Our Founders

Pat & Alan Spitzer

Pat Spitzer, along with her husband Alan, local businessman and Lorain County resident, founded The Oberlin-Wellington Rescue Project in 2021.

“Years ago, I would take my small children to Oberlin for violin and Japanese lessons with a student from Osaka. As I pushed a stroller around, exploring, I grew to love the cemetery - which kept calling me back - and the plaque commemorating the Oberlin community, who helped people escaping from slavery to mix into the community and to get across Lake Erie to freedom. Then Roots happened, and it was mind-boggling. So many lives skipped over... I started to go to outdoor drama, and loved the theatricality, the settings, the costumes, the music. I envision a place that can be used by the community, and have school buses bringing kids and senior citizens being part of this.

“I think people want to walk the walk with this history… I would just like to see the day when everybody wants to help everybody. That’s the ultimate goal.”

-Pat Spitzer

Our Team

Ifa Bayeza - Playwright

Ifa Bayeza is an award-winning theater artist and novelist.  Her critically acclaimed drama The Ballad of Emmett Till, received a Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference fellowship and premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 2008, winning the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Play. The Ballad made its West Coast premiere at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles in 2010, garnering six Ovation Awards, including Best Production; four Drama Desk Critics’ Circle Awards, including Best Production; and the Backstage Garland Award for Best Playwriting.

Acclaimed productions followed with the Houston Ensemble Theatre and the National Black Theatre Festival in 2011, Penumbra Theatre in 2014, and Ion Theatre in 2017 where it earned top honors at the San Diego Critics Circle Craig Noel Award, including Outstanding Dramatic Production.

Fueled by this success, Bayeza has expanded The Ballad into The Till Trilogy, recounting the epic Civil Rights saga now in three distinct dramas: The Ballad, telling the intimate story of the boy’s quest; That Summer in Sumner, chronicling the five-day trial of his killers; and Benevolence, charting the transformation in the Mississippi Delta in the wake of Till’s death. Penumbra Theatre’s current debut production of Benevolence has garnered outstanding reviews and Mosaic Theatre Company of DC has announced that it will mount The Till Trilogy in full, with all three plays running in repertory in the spring of 2020.

Bayeza’s other innovative works for the stage include Homer G & the Rhapsodies in The Fall of Detroit (Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award); String Theory, interweaving a quartet of stories surrounding the La Amistad slave ship; Welcome to Wandaland, A Fictional Autobiography; and the musicals Charleston Olio (Fred Ebb Musical Theatre Award finalist); Kid Zero with music by multiple Grammy-nominee Harvey Mason; and Bunk Johnson, LIVE, at The Shadows, which was commissioned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Her innovative adaptations include Wallace Thurman’s inside view of the Harlem Renaissance, Infants of the Spring, a minimalist Antony and Cleopatra from the queen’s point of view, and Ta-zieh-Between Two Rivers, the first English-verse interpretation of the Iranian classic passion play Ta-zieh. Bayeza also co-authored with her sister Ntozake Shange, the “gorgeous” (NY Times), “magical” (Elle), “dazzling” (Essence) novel Some Sing, Some Cry, chronicling 200 years of African American music through seven generations of women. 

Bayeza’s work has been performed at New Federal Theatre in New York, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre and Crossroads Theater. A performer and lecturer, herself, Bayeza has appeared at the Getty Institute, the Chicago Historical Museum, the Mississippi Museum of Art, DuSable Museum, BRAVA Women’s Center for the Arts, the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian, Cosmic Theater in Amsterdam, and at the Sorbonne. A graduate of Harvard University with an MFA in Directing and Dramaturgy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she recently was named inaugural Humanist-in-Residence at the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

To learn more about Ifa and her exciting work, visit http://gurmanagency.com/ifa-bayeza/

Debra Wise - Producing Artistic Director

Debra Wise (Producing Artistic Director, Oberlin-Wellington Rescue Theater Project) is the current Artistic Director of Underground Railway Theater, now at Central Square Theater in Cambridge, MA. In 2021, she was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award by Oberlin College, where URT was founded in 1978 with Wes Sanders, who recently completed an eBook documenting URT’s decades as a touring company (1978-2008): Underground Railway Theater - Engine of Delight and Social Change. With Sanders, Wise helped create over 30 new works which toured nationally and internationally to venues ranging from Lincoln Center to public schools; titles included Sanctuary – The Spirit of Harriet Tubman, Home is Where, InTOXICating and The Christopher Columbus Follies. Wise led URT collaborations with Boston Symphony Orchestra (Firebird, Creation of the World, Tempest); and created and staged plays for Boston’s Museum of Science (Aging Puzzle), New Center for Arts and Culture (Jewish Women and Their Salons), and the Mary Baker Eddy Library. She has created collaborations with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Institute for Contemporary Art, staging improvisations in dialogue with their collections and with public art.

With playwrights Alan Brody and the late Jon Lipsky (an OC alum), and physicist/author Alan Lightman, she founded Catalyst Collaborative@MIT, a unique science theater partnership that has produced over 20 works, including commissions and world premieres. She has created works in partnership with Mount Auburn Cemetery (an adaptation of Our Town) and the National Park Service (Roots of Liberty – The Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War, featuring over 50 actors, dancers, musicians, and guest artists Danny Glover and Edwidge Danticat). URT has won Elliot Norton awards under Wise’s leadership: for The Convert and Constellations (Outstanding Production) and Bedlam’s St. Joan (Best Visiting Production).

She has appeared as an actor on the CST stage in Homebody/Kabul; Copenhagen; The Other Place; The How and the Why; Einstein’s Dreams; From Orchids to Octopi: An Evolutionary Love Story; Yesterday Happened: Remembering H.M.; Breaking the Code; Arabian Nights and A Christmas Memory. Acting appearances on other Boston stages include Doll’s House 2 and Escaped Alone (The GAMM); Mistero Buffo (Poets’ Theatre); A Boston Marriage and Orson’s Shadow (New Repertory Theatre), Brooklyn Boy (SpeakEasy Stage Co.), and Chosen Child (Boston Playwrights’ Theater). In NYC, she was in the premiere of The Haggadah (The Public, with Julie Taymor and Elizabeth Swados). Her work as a playwright includes States of Grace, inspired by the stories, poems, and essays of Grace Paley; and Alice’s Adventures Underground, based on the works of Lewis Carroll. She has recently launched work as an audio-book narrator, with The Brides of Maracoor, by Gregory Maquire - his return to the Wicked series.