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The Oberon’s former home reopens as a new arts hub for local and emerging talent.

By James Sullivan Globe correspondent,Updated September 2, 2024, 2:55 p.m.

Arrow Street Arts founder David Altshuler and Georgia Lyman, whose theater group Liars and Believers is curating the 11-day festival celebrating the launch of the Harvard Square multi-use arts space.David L. Ryan/Globe Staff

David Altshuler always thought of himself as a “city kid.” But when the pandemic hit, and the entrepreneur began spending time outside of Boston, he realized the city itself wasn’t enough.

“Without restaurants and art,” he said recently, “Boston wasn’t interesting to me.”

When the American Repertory Theater announced in 2021 that it would not renew its lease for Oberon, the experimental theater space in Harvard Square, Altshuler sprang into action. His wife, Sharman, is the founder of the award-winning theater company Moonbox Productions. Altshuler knew the difficulties small arts organizations have faced in recent years as the Boston area’s development boom has surged.

After two years of negotiations with Harvard University (which owns the building that housed Oberon), Altshuler’s new nonprofit Arrow Street Arts is set to pull the curtain on a new multi-use arts center on Sept. 5. Through Sept. 15,the 2 Arrow St. venue will host an eclectic series of events — more than 40 of them, featuring hundreds of artists — under the umbrella of ArrowFest, a celebration of its grand opening.

Related: Moonbox Productions will anchor a new performance venue in Harvard Square

The 11-day festival includes a dance showcase, a hip-hop summit, a “puppet slam,” and free lunchtime concerts, anchored by three performances of “Don’t Open This,” an imaginative spectacle produced by Liars and Believers, the Cambridge-based theater collective.

Liars and Believers executive producer Georgia Lyman took the lead in curating ArrowFest. She joined Altshuler for a walk-through of the new venue two weeks before opening night.

“I’ve been in this space a hundred times and I had no idea there’s natural light in here,” Lyman said as the group entered the main theater at Arrow Street Arts. Altshuler says the renovators removed “2,000 square feet of stuff” from the old Oberon, including the bar and the stage. The new room will seat 264 people. The entire facility, including an adaptable foyer and a front-window dance studio, is licensed for a capacity of 600.

Now a black box, the main theater has state-of-the-art lighting and sound and a custom-designed retractable seating system that can be configured by remote control.

“I love the chaos of artistic creation,” said Altshuler. As an arts organization, he said, “we can’t compete with the internet, or those 60- or 70-inch TVs at home.

“The way we survive and thrive is to embrace the vitality of life. And that’s chaos.”

Shriya Srinivasan is the founder and artistic director of the Anubhava Dance Company, which leads the lineup for the ArrowFest dance showcase on Sept. 8. By day an assistantprofessor of biomedical engineering at Harvard, Srinivasan and her founding partner, Joshua George, explore psychological concepts, such as fear and elation, through Indian classical dance.

“Indian dancing is very mimetic,” she explained, “almost like Broadway.”

“A Hip Hop Experience with Jazzmyn RED,” scheduled for the evening of Sept. 11, will encompass a workshop on the history of the art form, a panel discussion about hip-hop’s current representation in Boston, and live performances headlined by A Trike Called Funk. That group’s creators built a custom cargo tricycle outfitted with a sound system, graffiti-tagging materials, and a pop-up dance floor.

Jazzmyn Rodrigues, who performs as Jazzmyn RED, is a US Ambassador of Hip Hop and Cultural Exchange, traveling as far afield as Abu Dhabi. She had applied to be a performer at ArrowFest, but was pleased when the organizers suggested she expand her proposal to include a comprehensive, hip-hop mini-festival.

“I said, ‘Well, yes, I will do that,’” Rodrigues recalled. “I really love that they saw what more I could do.”

Even after hip-hop marked its 50th anniversary, she said, the form is still too often seen strictly as music. “Hip-hop is actually a culture. We have our own artwork, cultural norms, food. In the workshop, we’ll talk about all the elements of hip-hop and where they came from, and we’ll celebrate each one.”

The new venue on Arrow Street will be a welcome addition to the local arts community, Lyman said.

“It’s very freeing to look at a space and say ‘How can we use this?,’ as opposed to ‘This is what we get,’” Lyman continued. “The flexibility is key, because it frees creativity.”

Arrow Street Arts is partnering with the Cambridge Community Foundation, one of the first organizations of its kind in the country, promoting equity and justice initiatives and “social cohesion.” Grants from the foundation will support artists and producers, subsidizing their use of the multi-use arts center going forward. Moonbox Productions will be a permanent resident of the building, calling 2 Arrow St. its new home.

“Art is what helps people be able to cope with the human condition,” said Rodrigues. “It makes people feel seen and heard.”

Altshuler seconded the notion.

“We know that Boston’s artistic heart is strong,” he said. “It just needs a home and a little help.”

ARROWFEST

Sept. 5-15. Some events free, others ticketed ($5 and up). Full schedule: arrowstarts.org

James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.

Flavortown fans of Greater Boston may hear a familiar name when watching the bleach-haired Guy Fieri roll up to a local restaurant in “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives” this week. 

Source in Cambridge, an eatery known for its elevated pizzas made with locally sourced ingredients, joins the long list of Boston spots — Bagelsaurus, Cutty’s, and Trina’s Starlite Lounge, to name a few — that have made their small-screen debut on the long-running foodie road trip show hosted by Fieri. 

It’s taken more time and money than anticipated, but the Comedy Studio is finally set to reopen in Harvard Square next week.

The club, which for many years occupied the attic of the Hong Kong restaurant on Mass. Ave., will unveil its new basement space in The Abbott, the wedge-shaped building in the heart of Harvard Square, on Wednesday.

It’s been nearly three years since the Comedy Studio’s founder and then-owner, Rick Jenkins, announced plans to move into the landmark building that formerly housed the Curious George store. In the interim, however, much changed, including the project’s construction costs and Jenkins’s status.

In May, Jenkins, who created the Comedy Studio in 1996 and gradually built it into a destination for both comics and audiences, abruptly resigned. In an interview this week, he said he made the decision to leave amid complaints from some comics and others about aspects of his past management.

In one case, Jenkins said, an employee at Vera’s, the Union Square bar where the Comedy Studio hosted occasional shows during the pandemic, reported seeing pornography on Jenkins’s computer. In another case, a comic complained that Jenkins told a person who served time in prison for child pornography that they could perform at an open mic. (Jenkins acknowledges telling the man he could perform, but said he never did.)

She first tasted wine as a Swiss boarding school student. She began to love it as a Minnesota housecleaner.

The Garage in Harvard Square is known for piercing parlors and Newbury Comics. But it’s also home to the Commonwealth Wine School, run by Cambridge’s Jessica Sculley. The school offers certification-level programs from the Wine and Spirit Education Trust, the Wine Scholar Guild, and the Society of Wine Educators for professionals and civilians. Sculley, 48, reflects on her past as a teacher, artist, and wine connoisseur — and shares her favorite summertime sips.

Tell me about your job.

I’m the founder and director of Commonwealth Wine School. Our physical location is in the Garage at Harvard Square — it’s in a funky building and a funky part of town. We look, I suppose, like the more serious group that’s there, but we try to have a really good time.

Even though we’re called Commonwealth Wine School, we mostly teach about wine. We also teach about beer and spirits and cocktails and sake and cider. We’re really here for either professionals in the industry who want to polish up or move their careers along and learn more, but also just enthusiasts: people who really like a glass of wine and want to know what they’re drinking.

What’s going on at The Garage, anyway? It was going to be renovated, right?

COVID really did change everything, didn’t it? Trinity Property owns the garage. We have a great relationship with them, and they’ve always been really open from the beginning, because I signed our lease moments before COVID happened.

Initially, their permitting was for office space, and I think COVID changed the needs and the finance around office space completely. … Over the last many months, all sorts new and exciting businesses have moved in. There’s a new club that’s moved in; there’s a new arcade. There’s certainly a lot of exciting stuff going on there, especially for our particularly youthful population, which is what we have right in the Square.

How did you come to this interesting position?

I was a teacher for a long time. My background is in the sciences, and I was a science teacher and a math teacher at mostly the middle school and elementary levels, but a little high school and college. I was also always an artist from the time I was a kid, even when I was in my twenties.

I moved back from Minnesota, where I had gone to college and grad school and where I had been teaching, and started a school not so different from Commonwealth Wine School, except it was for the book arts: printmaking, paper-making, and all that jazz. I did all sorts of stuff that one does in their twenties, including still teaching math on the side, because all artists need to do something else — or many of them do. I moved around a little bit. Right around 2005, I met my husband, and we moved shortly thereafter to Pittsburgh.

I’d always loved wine. I come from an Italian family, and let me tell you, none of the wine on my family’s table was ever good wine. It was always lovingly called table wine, but it was always there. It was never taboo in my in my house. But I never liked it until I was a teenager and got the taste of some really good wine and thought, ‘Actually, this is kind of interesting.’

I was a teacher and I was an artist, which necessarily meant I had no money, and so really getting into wine was cost prohibitive to me. When we got married and moved to Pittsburgh, it was supposed to be a two-year stint that went on for seven years before I managed to get us back to Boston. At that time, when I had my daughter, I didn’t go back to teaching. I thought: ‘You know what? I have this infant who’s lovely, and I treasure being with her. But I could really learn about wine.’

I signed up for a class. I loved it, and at that point I just kind of went down the rabbit hole. I geeked out. When we moved back to Boston, I had already started tasting groups back in Pittsburgh, where I would invite my friends over … We would put our kids in a morning preschool program, and I would teach them about wine, and they wouldn’t spit out maybe as much as they should have. Let’s say it was a very sane way to have toddlers at least once a week.

When I moved back to Boston, I started teaching at Grape Experience Wine School, teaching mainly out of the Boston Center for Adult Education. [Grape founder] Adam Chase and I merged Grape Experience into Commonwealth Wine School, so that we became the official program provider for all of the WSET [Wine Spirit Education Trust] courses, which really meant that we were no longer just focusing only on wine. We were bringing in spirits and sake, and they’ve just started off their new beer programming. We have all of these extraordinary content experts, and they’re all sharing their passion, knowledge, and excitement.

Did you ever suspect you’d grow up to do this? Was there an early spark?

I grew up in Providence and was raised by a single mom. She was very culturally oriented and educationally focused. She would bring us up to Boston to go to the Science Museum and to the MFA. She would bring us up for doubleheaders, where we’d sit in the bleachers at Fenway Park.

She was an architecture professor at Roger Williams. She would take me out of school when the architecture students would come up to Boston, and we would visit Harvard Square, and she would point out the buildings. That was sort of my experience with the place, feeling like Boston was the capital of New England.

In Providence, the restaurant culture wasn’t anything like what it became in the ‘90s or 2000s or certainly today. The really good food was at my house, when my grandmother would come to visit. She was an extraordinary Italian cook. I came from certainly a middle-class background, but middle class with no extra funds.

I was really lucky in that my best friend growing up was part of these international summer camps that originated from a woman who grew up in Barrington, Rhode Island. After World War II, she went to work with refugee kids in Europe and built a summer camp for them, with the idea that that they would grow up playing together and living together and never go to war again. There was a little Rhode Island contingent. There was a house up in New Hampshire, and I became part of that. The woman then became headmistress of an alternative school in Switzerland, and they gave me a full scholarship. I went there for my last couple years of high school, and when I was there, it opened up a whole new world for me that I couldn’t even previously imagine.

To say, ‘I went to school in Switzerland’ sounds super posh and snooty. It was not that. We had cold showers, and we peeled our own potatoes and …..

Recently it occurred to me that in all my years of writing newspaper columns, I’ve never written one about the strangest life story I’ve ever come across, in terms of the wild twists and turns it took in a relatively short expanse of time. It is the story of a person I never interacted with to my knowledge, although we lived in the same city, at the same time, when we were the same age. I’ll tell you his story, but strap yourself in first.

Mark Frechette came from Fairfield, Connecticut. By the time he was 19 years old in the mid-1960s, he was a high school dropout, drifting back and forth between New York City and Boston. When he was in Boston, he made money by panhandling in Harvard Square and doing some carpentry work in the Fort Hill section of Roxbury.

One day in 1968, he was standing at a bus stop on Charles Street in Boston, arguing with a man in a third floor window of a nearby apartment building, yelling invective at the man that is not quotable in a family newspaper.

At this time, the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni was planning to shoot an American epic about the cultural and political turbulence in the United States at that time. Antonioni did not have much respect for the art and craft of acting, having been quoted as saying, “Actors are like cows. You have to lead them through a fence.” Consistent with this lack of esteem for actors, he decided he would cast two non-actors for the lead roles in his film, thinking that would make it more authentic. He had aides out scouting the nooks and crannies of America to find a young male and a young female to star in the film. The male lead would play a student on the run from the law for a killing at a student protest.

Two of these scouts happened upon Mark Frechette having his vitriolic shouting match at the bus stop. They decided he was right for the part, because, as they told Antonioni, “He is twenty and he hates.” So, in what may be the most bizarre path ever taken to movie stardom, Mark Frechette was offered the lead role in a major motion picture with no previous acting training, experience, or intention, and without realizing he was auditioning by having a venomous verbal street fight.

But if you think his path to movie stardom is the culmination, or even the apex, of Frechette’s wild ride, think again and stay seated.

Frechette and Antonioni did not get along at all during the making of the film, perhaps because whatever else Frechette was or wasn’t, he was no cow to be led through a fence; more like a bull in the ring. ”Zabriskie Point,” as Antonioni entitled the film, was a commercial and critical flop. The film’s bombing did not prevent Frechette’s experiencing the accouterments of celebrity, however. For instance, he had his picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone and posed for a fashion layout in Vogue.

Frechette stayed in Europe after acting in Zabriskie Point to appear in two more films made by less prominent directors with smaller budgets, neither movie making much of a splash. Then he picked up stakes and returned to Boston with his Zabriskie Point co-star, Daria Halprin, and $60,000 he’d saved from his payment for the three movies, the equivalent of about $450,000 toda

Lovestruck Books coming to Harvard Square

A new bookstore is readying itself to open in the heart of Harvard Square this fall. Lovestruck Books, a romance bookstore, is in the early stages of construction at 44 Brattle St. in Cambridge, and the owner is waiting on permitting for a possible cafe and bar area to accompany the romance-stocked shelves. Owner Rachel Kanter lives in Cambridge, graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is a former elementary and high school English teacher. Romance sells more than any other fiction genre, and more brick-and-mortar stores devoted to it are opening around the country. California’s the Ripped Bodice, the first romance bookstore in the United States, opened in 2016; now there are over 20 around the country. An opening date for Lovestruck is still up in the air, and the store will center books by women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ authors. Kanter aims for the place to be not just a bookstore but a community hub, offering a range of steamy reads, as well as a sense of belonging. For more information, visit lovestruckbooks.com.

Zoe’s Diner, a longtime staple of Harvard Square dining beloved for its retro aesthetics, bottomless coffee, and all-day breakfast offerings, permanently closed last week.

Zoe’s, which first opened more than 20 years ago, was popular with both students and Cambridge residents alike for the price and variety of its food options. Its menu boasted a blend of American diner food, such as pancakes and milkshakes, with Greek food such as spanakopita, kebabs, and baked lamb.

Denise A. Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, speculated that a difficult labor market following the pandemic could have contributed to the closure.

“Many of our eateries have had trouble getting staff post-pandemic,” she said in an interview Wednesday. “Labor shifted, and it’s not an easy thing to do.”

Jillson added that increased breakfast options closer to the heart of Harvard Square may have squeezed out Zoe’s, which is located farther down Massachusetts Avenue than some competitors. Harvard Square has seen an influx of breakfast-serving coffee shops and restaurants in recent years, including Tatte, Bluestone Lane, and, most recently, Friendly Toast.

It looks like a Cambridge diner that offered a mix of Greek and American fare has shut down.

According to a poster within the Friends of Boston’s Hidden Restaurants Facebook group page, Zoe’s in Harvard Square is no longer in business, with a sign out front at the Mass. Ave. eatery indicating that it has closed for good. This appears to be confirmed within a Reddit post, with a picture showing a “permanently closed” sign, and that poster indicates that it had been open as of a few days ago.

Zoe’s first opened approximately 20 years ago, offering such dishes as omelets, spanakopita, lentil soup, burgers, kabobs, baked lamb, and gyros.

The address for Zoe’s was 1105 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02138. Its website is at https://www.zoescambridge.com/

We don’t make the rules. Everything — drinking, dancing, talking, eating — is better on a roof. Whether you’re looking for a chic supper spot or just a margarita in the sun, these bars and restaurants will take you to a higher plane. (And, this being Boston, you’ll find some winter-friendly rooftop igloos, too.)