You're also probably thinking that you don't want to venture downtown.

        Local theater box offices beginning to recover from the fear instilled by civil unrest in April were sent back into a tailspin by the cancellation of Pepsi Jammin' on Main. The message was clear: Downtown is not a safe place.

        Take it from somebody who goes to the theater a lot of nights in downtown Cincinnati neighborhoods. That's not true.

        The performing season runs through May, but the curtain went down for a lot of ticket buyers in April.

        Live theater cannot exist without an audience.

        It took years to build a theater scene in Cincinnati, and it remains precarious. Long before the curfew, there were too many goodbyes that will play out into 2001-02.

        Small, serious theater companies started making inroads in city neighborhoods this theater year, but Jay Apking's decision to move on ends the experiment of the Janus Project in Oakley. (This means we will lose Mr. Apking's onstage talents, too.)

        IF Theatre Collective was making a reputation in Clifton, but earlier this spring artistic director Benjamin Mosse was accepted into Yale University's master of fine arts directing program.

        No word on whether there will be an attempt to carry on without him, but it doesn't look good. (Jessica Morgan, an IF regular and one of the most talented actresses in town, is also departing, for a tenured faculty position in West Virginia.)

        The disintegration of Downtown Theatre Classics was almost simultaneous with the season start. It wasn't unexpected, but what a kick it would have been if it had worked. A chamber musical theater with panache in residence in the Aronoff's Jarson-Kaplan Theater would have added plenty of fireworks to the downtown theater scene.

        In Middletown, spanking-new Actor's Rep was in a financial mire by spring. Stalwarts are using the summer to re-group as Rising Phoenix Theatre Company in fall.

        The point is, for a variety of reasons, the developing local theater scene already was in fragile state before the trouble last month.

        If you want the scene to be there in October, make the commitment to help sustain it now.

        Check your calendar. Make a date with a show today. Then commit to one show a month through the summer. And take a friend.

        Wilson's visit: Playwright Lanford Wilson, who dropped by the first weekend of May for the openings of Talley's Folly at Playhouse in the Park and A Sense of Place at Ensemble had a great time here. (Well, he said he did.)

        You still can. A lot of the shows he checked out are still playing.

        According to various but reliable second-hand reports, he was impressed by School of Creative and Performing Arts student Jennifer Sese in Redwood Curtain at Know Theatre Tribe. Mr. Wilson hung out with the company after the show. (They have the pictures to prove it.) They took him to The Diner on Sycamore, and a good time was had by all.

        He was also pleased with Deborah Ludwig's performance in a rehearsal of The Moonshot Tape at Ovation. (Who wouldn't be?) Director Mike Morehead said Mr. Wilson offered a line reading that was happily accepted. “Who'd know better?” Mr. Morehead says.

        Mr. Wilson also put in quality time at an IF Theatre Collective rehearsal of Burn This, opening this weekend at the University YMCA (270 Calhoun St.) For information and reservations call (513) 961-7434.

        Chilly weather: If you want to know the average mean temperature in Norway, just ask local theater guy Bob Allen, who teaches, coaches, acts and at the moment is concentrating on directing Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder, opening Thursday for a three-weekend run at the Aronoff's Fifth Third Bank Theater.

        “Fifty-one degrees,” he says.

        That's one of the little details his cast needs to know, he says. People who grew up in and around the Midwest, he ponders, may not immediately understand “the chill that goes through the whole play.”

        While Ibsen was writing more than 100 years ago, he was attuned to issues that would strike chords a century later. In this case, his subject is an aging architect who sacrificed a healthy marriage and family life for fame and fortune.

        Another choice he's feeling guilty about is sacrificing his art for commerce. But he soon finds a sweet young thing to inspire him on to even greater heights.

        “There's lots of stuff going on,” says Mr. Allen, who offers a brief treatise on Norwegian myth as a source of inspiration for Ibsen.

        Don't worry, that's all subtext. We get “the maelstrom. I love a play that's about people and their passions.”

        The Master Builder continues through June 10. Tickets $15, $12 students and seniors. Call 241-7469.

        Female view: The new name is Women's Theatre Initiative.

        Even as the former Minerva Project (passed from departing Janus Project to foster parent Cincinnati Shakespeare) prepares for a production of Naomi Wallace's deliciously intriguing One Flea Spare (set during the Black Plague) July 25-29, planners are thinking about next season.

        Women's Theatre Initiative is looking for plays by women from any time period and plans to repeat the fall series of play readings established last season. E-mail suggestions to Kristin Dietsche at dietsche@fuse.net or send them directly to Cincinnati Shakespeare, 715 Race St., Cincinnati 45202, to the attention of Women's Theatre Initiative.

        Local Magnolias: We've seen her as a professor dying of cancer, as Bob Cratchit's better half, as a manipulative mother of a tragic Roman general, even as Shylock's nemesis Antonio.

        Now Dale Hodges is adding a Louisiana drawl to her repertoire to play Ouiser in Steel Magnolias. The play is about six strong Southern women who cope with marriage, childbirth, illness and death from the nest of a small-town beauty parlor.

        Another local stage favorite, Sherman Fracher, joins her in the commute to Dayton's Victoria Theatre where the popular comedy plays May 29 to June 10.

        Box office: (937) 228-3630.

        Real-life couple: If you think Thomas and Martha Jefferson look and sound very good together in 1776 at Middletown Lyric Theatre, know that the actors who play them — Brian and Kim Berendts — look and sound good together at home, too.

        The Berendts met onstage six years ago in the chorus of Brigadoon. They moved to the Cincinnati area last August from Columbus, where they'd worked their way into the semi-professional troupes. (In real life she's a teacher and he's a research nurse.)

        “Moving to a new theater community and not knowing anyone was a struggle,” Mr. Berendts says, but things are coming along.

        A pair of familiar faces on stages throughout the region take the show's other primary roles. Chris Kramer is John Adams, and Henry Cepluch plays Benjamin Franklin.

        Mr. Kramer is one of several cast members returning to Middletown 25 years later to revive the stirring, revolutionary musical. At the ripe old age of 17 he played the Courier, “who has the best song in the show”(“Momma, Look Sharp”). He doesn't mind aging into the lead.

        1776 plays at the Sorg Opera House May 24-26. For information and reservations call the (513) 425-7140.

       Contact Jackie Demaline at 768-8530; fax: 768-8330; e-mail jdemaline@yahoo.com. Cincinnati.Com keyword: Demaline
       

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