Tony Randall (left) and Jack Klugman (right) perform a scene from Tom Stoppard’s Rough Crossing at the Coconut Grove Playhouse Mainstage. The show later moved to Broadway’s National Actor’s Theater.

The past clings to the walls of the Coconut Grove Playhouse, but the future is whistling at its doors. From the box-office foyer to the main reception area, the clock turns back a few steps for this Miami landmark. Playbills paper the lobby, commemorating such illustrious productions as the 1956 American premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, which marks the year the building made its debut as a playhouse, to last season’s Praying With The Enemy, Luis Santeiro’s timely comedy about reconciliation among politically divided Cubans. Caricatures of actors, scenery drawings and bold marquee names, enshrining theater legends like Bert Lahr and Tallullah Bankhead, illustrate a world of changing graphics at different time periods. The changing faces of stagecraft, too, have passed through this house to leave their mark. And, despite several challenges, great plans are afoot here to make sure the process continues.

“One thing we have going for us is a rich history, and there’s so little of that in this area,” says Debbie Eyerdam, director of marketing and communications at the not-for-profit theater, which gets its name from the tree-lined neighborhood that dates back to Miami’s late 19th-century pioneer days. “It’s something people can hang their hat on and say, ‘Yeah, I like the Coconut Grove Playhouse.’ They come back for it.”

For many patrons, though, trust in the playhouse stems from more than respect for its long-standing presence. For example, the wave of young professionals who now subscribe to the October-to-June season (with six productions in the 1,100-seat mainstage space and two or three more in the 140-seat Encore Room off the foyer) may well have been drawn to live drama by the discounted student tickets the theater offers. Another attractive feature is Coconut Grove’s educational programs, such as the 15-year-old “In-School Touring Program, ” which gives children a forum for important social issues through specially commissioned plays.

Kathleen Turner turns up the heat in the Coconut Grove Play-house’s 1999 American pre-miere of Tallulah.

The theater’s roster of familiar playwrights is an attractive element for the region’s elderly residents, who often arrive en masse from Broward and Palm Beach, counties just north of Miami-Dade. Many of them are retired from cities in which the theater was a prominent part of the cultural landscape. This winter, for instance, the season includes some reliable favorites, such as Arthur Miller’s The Price and a double Neil Simon bill: Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound.

Furthermore, the Hispanics—predominantly Cuban-Americans—who make up a large and ever-expanding segment of South Florida can find material relevant to their experience, too. They connect to plays, such as this season’s Encore Room production of Nilo Cruz’s A Bicycle Country, which speak directly, though not exclusively, to the souls of immigrants.

In short, the different members of this multicultural, sometimes tumultuous society can find sustenance in the varied voices and range of stories that animate the Grove stage. How fitting, then, that at the helm of this venerable theater is Arnold Mittelman, its longest-tenured artistic director, who has not only tapped the community’s pulse, but also quickened it, with bracing effect. “South Florida is always changing; it doesn’t seem to sit still,” he observes. “But the forces for that change were in place when I got here.”

Accounting for societal ebb and flow, Mittelman’s experience in South Florida has shown him that the local populace—including significant numbers of Haitians, African-Americans and Jewish residents, many of whom are resettled northerners—merits vigorous engagement. “A lot of my work here has been identified as speaking to the Latinos, but, at the same time, [I’m] not leaving others behind. I’m not trying to create a theater for any one group,” emphasizes Mittelman. “My greatest frustration has been when the obvious audience for a show has come to see it, but others haven’t.”

One of his biggest aspirations remains attracting, via programming and education, a larger Hispanic audience. For Mittelman, making this goal a success could set the standard for the rest of the United States, where Latinos have become the country’s fastest-growing minority. Luckily, the task seems tailor-made for Mittelman, who, aside from having produced and directed on and off Broadway, once founded the New York Free Theatre and Interracial Street Theatre. “When I went into the theater,” he confesses, “I wanted it to be revolutionary.”

Fresh from “Act II: The Second American Congress of Theater” at Harvard, which aimed to bond commercial and not-for-profit theaters, Mittelman was shocked that “not one Latino theater artist was at this conference!” He addressed this lack of attention in a speech at the congress, creating a buzz about how to remedy the situation.

“In the arts community,” points out Eyerdam, who must keep a grasp on the market through innovation, “we’re one of many looking for answers about first-generation Americans. To find out about their personalities and what they’re looking to see, we’ve just applied for a marketing grant. I think if you’re going to survive in Miami-Dade , that’s your audience for the future—one you really have to develop.”

According to Eyerdam, the playhouse operated last season with a budget of a little over $6 million, of which 55-60 percent came from ticket sales (half of these by subscription) and the rest from government and corporate grants. Financing for the current season will remain the same.

Elizabeth Ashley in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf at the Coconut Grove

Fostering new audiences through relevant productions is not the only concern at the playhouse. The theater space, with its spiraling and flowery ornamentation, is in dire need of repairs. As Eyerdam explains, “Last year, when we were putting in thinner support columns in the Encore Room [to improve sightlines in what was originally a fancy restaurant], we discovered spalling in the cement.” That’s a type of crumbling, caused in this case by the mixing of cement with seawater, a common practice during the 1920s Florida building boom. “Fortunately, the worst problems are in the administrative offices,” she notes. “The big theater is in the best shape.” Still, it will take approximately $7 million to fix the structural problems. The playhouse has secured about $5.5 million so far.

But there’s more than one act to this drama of repairs and refurbishments. “Because the building was built in 1926 as a movie and vaudeville house, we don’t have a right wing nor an adequate flyspace,” adds Eyerdam.

A $20 million, five-year capital campaign has been launched to renovate and expand the playhouse, to help it keep apace in the 21st century. Ideally, the effort may be extended to build a third 400-seat venue within the facility, which would be best suited, in Mittelman's view, for bringing off-Broadway productions and developing original works. Fulfilling these aims would serve his mission to keep people hooked on the theater-going habit. There could be no better way to honor all those friendly ghosts at Coconut Grove Playhouse—Bert, Tallullah and all the others—than with drama for this new millennium in the melodic new accents of contemporary America.