- [Narrator] Production of Applause on Idea Stream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

(upbeat ambient music) - [Kabir] Coming up, a new theater group rolls out the welcome mat in Lorain County, we go behind the scenes.

Plus a woodworker carves out a name for himself as a furniture maker.

And we head out to the Scottish Highlands with the classical troupe Lay Delise.

It's another round of Applause for you to enjoy.

I'm Idea Stream Public media's Kabir Bhatia.

Welcome.

(tranquil ambient music) Shakespeare said, "All the world is a stage, but sometimes it can be difficult to find a place to share your story."

In Lorain County, two retiring magistrates founded a new theater project for underrepresented voices.

The lights are about to go up on outside circle theater projects, inaugural production, a play that addresses the challenges of aging.

- Yes.

- Everybody has a novel in a drawer somewhere, right?

I bet you there's a lot of plays underneath socks in drawers, you know, and we thought, I wonder how many people in this community want that opportunity.

- Sing and dance and you're quiet.

Because.

- We have an amazingly diverse community here in this county, and really not a lot of serious theater.

The mission is to provide a venue for anyone who has a creative idea or play or something they want to produce that could not otherwise get it produced, or have anyone read it or look at it in any serious way.

And we're willing to do that.

- I believe there are a lot of great writers out there, and I'm huge on encouraging people to share their dream.

There are a lot of marginalized voices that don't normally get heard, and that's kind of our focus.

- And if you need any help, I can be a hostess.

- One of my favorite poets is Audrey Lord, one of her poems talks about women and being different.

She talks about women who live outside the circle being different and wanting to do different things, and just being outside of the norm.

- There are always that group of people that are outside the circle that are just as talented or for some more talented than those that are in the circle.

Sometimes those of us are those people outside the circle just need that push to believe that they belong in the circle.

- And so we thought that's what we're doing, we're on the verge of retiring, we're of a certain age, you know, we wanna do something different, something fun, and everybody's different in their own way, you know, I don't think that we are necessarily so radical in that idea.

Then we set up a playwriting contest, we say, "Where are we gonna get the content?"

- Sure.

- We got, oh, maybe 10 plus plays.

I think maybe I was projecting that we were looking at DEI that we were gonna get a lot of marginalization issues, but we got Molly McFadden's play about ageism, and that's a marginalization issue, that's ageism.

And I think in terms of looking at underrepresented voices, that was a perfect pick.

(crowd applauding) So we invited Molly to Elyria since she gave us permission to produce our play.

- When I got accepted and the award, I thought I got the Oscar.

(Molly chuckles) (tranquil ambient music) - It's about loss, love, it's about a lady who is fearful of changing her life and feels like she has no agency.

She's in her 70s, she feels like she's being forced by her family to leave the home and neighborhood and the neighborhood family that she's come to love, and that's scary for her and she's uncomfortable with that notion.

- For me, with the downside, I hope people see themselves and are open to it because like every writer, you wanna write about your life.

When we lived in Michigan, we had a jazz bistro called Mollies.

Well, it was time to sell the equipment, the books, my cookbooks, and I had a meltdown and I said, "They're taking my life away."

And my daughter was like, "Mom, they're not."

God bless her, she was saying, you need to downside, you need to ask, "Do I love this object?

Can it be let go?"

I said, "No, that's my memory, that's my life."

So I understood the struggle between an adult and a child who cares.

I found what came out of that is what we're all going through when we go through transitions of life, and those transitions of you need to downside, you need to let go, you need to face the fact you're getting older.

Those are healthy.

It was painful, it was funny.

And the more I wrote, the more people kept saying, "Go, keep going."

Before I knew it, I had a full length play, and everybody is relating to it, you know.

- Me particularly, I think ageism is a thing and it's going to affect all of us at some point in our lives.

And I really felt connected to the angst that she was going through in having to make huge life decisions because we're all going to be there.

Never in my life have I seen Sam and I ain't taught, I know everybody in this neighborhood.

- I'm excited for people to see it, I'm excited that it's our first production.

I'm excited because I know this is gonna be the beginning of great things.

This is something that I really feel is gonna transform Elyria and Lorain County.

There's so much we can learn from each other and theater can bring you together in such a unique way.

So I'm very excited for people to see this, but I'm even more excited that I look at it as a stepping stone to greater things to come, and more people looking at it and saying, "Hey, this is legitimate, I want to get involved."

- And no matter what happens, we did it, we tried, and that's the whole point of the exercise.

And we will have said something about how we flee our community, we will have made a statement about how we expect our world to remain and change at the same time.

- And just think, being able to see the words I wrote down, portrayed, and how it impacts their life and the audience.

That's a gift.

And they've got the passion, they've got the drive, they have the mission.

And to, there's other writers out there who have a story to tell and they will find their way here and something magical is happening.

(Charlita chuckles) - Am I having trouble getting rid of things because of an attachment to the past or fear of future?

(tranquil ambient music) - [Kabir] The Outside Circle Theater project's, production of "The Downside" hits the stage March 22nd and 23rd in Lorain.

(tranquil ambient music) Are you familiar with the term 'bespoke furniture'?

Well, what it is is unique furniture made to order by the craftsperson, just for you.

And that's what Tobias Katz is up to in Columbus.

(tranquil ambient music) - In college, I had this great professor who taught furniture.

He had this message I really took to heart that anything you make should last longer than it took the material to grow.

When I work with wood, it's really glaringly obvious how old something is.

So you start to look at some of these boards and these things that I'm using and they're a 100 year old trees.

And as a designer and a builder, I try to take responsibility to make my pieces both aesthetically and physically be able to last in someone's space that long.

I am a Eastern Nordic influenced minimalist and my work reflects that.

But you know, there's no reason why these pieces couldn't live in other countries or other places.

My name is Tobias Sagan Katz, and I'm an artist, a designer, a builder, a maker, a creative person.

(upbeat ambient music) I remember when I was a little kid, I used to love to crawl under tables and look at how they were created.

I was obsessed with my grandparents leaved dining table because you could stretch a table and it blew my mind.

Furniture is so personal.

Most, all of my pieces are created with someone in mind.

I found that people wanted to be a part of the process.

And so once we get a design finished in the computer, I make a scale model of the piece in the true wood that it's ultimately gonna be, and I give it to the person.

They're able to hold it in far view and look at it sort of where it should be in the space to see if they like it.

And it allows them to start to see some of the details that I'm thinking through before they're even in place.

My work is not mass produced, it's not readily available at stores.

And it also takes me a while.

(wood sawing) I use a combination of (machine whirring) hand tools and machinery to optimize my workflow, not necessarily because one is better than the other, but sometimes it's just the best tool for the job.

For some of my pieces, I do joinery methods that are 500 to a 1000 years old and some that were only created using a tool that they made 10 years ago.

(upbeat ambient music) And I try to look at and use materials important to the region.

We are really fortunate to live in Ohio where we have a great collection of lumberyards here.

And I source most all of my wood from locally grown and sustainably harvest farms that truly care.

I generally work with lighter toned woods.

Most of the pieces that I do are in ash or white oak, both due to aesthetics, but also due to the type of work that I do.

They're both hardwoods, they're both easy to steam, to cut, to shave.

The way that the wood is oriented creates a visual aesthetic in the piece.

I love to use what's called quarter saw or rifts on wood, which is where they cut the board at an angle in the grain line so that you have really tight long grain throughout and you get this really beautiful pinstriping effect.

And that then has a ton of hard grain, so it makes a really structural surface.

So for desks, I love to use quarter sawn because if you're gonna write on it all the time, that gives you a good deflection area surface, but also a really nice pleasing line to look at.

With a larger piece, I like to incorporate the lines of the wood as the tree would grow.

For larger surfaces, I'll use the flat sawn bit, but then throughout different details, I can use quarter sawn elements that then create a pop.

I am very guilty of the fact and the saying like, "Cobbler's children have no shoes."

My partner, Gail, has been very patient and flexible with me.

This is a labor of love between the two of us and between our evolving aesthetic.

All of these pieces are created through the nine years we've been together.

And some were created as gifts from me to her that she had no say in, and some were created that were collaborations where we worked together from initial conception to delivery day.

(tranquil ambient music) As I look at furniture, everything should have function and space is always at a premium, and making things that both fit for how I live and how my clients live is one of my favorite parts about furniture.

You know, they sort of say that a designer doesn't hit their stride till their 60s or 70s.

And so I have so much time to look forward to what I'll create.

The aesthetic I'm creating makes me happy, and it doesn't have to be everybody's, but I am always flattered when somebody wants one of my pieces.

And I'm extremely flattered when someone gives me open, creative interpretation.

And as I've gotten older and my practice has grown, I've gotten more of that.

As a designer and artist, that's the most flattering thing when somebody who's not family or somebody who is a stranger, trusts my vision to create something that they'll live with for decades.

(upbeat ambient music) - [Kabir] Vintage car aficionados, take note, on the next Applause, see how volunteers maintain classic cars for the Crawford Auto Aviation Museum.

And keeping it vintage, meet a paper maker in Cleveland using old school equipment and techniques for his craft.

(tranquil ambient music) Plus, Franz Welser-Most puts the Cleveland Orchestra through its paces with a colorful composition from the roaring 20s.

All that and more on the next round of Applause.

You can watch past episodes of Applause with the PBS app.

(tranquil ambient music) You could call Dayton's Jim McCutcheon, the 'Pied Piper of acoustic guitar'.

However, he prefers a much simpler moniker, 'The Guitar Man', let's meet this winner of a Governor's Award for the arts in Ohio.

(tranquil ambient music) - I have devoted most of my life to playing the guitar, and teaching the guitar, making music as much as possible.

Kids call me 'The Guitar Man'.

McCutcheon is kind of hard to pronounce, I think.

So pretty early on in my work, the little ones started calling me 'The Guitar Man'.

And I thought, "Okay, that can work."

And so I just started making that my trade name.

I got started when I was eight years old, playing the ukulele that I found in the family room closet.

I sat on the floor for hours, cross-legged singing folk songs and just learning how the chord sounded, and I started bugging my parents for a guitar 'cause I wanted a real guitar with six strings.

And they made me wait three years.

And by that time I was starved.

And they got me a guitar and said they'd pay for lessons if I practiced an hour every day.

And I started to have a really good time playing, and I have never stopped learning.

I got a degree in physics because I wasn't courageous enough to become a musician.

And at the end of that I was accepted to medical school, and I was also in a band playing the flute.

And that is really kind of funny because my whole reputation is been based on the guitar.

We did pop and jazz and rock music, Jethro tall kinds of things.

And we had a chance to go on the road full-time with an agent.

The medical school said, "Okay, we'll give you a two year window."

And literally what he said was, "When you decide what you want to be when you grow up, you can come to my school."

I guess I never grew up.

I love a lot of different styles of guitar playing.

Classical guitar is the style I would say I love the most because there is so much going on, and if you can play that, you can really enrich all the other styles, whether it's rock and roll, jazz, finger style.

I have a radio show every week on Dayton Public Radio.

Welcome to the Intimate Guitar, I'm your host, Jim McCutcheon, inviting you to join me.

And most of it is classical guitar because there are so many different kinds of music within that genre, and at the end I always have dessert, which is some kind of quality artistic guitar playing that is not classical.

(tranquil ambient music) I love teaching people of all ages.

I love teaching kids.

It has been said that I haven't grown up much past the age of six.

I relate to kids really well, I have a really good time.

Good for you.

Some of them can play faster than I can, and I love it.

(upbeat ambient music) Teaching at all the levels, children, high school, college, adults, senior citizens.

It's just a chance to help people connect and share some experience that people were kind enough to share with me.

Best yet.

How'd that feel?

- Good.

- Pretty good.

- Pretty exciting, like you really let it roll that time.

I've taught college now for 39 years, and I could not find any printed materials that lined up with the kind of priorities that I wanted to have for my guitar students at the beginning of their playing.

So I wrote my own.

(tranquil ambient music) I wrote a book called "Blues for Beginning Guitarists", which teaches really good technique, it really sets them up for any kind of style of music that they wanna play in the future.

One of my students became lead guitarist with Megadeath.

He was already a good electric guitarist, but he cleaned up his technique, especially in his left hand and just started playing extremely clean and fast, and that's how he won the audition to tour with this heavy metal rock group.

And so the kind of things that I'm teaching in the beginner's classes are things that that fingers will really perform well on in any style.

I had more calls for lessons than I had time to give them.

Right.

My wife and I founded McCutcheon Music in 1988, and we have now over 50 teachers and 100s of students every week.

We have classes for newborns, and then we have, I think our oldest student is 82, but might be older.

Yeah, it's really wonderful.

♪ You could play Ukulele, uke, ukelele.

♪ - [Kabir] Are you an arts fanatic like us?

Well, then I'd recommend, no, I'd highly recommend you sign up for the Idea Stream Arts Weekly newsletter, "The To-Do List" from event suggestions to Breaking Arts news, "The to-Do List" has you covered, find out more and sign up (tranquil ambient music) at arts.ideastream.org.

On that note, it's time to go.

Thanks for watching this edition of Applause.

I'm Idea Stream Public Media's Kabir Bathia, leaving you with a spirited diddy from the Scottish Highlands, performed by Northeast Ohio's Masters of Early Music, Lay Delise, enjoy.

- [Narrator] Production of Applause on Idea Stream Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.