LOST IN REHEARSAL Groom-ski Rob Mayes, bride Monique Askew, director Damien Gray.

City blocks buzzing with high-tech exhibits.

A carnival atmosphere. And the belief that technology can fuel and drive the future. Not so fast, hot-spot haunting Wired subscriber. We're talking about the Great Lakes Exposition, which took place in this very city in the 1930s — a sepia-toned precursor to the Technicolor explosion about to happen in downtown Cleveland under the zippier heading "Ingenuity Fest." The scale of the Great Lakes Exposition was more in league with a World's Fair. It even had an Aquacade that featured water ballet — but since none of the innovations introduced there was a time machine, you can't go check that out for yourself.

You can go see Lost Prospect, however. This textured, site-specific theatre experience commissioned for Ingenuity takes for its inspiration the events and icons of Cleveland's once-gilded industrial past, including the Great Lakes Exposition. It's staged at multiple old-timey sites in and around Prospect Avenue, including the Cleveland Trust building and the Old Arcade.

This history had the rust buffed off it by the five writers of Lost Prospect, who exhaustively researched the highs and lows of the city's industrial timeline before cobbling together the story of one Cleveland Everyman-ski. At this writing, a lot of the references to historical events have been scrapped, informing the text indirectly rather than showing up as actual plot points. It's probably just as well that the script isn't overburdened with historical footnotes, since audiences will no doubt find intellectual stimulation to the nth degree in the multiple performance sites and performance styles. Lost Prospect incorporates movement, music, a three-card monte charlatan and, yes children, even a rooftop poetry slam accompanied by percussion.

In addition to the dramaturgical impact of writers' repeated online visits to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (among many other sources), the production owes much of its artistic design to the presence of New York-based director Damien Gray, whose extensive resume includes work off Broadway and at the Sundance Theatre Lab. Gray is perhaps best known to local audiences as the director of Crowbar, a play by Obie-winning Cleveland native Mac Wellman and the first production staged in Cleveland Public Theatre's Gordon Square performance space.

"We wanted to create five different and distinct theatrical experiences. Each scene has a distinct tone," says Gray. "One can be lyrical and emotional without text. One can be a monologue. One can feature a lot of music."

But one of the first scenes of the play is old-school theatre conflict right out of classical Greece — the father-son confrontation scene. Stan Koszloski is only 12 years old when the play opens, but already knows he won't follow his Polish immigrant father into a life of nastily repetitive auto assembly work. He's more impressed with the radio and matinee jungle adventures of Tarzan, even though his dad insists that he embrace his industrial heritage and find value in the tangible goods he can make with his hands.

"Cleveland is a blue-collar town, and those types of themes came up a lot in our free writing," says Mike Geither, the Cleveland State playwriting professor who shepherded his students through the creation process. The script, which is being revised and rewritten up until the performance date (presenting a challenge for the actors and at least one Free Times freelancer) also follows Stan's personal life as he leaves his wife and kids (a scene dramatized entirely in movement) to eventually enter into a union with an African-American woman. The interracial marriage is the final result of the creators' many attempts to find a metaphor for Cleveland's ongoing race-relations issues.

"That influence retains a strong presence in the play," says writer Tom Hayes of the city's segregation history. "It's something that still is not resolved in Cleveland." Hayes, who by day is a managing librarian at Case and who did a lot of the heavy lifting on the research end of the Lost Prospect process, says that the writers were particularly interested in the Plain Dealer's 1993 supplement "Race: Attitudes Divide Us." Inspiration from that lengthy article led to the creation of a scene, now scrapped, that incorporated black and white actors as pieces on a chess board, lamenting the inability of blacks and whites to just get along.

The process of creating Lost Prospect was highly collaborative, even for theatre, and even for a new play, which inevitably and sometimes radically evolves under the influence of the director, dramaturg, actors and early audiences. The project's five writers — Tara Broeckel, Dan Leatherman, Mike Oatman, Mike Sepesy and Hayes — are MFA candidates in the Northeast Ohio Creative Writing Program (which is itself a collaboration between four Northeast Ohio universities — Kent State, Akron, Cleveland State and Youngstown State). As in the above example of the chess match losing out to the interracial marriage metaphor that found its way to the final script, the writers learned quickly that a personal vision can be heartlessly trampled by the messier creativity of collaboration.

"Mike would assign scenes and the best content would win and be merged," says Hayes.

"If you're going to be an MFA playwright, you have to know the collaborative experience of being in rehearsal. "You have to learn to leave your ego at the door. You will lose a lot of what you create," says Geither.

Director Gray says he isn't worried about losing what's been created in Lost Prospect to the flashier, noisier, higher-tech exhibits to be found lining the streets at Ingenuity Fest: "Our environments are controlled, since the performances happen indoors. We're not competing with the other exhibits. In fact it's good that part of the experience happens outdoors. People should feel like they're coming in and out of the storm."