Life as a playwright began at Boardman bookstore

By GRAIG GRAZIOSI

ggraziosi@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Michael Anthony Forney ­– who professionally goes by Michael Anthony – collected his newly purchased books and left the Barnes and Noble checkout counter.

He didn’t go very far – just past the front door into the bookstore’s small cafe, where he sat at a table and began leafing through his books.

Reading wasn’t his favorite activity; he probably wouldn’t have listed it among his hobbies.

But recently Anthony’s married friends had come to him to vent about their relationship problems. Commitment issues, fights, insecurity – all the tangles that come with the territory.

He wanted to help, so rather than offering platitudes to his inquiring friends, he decided it would be better to arm himself with expert information.

So he and his friends met at the Boardman bookstore to talk about love and all its potholes.

Eventually, this occasional gathering became regular, and caught the eye of an employee at the store who suggested Anthony make the gathering an official book club.

So, in 2006, Michael Anthony’s book club was born.

But a discussion group wasn’t enough for Anthony. He preferred the visual, and had always been a performer. He had an idea.

At that time, Anthony wasn’t that many years removed from his days at East High School, where he was a football player and a frequent participant in school plays.

His natural inclination was to perform and to try to do it well, so he began implementing skits into his book club meetings to illustrate the ideas discussed in the texts.

Anthony’s club grew from his immediate friends to include their friends, and their friends’ friends, and interested passers-by. Eventually the group swelled to nearly 100 people.

As time went on, his friends became his actors and the skits became full-blown scenes. Before long, his friends were asking when he’d just bite the bullet and direct a play.

“My first play idea was centered around relationships because the books were about relationships,” Anthony said. “I think the book club grew so much because of the universality of that topic. Those discussions were what “He Loves Me, She Loves Me Not” grew out of,” Anthony said.

That 2012 play was the first of Anthony’s productions outside of the bookstore cafe, a story about married people performed for a nearly sold-out crowd at the DeYor Performing Arts Center. It had no script, ran for 2 hours and 40 minutes and nearly tanked on the first night.

“I was a nervous wreck. I had four of my leading actors quit two days before the show. Opening night, I got a call from the head tech at the DeYor Performing Arts Center telling me that if we went for a second hour the stage time would cost me a whole lot more, so I had to cut an entire hour off the play before the show without anyone noticing,” Anthony said.

Since then, Anthony has written, produced and directed 14 shows, the majority of which have been performed at the DeYor.

Anthony’s first five shows didn’t have scripts. Instead, the actors would improvise scenes based on the traits their characters were meant to portray, and Anthony kept what worked.

Once his plays began attracting professional actors, he acquiesced to the industry’s needs and began writing scripts.

In 2015, Anthony decided he wanted to do more than write, produce and direct the plays; he wanted to host and feed his audience as well.

So he purchased the James E. Winner building in Sharon, Pa., and opened the Michael Anthony Performing Arts Center and Michael Anthony Cafe.

He kept the building and the cafe until he sold the building in 2018, continuing to produce plays and grow his notoriety in the regional theater scene.

His eyes always set to the horizon, Anthony was struck with a vision for his next endeavor. Why stop at just a performing arts center when he could capitalize on the burgeoning video-streaming business by opening his own film-production studio in his hometown?

His pitch to Youngstown for a film studio never took root with the city, so he left the region for Columbus, where he’s still pursuing his dream of opening up a production and performing arts center, with hopes that one day he’ll be producing content for Netflix and Oprah Winfrey’s O Network.

“I’m 40. It’s now or never for me,” he said. “Am I in a position where I’m well off? Well, we’re having discussions with people who want to make adaptations of what we’ve already created. So I’m in a position now.”

His 2018 play “Why Me?” has an encore tour with shows in Youngstown, Akron, Columbus and Pittsburgh beginning today.

Since the days of his book club, Anthony’s journey into the world of theater has been a crescendo, constantly growing, its energy attracting an ever-increasing audience bewitched by the anticipation of what’s next.