Playhouse board must put on a better show than Lenhoff

The Youngstown Playhouse board may have squandered its last best chance for a revival of a community institution by rejecting an offer from Bentley Lenhoff to return to Youngstown and to run the Playhouse as he did during some of its most glorious days.
A majority of the members of board apparently do not see it that way. They believe that Lenhoff's demand for three months of total autonomy in putting together a new season of plays, hiring and firing at will, revitalizing the children's theater, soliciting pledges from benefactors and attracting season ticket holders was too much to ask.
The board may be right. Lenhoff described himself as an autocrat and the prospectus he submitted to the board had its quirks.
Beyond that, it is quite possible that Lenhoff, who headed the Playhouse for 20 years beginning in 1965, would have found that Thomas Wolfe was right, you can't go home again.
Youngstown today, and its theater scene , are not what they were in the '60s, '70s and '80s. There are fewer people, less foundation money, more competing theater groups and changing lifestyles.
All that makes bringing the operations of the Playhouse up to the standard of its recent $2 million federally funded facelift a daunting task.
But it was a task that Lenhoff, at age 74, was willing to tackle. In the week that Bentley was back, to use the short-lived catch phrase, he had solicited potential new board members, put together a game plan for luring season ticket holders back to the Playhouse and claimed to have gotten commitments of monetary support for an institution with debts that outweigh its meager endowments.
What now?
In rejecting Lenhoff's offer to return to the Playhouse as long as he was given the authority to do virtually anything he had to do -- short of adding to the Playhouse's potentially crippling debt -- the board has placed itself in an unenviable position.
It must now outperform Lenhoff.
It must marshal the kind of community support Lenhoff would have gotten. It must demonstrate to potential benefactors, ticket buyers and the community at large that it can put on a season of plays that will excite traditional theater goers and even attract people more inclined to stay at home watching a DVD play out on their television screens.
In short, whether history would have shown that Lenhoff could have revived the Playhouse or not, history will now record whether the board that rejected him saved the Playhouse or oversaw the demise of an 80-year-old institution.
Adapt or die
There really is no middle ground. The Playhouse must find a way of attracting support, of either recarving its exclusive niche in the Mahoning Valley theater scene or reaching some accommodation with its younger competitors, of entertaining a new generation of people, or it will die.
The Playhouse cannot carry its debt indefinitely. Even if the board could tap into the two endowments it has to wipe out the debt -- something some board members seem inclined to do -- that alone would only delay the inevitable. It is like eating the seed corn. A 500-seat theater cannot continue to operate with 50 or 150 theater goers at a performance.
If the board has a better plan than Lenhoff's for saving the Playhouse, if board members have benefactors more willing than Lenhoff's to throw their support behind he revitalization, if they have a better way than Lenhoff of creating a buzz about what the future may hold for the institution they oversee, now is the time for them to speak up.