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Selah Dessert Theater starts its 10th anniversary season the same way it started its first.
Tom O'Donnell will play President Abraham Lincoln in "Mr. Lincoln," a one-man show written by Herbert Mitgang.
Some things have changed in that decade. The stage is larger than the one O'Donnell first performed on in 2014.
"Literally, if I put a chair on the stage, actors would run into the wall or they would fall off the end of the stage because there wasn't room," said its founder, Mary Ruth Lynn.
The lighting is significantly better, and Lynn even found a way to expand its capacity. There were 30 seats for audience members for "Mr. Lincoln" in 2014; there were 37 available for each of the two performances on Sept. 6 and 7 above Selah Restaurant in Struthers (both shows are sold out).
Its mission remains largely unchanged.
"What I've tried to create as a theater is to find lesser known, that audiences and actors really should be exposed to, give them an opportunity to see and to experience it in an intimate place," Lynn said.
Selah Dessert Theater started after Lynn was dismissed as executive director of the Youngstown Playhouse. Other theaters contacted her about directing larger shows, but she was looking for someplace to do something different and reached out to Selah Restaurant owner Brian Palumbo, who also started Top Hat Productions. Lynn said Palumbo told her he was considering transforming the performance space above the restaurant into offices, because he didn't have time to program it.
"We met one day outside on the patio and had lunch," she said. "In an hour and a half. Selah Theater had been born. I don't think either of us knew exactly what was going to happen, other than, you know, I had a little intimate space up there to do some theater and to do some small shows."
"Mr. Lincoln" focuses on the 16th president of the United States during his time as an advocate in Illinois as well as his presidency during the Civil War and includes excerpts from some of his most famous speeches.
Lynn normally doesn't like to redo shows she's already directed. It's not as challenging, she said. However, the larger stage and better lighting provided some opportunities to do different things, keeping it from being a copy of the original production.
She also believes the work resonates in a different way in 2024 than it did a decade ago.
"I didn't go into it trying to make a political statement, but some of the things that Lincoln supported and did are really relevant in today's world with the political climate right now," Lynn said. "That's been an interesting adventure in terms of interpretation of the play and how it relates to the political scene now.
"There's one speech he makes about how divided the country is. He likens it to a divorce, where a man and a woman can end their marriage and they no longer have to deal with each other or see each other. A country can't do that. There can be a division, but we the country still have to interact with each other. There's no way to make that division complete and without any interactions. So it's interesting looking back at some of the things that he said and relating it to now, and of course, the anger and the division in the country today."
The season continues with Harold Pinter's "The Birthday Party" (opening Nov. 7), Jim Still's "Searching for Eden: The Diaries of Adam and Eve" (Feb. 20) and "Ripcord" (May 8), a comedy by Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire.
If those titles sound unfamiliar or at least if they're shows regular theatergoers haven't had an opportunity to see before, that's the point
"One of the comments I get is, 'I'm really glad when I come here I'm not going to see the same kind of theater, the same shows that I see everywhere else,'" Lynn said. "My goal for the space is to continue to give my audiences good quality fare that they're not going to see four and five times, you know, within the span of two or three years."
Lynn has no plans to stop at 10 years.
"It's shocking to me that we're actually here after 10 years," she said. " We had no idea that it was going to mean we're selling out three weekends of performances now. So we've succeeded. And as long as I am able-bodied and can climb up the stairs and not succumbing to the frailties of age as I'm approaching my 78th birthday, we'll keep going as long as we can."