For more than four decades, Ben Zylman has been a fixture of Kalamazoo theater — first as an actor, then as a director, and always as a mentor.
In this episode of All Stories Matter, host Marvinetta Woodley Penn sits down with Zylman, a longtime member of the Kalamazoo Civic Theatre community, to trace a story that started long before anyone in town knew his name.
Zylman grew up in Portage, the middle child of six, in a house with one bathroom and one television. He knew he wanted to be an actor as early as third grade — though he didn’t say so out loud, since most of his classmates were naming firefighters and police officers. Instead, he told his teacher he wanted to own his own store. Years later, he would do both: build a career at Gilmore’s department store, rising to store manager by 24, while quietly becoming one of Kalamazoo’s most familiar theater names.
The spark, Zylman says, came earlier than that — from reruns of I Love Lucy after school, and later, at 13, from his aunt driving across town to take him to his first live show at the Barn Theatre in Augusta. He didn’t grow up around theater people; his parents weren’t part of that world, and there wasn’t always room, in a family of eight, to focus on one child at a time. But teachers noticed. A choir teacher in elementary school, a director in high school who pulled him aside after a reading of Edgar Allan Poe and asked him to audition for The Crucible — each one became, in Zylman’s words, part of a relay race of encouragement that carried him forward.
He never took an acting class. Never studied directing, marketing, or management. “I just did these things,” he says.
That early momentum led him, in 1978, to audition for what was then called Kalamazoo Community Theater — the Civic’s summer repertory program. His first role: Steve Baker in Showboat, a part so small he had to go to the library to find out who the character even was. It was the beginning of what’s grown into roughly 130 productions across stage, film, commercials, and radio, including years spent at Kindleberger Summer Theater performing in Camelot, Brigadoon, and The Robber Bridegroom — and later directing Guys and Dolls, South Pacific, and The Pirates of Penzance.
Not every memory is a warm one. Zylman recalls a review of a production called The Diviners that singled him out by name, calling his performance flat while praising everyone else in the cast. The review stuck with him for years — so much so that, decades later, on opening night of Damn Yankees, a photo from that same production turned up in the Civic’s green room moments before he was due onstage. “We always remember the bad things,” Marvinetta offers. Zylman doesn’t disagree.
But theater gave him something else, too — friendships built backstage, evenings spent at a downtown restaurant once known for hosting cast tables from both the Civic and the New Vic after rehearsals. He met one of his closest friends, Michelle Hopkins, during a production of The Robber Bridegroom. “We just went out,” he says of those years. “Every single night.”
Somewhere along the way, the role that mattered most to Zylman shifted from performer to teacher. He sees the plays he directs less as productions and more as tools — ways to pass something forward to young people the way his own mentors once did for him. The proof of that shift came years ago, he says, when a former student told him, after an opening night, “I couldn’t have done this without you.” His answer: “You’re right. You couldn’t have done this without me. But you did it.”
That, Zylman says, is what theater has really been about all along — not the accolades or standing ovations, but the moment someone steps outside their comfort zone and discovers something they didn’t know was there.
