John Carroll University has a new way to engage its theater students through a partnership with Ensemble Theatre. The Cleveland-area company left its longtime home at Notre Dame College last year and will now be based at JCU’s Marinello Little Theater.
“We, as a board … had talked about the nature of the theater becoming maybe itinerant,” said Celeste Cosentino, Ensemble’s executive artistic director. “There's challenges when you don't have a space. There's challenges when you do have a space.”
Now they’ll be able to share resources with the college.
“I think both civic and educational organizations, as well as arts organizations, can really partner to kind of maximize assets,” she said. “We're going to bring a lot of the tech that we have that the space didn't.”
Those physical attributes, such as lighting equipment, will be augmented by programming for current and potential students.
“We do a free … theater, film and voiceover summer camp that will be Cuyahoga County-based students,” she said. “Students from all over the county will get introduced to John Carroll's campus when they're in middle school, which is really kind of exciting.”
One young person who worked with Ensemble was Amy Payne. As a 19-year-old, she handled costumes for the company. Now, almost three decades later, Payne is John Carroll’s assistant director of student engagement for the arts.
“That practical experience was so huge for me,” she said. “It completely molded who I am today. Being invested and involved in the arts really molds you as a person. We really do have this belief that it's a fundamental part of a well-rounded liberal arts education.”
Ensemble will present “Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People: A Rust-Belt Adaptation” by Les Hunter in February, followed by Simon Stephens’ “Heisenberg” in May. The partnership also calls for Cosentino to teach at JCU, work with the school’s drama club and mentor budding theater professionals.
“It's not just production, it's also … a kind of a collaborative,” she said. “We have a network within Cleveland or Northeast Ohio that also then helps John Carroll students to go out into that network in Northeast Ohio.”
Ensemble was founded by Cosentino’s mother, Lucia Colombi, in 1979. After she passed in 2009, Cosentino took the reins. The company has been housed in the past at Cleveland Heights’ Civic Building, the former Cleveland Play House building and the Coventry PEACE Campus.
