Over the past half-year, Cleveland Public Theatre (CPT) has been readying its two-theater campus in Gordon Square to hold 20 immersive installation pieces that look to steep audiences in the minds and performances of creators’ experimental endeavors. It’s all part of a three-day event dubbed SoftLaunch.
Lead artists contributing to SoftLaunch’s (SL) run on Jan. 23, 24 and 25 have converted spaces typically used as hallways into their own medulla oblongata. Production technicians have appropriated curtains and CPT’s lighting equipment to transform storage rooms into artists’ hippocampuses and main stages into creatives’ occipital lobes to explore an array of interpersonal themes using the theatre’s supply of props.
In addition to seeking to “reinvent what theatre and art can be,” SoftLaunch hopes to present viewers with works that “burst beyond CPT’s theaters into lobbies, hallways and event the rooftop,” according to the event description. Selected artists received between $500 and $1,200 to devise and implement their projects, depending on scale.
“CPT has always been about pushing the envelope and groundbreaking performances, but I guess I felt out of the pandemic that the work we had been doing was maybe not as radical as (it) could be. Or it was radical more around social issues and around equity and racism and less about form and content,” Raymond Bobgan, CPT’s executive artistic director, explained.
While CPT’s usual repertoire of genre-bending, experimental performances looks to sate audience and thespian tastes, Bobgan believes the event can create descriptive and engaging work outside of traditional realms. He’s not alone in this belief. Actress Anastasia Urozhaeva has worked with CPT and Bobgan in various capacities over the past five-plus years and is collaborating with Bobgan again while heading up her own concept in SoftLaunch.
“I think one of the biggest values is (SoftLaunch) gives artists the opportunity to dream of performances at the edge of theatre, that don’t often fit into theater as we often think about it,” Urozhaeva explained.
Of her and Bobgan’s collective piece The Mermaid Within, which hopes to call the audience-actress relationship into question by urging guests to deliver spoken dialogue to a primarily silent performer, Urozhaeva said “I also saw it as an exciting opportunity for a performer because it could be so. . . exciting to be there, to be that character and not have a voice which can be a very real experience.”
Urozhaeva’s acting experience includes dozens of shows, but she said she recognizes additional value in SoftLaunch because it allows her to directly gauge audience reactions while working in a creator’s capacity, an opportunity not frequently afforded to actors.
Bobgan is the architect of this year’s SoftLaunch (“Even if this is a huge failure, we will try it a second time,” he assured The Land) as well as The PILOT Project, which played midwife to several of the ideas that will be on display this week at CPT.
Bobgan has been involved with CPT since the mid-90s and assumed his current role as executive artistic director in 2006, all the while carving a path writing and directing new and experimental modes of theatre that play with audience expectations and roles. The PILOT Project was Bobgan’s vehicle for introducing local creatives to the process of interexperience.
During a series of workshops held throughout late 2024, Bobgan introduced PILOT participants to experiences like the recently retired “Sleep No More,” a stylized retelling of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” spanning five stories of a New York City stage venue built to resemble a hotel. A handful of workshop participants developed their SoftLaunch concepts in PILOT after learning of the idea for the event: a show that revolutionizes not only what’s possible in theater but also the idea of iteration.
Stages of completion
Unlike most theater-supported art exhibitions, the show advertises “pieces that exist in various stages of development.”
That mindset was crucial for the creation of a piece like Fatima Matar’s Awash with Guns, a rumination on America’s school gun violence issues via the eyes of Matar. She’s a former asylum-seeking poet, artist and mother who worked as a law professor and activist in Kuwait. The piece involves a dialogue between three central characters: a mother who lost a child to gun violence at school, a gun-equipped opponent of gun control and Matar herself, playing a mediator between the two conversants.
“Unfortunately, the debate around gun violence in America is futile: the far right claiming it’s their God-given right to own guns and the left pleading with their government. . . Every time I hear about a school shooting, I know I am not okay, and I know that a lot of people are not okay. And I think to myself ‘Children are dying in classrooms. Should this not insult our sense of decency?'”
While Matar’s story and prop choices are all deliberate, she said the show won’t really attain its final form until she can bring it into the classroom in some manner. That doesn’t mean it lacks value in other areas, though.
Beyond the person-to-person interactions inherent to each piece, the distinguishable throughline that unites all 20 pieces are the intensive periods of self-reflection they encapsulate. Key to that, Bobgan said, is the fact each exists at various stages of completion. Many of the works on display will show rough edges and unrefined ideas. Nothing is set in stone. Artists may choose to replace or omit certain elements of their space throughout the event or throughout the night. Performances will proceed in a similarly fluid manner as artists revise spoken language or other aspects of their ensemble.
Fittingly, a handful of the intensely personal pieces that can be experienced this week at SoftLaunch directly stem from the lead artist’s experience of isolation during and following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Crowd work
Performance artist and ex-actor Ray Caspio, for example, birthed their piece THE BUCKTOOTHED F△GG⊙T (or THE NIJINSKY INCANTATION) as the latest evolution of a work which first premiered in 2023 within 78th Street Studios as “THE WALL.”
An actor turned performance art architect, the 46-year-old Ray Caspio took a step back from their passion and hobby in 2021 to explore themes of self and societal acceptance following the COVID-19 pandemic through their piece “THE WALL.” Having iterated on that 2023 show with 2025’s THE BUCKTOOTHED F△GG⊙T,
Itself involving improvised automatic writings that Caspio scribbled on the expanse of white plaster which the actor previously used as a backdrop for audition material during the pandemic, “THE WALL” ultimately served as a progenitor to BUCKTOOTHED. Pandemic stagnation may have melted into a creative lineage; Caspio said a third iteration on the concept in the future would involve a stage show that makes greater use of the text.
The alternative title references the fact that BUCKTOOTHED is the latest generation in a series of ideas that occupy Caspio; while the ethereal influence of Russian danseur Vaslav Nijinsky’s haunted “THE WALL,” the artist uses Nijinsky’s tragic life to parallel their own here.
“What I am seeing is an artist who was deprived of their art form for an extended period of time, who was locked in a room and could not express himself in the way he knew how his entire life, which was dance,” Caspio explained nakedly.
Painter Lacy Talley sets the scene by placing her easel alongside cushions and other comfortable furniture. It’s bordered by heavy dark curtains set before the theatre’s balcony, Detroit Avenue behind her, outside of CPT’s second-floor concessions stand. There, she seeks to bring audiences into the more cathartic aspects of her practice with her piece “I AM” Resetting Live, in which she walks viewers through her internal process of mentally “resetting” while live painting and singing.
“I wanted to take people through my journey of resetting and what that means as far as looking and learning the way that you want to be nurtured and cared for, and how you want to share those,” she explained. “This is my place of resetting.”
Besides sharing techniques and tips she has devised for resetting in her own life, Talley will also allow guests (contributing artists interviewed for this piece shied away from the typically used term “viewer”) to insert themselves in the process by writing affirmations that will hang from the ceiling around her space.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Dave Maher, a Chicago-bred comedian who arrived in Cleveland six months ago, just in time for winter. Maher’s piece, Black Metal Rooftop, challenges viewers with a binary option: step onto CPT’s roof for a curated experience on a cold January evening or remain indoors where conditions are more comfortable.
“(Inside is) intentionally not as cool as outdoors,” Maher said. “I have some contempt for guests who remain indoors and so I hope to somewhat gently tease them. I can only imagine myself – anything you’re told not to open or to interact with, my childlike instinct is to mess around with it. You want to touch the hot stove, to go out onto the cold roof.”
As the name implies, the piece will involve the soundscape of a typically abrasive music genre, warping and playing with viewers’ unfamiliarity with the style’s operatically falsetto screaming and high-pitched electric guitars. Maher will be present to interact with audiences as he sees fit, but to reveal more about his piece or its presentation would be to ruin the surprise.
Launch codes
In evaluating SoftLaunch ahead of its takeoff this week, Bobgan said the event has already achieved success in terms of how much the theater and contributing artists have done to bring it to fruition since it was announced alongside The PILOT Project in September.
“I can’t remember a time that (CPT has) done something this extensive in this little amount of time,” he explained. “From the time we announced the program to getting the proposals to starting the event, we’ve been learning what it even is or even how to talk about it.”
Bobgan and the other CPT staff working on SoftLaunch also see its value when comparing it to past programs focusing on avant-garde performance art in Cleveland’s long theatrical tradition.
That history is evident Downtown in the familiar Broadway bills at Playhouse Square’s 11 performance venues. More avant-garde performances arrived in the city via the Cleveland Performance Art Festival between 1988 and 2003 and the recently revived BorderLight Festival. Attending this week’s event may also put patrons in mind of the annual IngenuityFest in the Warehouse District, or previous CPT initiatives like the upcoming Test Flight showcase event, whose latest iteration heads to James Levin Theatre in February and March.
“It’s like a mashup of our donor fundraising event Pandemonium and, a few years ago, (creative incubator) Entry Point,” explained Kadijah Wingo, a producer in residence, who arrived at CPT through the National New Play Network.
“Also I feel like Test Flight, too. . . but encouraging more obscure modes of play in theatre. Those other events are more typical of the attitude that ‘We are aware of the audience coming and we want to cater to them.’
“I feel like SoftLaunch is not that. You can choose whether to engage with the artist or not, but these are these own artists’ individual stories, and we’re giving that to you no matter the audience. This is just the truth.”
Performances of all 20 pieces in SoftLaunch are planned to run simultaneously between 7 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 23; Friday, Jan. 24 and Saturday, Jan. 25. Tickets to the show are available online at the Cleveland Public Theatre’s “choose what you pay” pricing scheme.
Certain aspects of the pieces previewed in this article were intentionally discluded at the request of the lead artists involved in each. The title of Ray Caspio’s piece is stylized herein per the artist’s naming convention.
The Land will soon publish a longer in-depth look at SoftLaunch and the ideas and craft that molded each piece.
Readers looking to explore additional avant-garde stage shows in Northeast Ohio can learn more about this year’s BorderLight Festival, scheduled for July 16-19, before artist applications close on Jan. 31. A full schedule of theatrical events for Cleveland’s 14 playhouses, spanning those in Playhouse Square to CPT and independent playhouses like CPT and Karamu House, can be found on BroadwayWorld.
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