MARK THE PASSING: For the past several years, January has marked the unveiling of Playhouse off-night “alteractive” series, which ran winter Mondays for the last several years.

 

The idea was to pull in a different audience with national, regional and local acts, and there were some doozies, including Daniel Beatty in “Emergence-see!” (he went on to win an Obie), Charlie Bethel’s mesmerizing “Beowulf” from Minneapolis Fringe and Loveland’s own Ann Randolph in “Squeeze Box.”

Unfortunately, alteractive was a loss leader with too many artists playing to too few audience members. While there’s no equivalent for the national acts that brought a highly professional alternative view of the world to alteractive (and Cincinnati theatergoers), Playhouse producing artistic director Ed Stern points out that since Playhouse raised the curtain, other venues, like Cincinnati Fringe Festival, have come on the scene, running along a “slightly different” but certainly parallel track.