Director resigns, criticizes board

Lenhoff said he has 'severed all ties' with the Playhouse.
By GARRY L. CLARK
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Bentley is gone.
Bentley Lenhoff will not be doing an encore in his role as executive director at The Youngstown Playhouse after all.
In a letter being mailed today to area residents who had agreed to work with him at the Playhouse, Lenhoff says that their appointment to the board had been rejected by the current board, and he has "severed all ties with the organization."
The letter further states: "Your appointment was rejected because you had been asked to serve without [current] board members being consulted first. In addition, they wanted your biography -- a step that I continue to feel is an insult to you. I know you. The community knows you ...
"This was one reason for my resignation. The other reason is that this group [the current board] reneged on the authority it had given me to operate the theatre as I best saw fit."
In a telephone interview, Lenhoff said that he had told the current board "if I was going to do this for nothing, my salary would be their cooperation. They agreed."
Lenhoff says that he then got on the phone and "begged and cajoled" 16 people to accept positions on the board. He also says he developed a mailing list of 3,500 households to begin the "Save Our Stage" campaign he was planning. A reunion picnic had been planned, a season of plays had been chosen, directors had been secured to return on an unpaid basis, and Youth Theatre classes had been scheduled to begin in mid-October, among other things.
"There was immediate resentment," he said. "The board met without me, and then told me they were 'skittish' about some of the things I had done and was doing."
Reaction
Paula Stroebel, who has been active both onstage and backstage at the Playhouse for many years, said of Lenhoff, "He knows how to let people do their jobs. He knows how to find money. Bentley would only have to work about 5 percent of the time with all the people who would rally around him."
She also said that everyone was very excited about Lenhoff's return to the Playhouse.
Jack Ballentyne, who directed this season's closing show, "Carousel," says he believes that "they [the board] are betraying the trust of everyone who's ever done a show at the Playhouse. Now it's moving backwards."
Lenhoff says that the board basically wanted to be consulted on every decision he made. "I'm not going to be a surgeon who is told by nonmedical personnel how to operate," he said. "There was a good chance of it happening. I was amazed at the enthusiasm that had built up and all the phone calls from people willing to help and volunteer. None of that will happen now. I may be an autocrat, but that's the way successful theaters are run in this country."
Donation canceled
Lenhoff said that an expected donation of $50,000 from an unnamed source would not be happening as well as some other donations he had procured.
"This is a very close corporation," he said. "They are nice people. They all mean well, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with. They're a board of people who have very little experience in the theater, onstage or backstage, yet they wanted to call the shots."
Playhouse board president John Maluso was unavailable for comment this morning.