept was radical. To generate broad interest, she wanted to set up large tents on the west, east, north and south sides of Dayton. Each venue would drum up its own work force. Shows produced in one venue would tour to the other venues. All shows would end up at a permanent venue downtown. This idea seemed to many extravagant and unwieldy. When the second floor of the Biltmore Hotel became available in 1988, speculation about a home was no longer theoretical — budgets needed to be drawn up, shows needed to be mounted, publicity sent out and audiences drummed up. The idea of the four tents fell by the wayside, and the pool of 77 actors was whittled down to a practical handful — those who would become the resident artists.
The Human Race found itself producing plays for the Victoria Theatre as well. “We needed to be that edgy contemporary theater,” Moore said. “We also needed to be somewhat traditional and do some classics.”
These demands made the organization grow faster than it might have otherwise. Saidel said, “They put together shows in this makeshift theater that were, well, theatrical magic.”
Marsha Hanna’s Lofty heights
In 1991, overwhelmed by her duties running both the theater and the Muse Machine, Bassani turned the artistic reins of the theater over to Hanna. That same year the Human Race moved to the Loft Theatre. Hannah, who had by now become a talented director, quickly coalesced the energies of the resident artists and began to move the company to a measurable standard of excellence.
The next step seemed inevitable, exciting and frightening: become an Actors’ Equity venue. Resident artists could work toward joining Equity, which would mean health insurance and higher wages, and Equity actors from outside Dayton could work at the theater, which would improve the quality of productions. But it would also raise expenses.
One teenager influenced by the productions she saw at the Human Race was Katie Pees. “There’s just a different energy with the shows in the Loft space,” she said. Partly because of that impact, Pees decided to major in musical theater in college.
In 1995, the Human Race was on the brink. Moore said, “That was the season when we said, ‘If we’re going to go down, we’re going to go down doing the shows we really want to do.’ ”
A play that year that sold more tickets than any production the Human Race had yet mounted was Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” The Human Race also began collaborating with Victoria Theatre, with what would become Next Stage. This opened the Human Race to a new audience and additional cash flow.
In 2000 the Human Race returned to its roots and launched the Musical Theatre Workshop.
“We were never going to do ‘The Sound of Music,’ ” said Moore, “but those were the musicals people wanted to see. Instead we were doing musicals like ‘Closer Than Ever.’ Great little shows, but we weren’t getting an audience. So the idea came up of developing new works. We present new or unknown pieces as staged readings. We go back to the Illumination Theatre format. People start to develop an appetite for new works. They get excited about watching a show evolve.”
Connections
In 2005, Katie Pees, now 27, exhausted from a successful career in New York, called Kevin Moore. If she returned to Dayton, could she be a resident actor? Pees had, through New York auditions, already worked twice at the Human Race. She was performing off Broadway, in Broadway road shows; she was regularly getting callbacks for Broadway. She wanted something more: a home life and more varied work as an actor than she could get in New York. Moore assured her that she had a home with the Race.
In 2007, the Human Race developed a relationship with Stephen Schwartz, the lyricist and composer for “Pippin,” “Godspell” and “Wicked,” and began giving out annual scholarships in his name.
In 2010, Hanna and Moore were awarded the Governor’s Award for Arts Administration by the Ohio Arts Council.
In January 2011, Hanna died from esophageal cancer. Moore took over the duties of artistic director, taking on the title of producing artistic director.
I asked Moore in what ways he missed Marsha: “That other opinion is not there,” he said. But then said, with a glint in his eye, “I just saw a couple of plays in New York, and I was able to say, ‘Marsha would like this play.’ She is still there as an influence.”
And solvency? “Flat is the new up,” he said. “We are about 60 to 65 percent earned income.” That exceeds the national average for professional theaters of 50 percent.
The Musical Theatre Workshop “has brought us a lot of national recognition,” Moore said. “It has allowed us to work with people like Stephen Schwartz and Tom Jones (“The Fantasticks,” “101 in the Shade”) and Joe Thalken (“Was” and “Harold and Maude”) and Brian Yorkey (“Next to Normal”). ... When you look at who is developing new works on a regional level, the names that always come up are The Goodspeed Musicals in Connecticut, TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, the Village Theatre in Seattle and The Human Race. That’s a great place to be.”
The Human Race recently established a 25th Anniversary Fund. “We want to develop plays as well as musicals,” Moore said. The goal is $1.5 million, and the organization has already collected $1. 2 million.
“Develop the stuff here and send it forward,” Moore said. “That’s what I try to sell people on. Instead of waiting to produce the play that just won the Tony Award, I’d rather be on the other side — working with the playwright to develop the play — then send it to New York — and then win the Tony Award.”
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