Playwright Eric Mansfield has stories he has to tell
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Local public relations professional Eric Mansfield has been on fire as a new playwright, writing eight full-length plays in the last two years.
The Akron native has had eight productions of seven of his original modern dramas in the last two years, from Akron's Rubber City Theatre to Salem State University in Massachusetts.
Mansfield calls this playwriting phase of his life — a passion that crosses between his private and professional lives — "Eric 4.0."
Playwriting is one of the four vocations throughout Mansfield's life, starting with the military as an Ohio National Guardsman in 1986, at age 17. His 20-year career with the U.S. Army, which included serving on active duty in Iraq for 14 months in 2003-2004, began as a military police officer and ended with him retiring as a major.
Mansfield's military career overlapped with his career as an anchor-reporter for WKYC in Akron and Cleveland from 1994 to 2012. He continues to serve in a Pentagon appointment as civilian aide to the secretary of the Army, representing Northern Ohio.
In 2012, the Emmy Award-winning journalist switched to public relations at Kent State University, where he's now university spokesman and assistant vice president of content strategy and communications. As if that high-profile job weren't enough, he's also working on his MFA in playwriting from Kent State University, which he expects to complete in 2025.
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He takes one or two creative writing classes each semester from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (NEOMFA) consortium that includes KSU, the University of Akron, Cleveland State University and Youngstown State University.
How does Mansfield, 54, do it all? Military discipline has stuck with this playwright, who gets up at 5:30 a.m. daily to write before going to work. He rises at 5:30 on weekends, too, to write at his kitchen table.
"I use my military training as much as anything else in what I do now," including managing KSU newsroom staff assignments, Mansfield said.
When Mansfield's working on his plays in the kitchen, his wife, Lisa, can see when he's focusing on dialogue: "His facial expressions match the conversation."
Mansfield wins Kennedy Center honor
Now, Mansfield has been honored with a second-place Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award in the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Michael Kanin Playwriting Awards for his play "Baron of Brown Street."
Mansfield, who entered the competition in late October, learned March 21 of his second-place win. The national honor comes with $500 and professional memberships to the Dramatists Guild and the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis.
"I’m walking on air to finish second in a national playwriting competition with the Kennedy Center," Mansfield said.
He wrote "Baron of Brown Street" a year ago as part of his MFA program. The play is rooted in the real-life Akron story of Lenny King, a homeless man who forgave the strangers who attacked him and set him on fire under the Brown Street bridge in 2007.
In "Baron of Brown Street," numerous people come to gawk at Lenny under the bridge or try to take advantage after his story of forgiveness comes out in the newspaper.
Mansfield interviewed King at his tent under the bridge for WKYC after King's attackers went to trial. At the time, King showed him his scars on his arms and stomach from his severe burns.
"Baron of Brown Street" will have its world premiere in September at Rubber City Theatre in Akron. It also just won a best new play award at Market House Theater in Paducah, Kentucky, where it will be produced in the future.
So what compels Mansfield to write plays?
"To me, it was storytelling. I got away from it (as a journalist) for a while and I missed it," he said.
"I think that he can't not write," said Lisa, his No. 1 sounding board.
She talked about the joy of her husband being an emerging playwright in his 50s: "People still have hopes and dreams after they're 50."
Getting a play accepted for production takes a lot of legwork. At the advice of Cleveland playwright Michael Oatman, Mansfield makes 100 submissions a year in his quest to have his work produced. He keeps an Excel spreadsheet on each submission and the ongoing status of each.
Being a playwright comes with many more rejections than acceptances.
"You gotta get thick skin, that's for sure," Mansfield said. "You just keep sending it and sending it and sending it and then hoping this'll lead to some good things."
Longtime couple
The couple, who have been together since his junior year and her senior year at North High School, met in orchestra when they were in the fourth and fifth grade, when both played the violin in the school orchestra. He got his first taste of broadcast journalism as an announcer for the North girls basketball and volleyball teams.
Lisa attended the University of Akron and he studied journalism at the University of Dayton, with the couple marrying right after he graduated.
Throughout their marriage, she held down the fort with three young sons while he served in Iraq for 420 days. Josh, 28, followed in his dad's footsteps and served eight years in the Ohio National Guard. Other sons are Jake, 25, and Teddy, 21.
In more recent years, the Mansfields have focused on their mutual love of theater, with Lisa working at Weathervane Playhouse from 2006 to 2016 and Eric having the opportunity to perform onstage with their sons.
"That really was feeding my love of theater and storytelling through the stage with them," he said.
That's when the ideas for playwriting started flowing for Mansfield.
"The more theater I went to, I thought, 'I could write stories like this,' " he said. "I segued because I enjoy a good story."
His first play, "Love in Reserve," a semiautobiographical play about the Mansfields' experience as a military couple, was produced by Rubber City in Akron in 2021. It was a national semifinalist in the 2020 Arts in the Armed Forces Bridge Award.
"Why do you do this? What's your why?" Lisa asked him last year about his playwriting. "Is it because you just have stories and you have to get them out or is it because you have to see them performed?
"Both," Mansfield said. "I'm writing them because I have to tell the story, but I'm also writing (them) because it means so much when I see the work come to fruition."
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A number of his plays are inspired by his life and his career as a journalist.
"So now as I'm writing plays, all these characters you just meet, like Lenny, just come back into your head and they start to come out of these stories that you're writing," Mansfield said.
His 10-minute play "Witnesses to the Execution" is also based on his experience as a reporter, when he witnessed a state execution by lethal injection at Lucasville and later debated the death penalty with other journalists at a diner.
"I think what he does really helps process some of those tougher topics," including current turmoil in the nation, Lisa said.
Mansfield's "Whitesville" is based on the American reaction to George Floyd's murder by a police officer in Minnesota. "Trial by Fire," a play in development about a teacher who uses banned books at a private school, will have a public reading July 6 at the Akron main library by actors from Millennial Theatre Project.
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Mansfield is also working on a mystery novel, "Kelleys Island." Someday, he'd like to have his work produced at Cleveland Play House or Playhouse Square.
His plays "Love in Reserve" and "Lockdown" have been published by Next Stage Press. With all of the latest activities with his plays, Mansfield has been pondering getting an agent.
No matter what happens, he'll keep writing.
"If nothing ever gets produced again, I'll still be OK with it," he said. "I survived a war and got home. Everything else is just gravy after that."
Arts writer Kerry Clawson may be reached at 330-996-3527 or kclawson@thebeaconjournal.com.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Eric Mansfield: Akron native does it all, from military to playwriting
