On Staff: The Play's The Thing: Krohmer Tackles Interracial Love Mike Field -------------------- Staff Writer Stan Krohmer can't decide if seeing his plays produced is ecstasy or agony. Call him the supreme dismal optimist. "I go into it each time saying this is going to be the best experience ever--better than the last time--and the cast and director are going to love every word," says the 43-year-old part-time playwright and Hopkins librarian. "I'm always pleasantly surprised," he adds cheerfully, then pauses to consider. "Or deeply saddened," he says, with the dismissive chuckle of a recollected memory best left undisturbed. Krohmer has had his share of triumph and frustration in his 20-some years of play writing. On July 22 and 23 he is hoping for some of the better results when his one-act play "Premonition" premieres as the Literary Arts Award winner at Artscape '95. The Baltimore city festival of the arts draws tens of thousands of visitors to the Mount Royal neighborhood each year for the food, music and celebration of artistic activities of all kinds. This year, the festival will include two performances of "Premonition" at the Decker Auditorium of the Mount Royal Station Building at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. In his small, windowless office on A-Level of the Eisenhower Library, Krohmer takes a moment from his work as supervisor of current periodicals to discuss writing plays about the things he knows. "I tend to write confrontational plays," he says when asked to describe his work. "And several of my plays are multiracial in cast and content. This play [Premonition] deals with interracial love themes, even if the whole cast is black." Dealing with highly charged subject matter such as race relations may be what live theater does best, and Krohmer, who is white, has had no fear of wading in where others might only tiptoe. "Growing up in Baltimore gives you many experiences in a multiracial setting," he says. "I doubt whether I could write an authentic play about being a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. I just don't have the background." But the streets of Baltimore are something in which Krohmer has a lifetime of experience, and it shows in his play. Kendra, his protagonist, has lost her man to the violence of the streets. Now, after months of mourning, she has begun to date--but her new beau is a white certified public accountant whose idea of a good time is dinner at the Inner Harbor. How she reconciles her choice to her family and her community is the subject matter of Krohmer's one-hour drama. "No one has come out and said 'What is your play about and why are you writing this?'" says Krohmer about writing a play with an all-black cast. "I like to think it shows that theater artists are beyond that. No theater artist should be restricted by race or gender or whatever. "But," he adds, after a moment's consideration, "you better sure know what you're talking about." Krohmer's extensive experience in the theater gives him some leeway to do some talking. He began writing plays as a college student at Wilmington College in Ohio. In 1970, at the tender age of 19, Krohmer had a school buddy who wanted to audition for the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, which was devoting its entire summer season to theater by and about African Americans. The friend asked Krohmer to come along to the auditions for moral support. "While I was there, the director asked me to read a part written for a white actor in the play," recalls Krohmer. "I got the role [his friend did not] and played the white parts in several of the plays that summer. I got my [Actor's] Equity card as a result." A self-described "reluctant actor," he has since allowed his membership in the actor's union to drop. He remembers his days on stage with some fondness though. "I got to play all the heavies, like the landlord in 'A Raisin in the Sun'," he says of that era of black and white typecasting. "I'll never forget, in one play I had to say, 'How would you know what it is? It doesn't have any drums in it!'" After college, Krohmer moved to Cambridge, where he became deeply involved with the Boston Playwright's Theater, then widely known as the Massachusetts equivalent to New York's Playwright's Horizon. "I had plays read and produced there, I worked box office and did tech, I was on the board of directors for a couple years," he says of his apprenticeship in theater. "It was a learning experience." Krohmer returned to Baltimore in the mid-'80s for family reasons and soon thereafter started working at the Eisenhower Library. In 1991, he was the first student accepted into the School of Continuing Studies' new Master of Drama Studies program. He graduated three years later, submitting a two-person, one-act play for his graduate thesis project. It was this play that eventually became Premonition. "I like to think I write plays that rely on subtext, that what the characters aren't saying is just as important as what they are," Krohmer says. Premonition is haunted with the ghost of Kendra's first love, the man who never appears on stage, yet never seems very far away. His presence is manifest by the appearance of Marcus, the self-described "darker angel" who appears suddenly from Kendra's past to question her about her former and future loves. Kendra's final decision may make no one happy--perhaps not even herself--but it is her decision, and that's what Krohmer's play grapples with. "These characters kind of emerge out of somewhere," says the playwright about a process he can't quite describe. "I'm just a messenger for this." His message, though, has much to do with something he can describe. "People have to make decisions and take care of themselves." ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Premonition" will be performed Saturday and Sunday, July 22 and 23, at 4:30 p.m. in the Decker Auditorium of the Mount Royal Station, across from the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Admission is free. -----------------------------------------------------------------