Four Questions With: Bennie Bender

2019 Gary Surmacz Memorial Scholarship Recipient

Bennie poses in front of their set designed for "The Body Play" at Cleveland Public Theater.

Our Penn-Trafford community prides itself in offering support to high school seniors getting ready to set off on the next step of their journey.

We sat down with the Theatre Factory's 2019 Gary Surmacz Memorial Scholarship recipient Bennie Bender to catch up. Bennie has been involved in community theater in Trafford since 2010, and currently works as Properties Manager for the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in Cleveland, Ohio.

Thanks for chatting with us, Bennie!

Tell me about your journey with community theatre in Trafford.

I started at the Theatre Factory around 2010 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when I was nine years old. I played Nibbles the dwarf, and immediately fell in love with theater. I met so many wonderful humans — Mike Byrne, Mike Crosby, Tina Stewart — and continued on to do two to three shows a year until I graduated from high school.

Some of my favorite roles included the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and Slue-Foot Sue in Pecos Bill, Slue-Foot Sue, and the Dirty Dan Gang, all with Kidworks. On the Mainstage, I played Anne Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank directed by Sue Kurey and Little Maxine in Sisters of Swing directed by Laura Wurzell, and was in the ensemble for shows like Children of Eden, Big Fish, Heathers, and The Goodbye Girl.

The cast of "The Wizard of Oz"

I also helped out behind the scenes! I assistant directed one of our Kidworks camp shows, A Pirate Adventure, and also tried my hand at stage managing and set painting.

What are some of the things that you learned at the Theatre Factory that you took with you for the rest of your life?

Having a safe space to learn the essentials of theater in all of its forms was really what kickstarted my career path. I was able to explore different avenues, supported by a huge number of people, and encouraged to do my best work. Community theatre in Trafford was truly where I learned that theatre is the art of playing. One of the most important parts of theater is not being afraid to mess up and make a fool of yourself, and especially growing up through the Kidworks program, it was essentially like a safety net that let me fail beautifully in front of a lot of people. This is something that has really helped me in my adult life because you fail a lot, and you have to get right back up on it and keep pushing forward.

The cast of "Sisters of Swing" wears fake mustaches backstage. Bennie is second from the right.

There’s a quote from a college professor I had: “If you want to go into theater as a profession and you can picture yourself doing anything else instead, go do that. Don’t do theater.” Standing on stage in Trafford was where I realized I couldn’t picture anything else. Theater was what I needed my life to be, and community theatre gave me the confidence to actively pursue that dream.

How did receiving the scholarship help you with your journey?

I received the 2019 Gary Surmacz Memorial scholarship as I was headed to Baldwin Wallace to pursue a degree in acting. I chose Baldwin Wallace because it had one of the most intriguing classical acting programs available, which enabled me to study interests like Shakespeare, stage combat, and Jacobean theater. I was also able to pursue a small study abroad opportunity in London, to expand my horizon to theater across the pond. During college I minored in voice, so my passion for music continued to be a part of my journey as well. And while studying at BW, I truly got to unlock my love for making props, which opened a world of career possibilities for me.

Bennie's class at Baldwin Wallace at the Globe Theatre

To be brutally honest, you don’t go into theater to make millions; there’s a lot of truth in the phrase “struggling artist.” So going into a profession where you don’t make as much as you could being a doctor or a lawyer, the ability to cut down on student loan debt helped me drastically improve my chances of success. I wasn’t worrying as much about purchasing the things I needed for class, and could focus on learning and honing my craft instead. The scholarship was a significant amount that was key to getting me through my college days successfully.

Excluding the financial aspect, it was also a physical representation of support from my theater community back home. So any time I felt out of place or like an imposter, it was a grounding reminder of how these people believed in me and believed I could do this.

Tell us about what you’re doing now!

I work as the properties manager at Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, Ohio, along with our sister locations: the Idaho Shakespeare Festival in Boise, Idaho, and the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. I manage a shop of properties artisans, and am responsible for anything an actor touches onstage that isn’t the floor or the walls. I was actually the youngest properties manager ever hired at Great Lakes Theater!

We make furniture, fake food, curtains. You name it, we make it. We also source antique furniture for shows, and can track down pretty much anything that a director or designer could desire. We just closed a show where we had to build 10 feet tall lifelike flowers, and are opening a show that required several severed heads. It’s a profession where you truly have to be a jack of all trades.

Our season for Great Lakes Theater Festival runs from September to May, and we do about six shows during that time. Once May hits, we travel out west to our sister location in Boise, Idaho and remount the three shows that we built in the spring. Then we build two new shows out west. Simultaneously during the summer, our third sister location at Lake Tahoe is up and running a remount in rep, which means two shows use the same set and the show is switched out every other day. So, actors could perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream one night and Mamma Mia! the next. Even though the base set is the same, everything else is different!

Then when September rolls around again, we pack up our two new shows out west, and bring them back to Cleveland to perform at our home location, the Hanna Theater.

Without the community theatre’s contribution during my childhood, I never would have found my passion for prop-making, and I’m so grateful that my experiences there helped shape where I ended up. (And I haven’t left Trafford for good — I just designed a few props for the Theatre Factory’s recent production of Beetlejuice, Jr!)

Bennie in the Hanna Theatre in Cleveland with some prop flowers

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Did you know that the Trafford Performing Arts Center also offers a scholarship? When you donate to our book raffle next season, you’ll be supporting the big dreams of one of our high school seniors who’s about to take off on the journey of a lifetime.

Learn more about qualifying and applying for the scholarship on our scholarship page.