
Photo by Devyn Glista
When a thirtysomething woman with long blonde hair entered a dive bar halfway between Columbus and Cleveland, the clientele, mostly male, took note. She handed the bartender $10, but not for a drink. She wanted permission to stand on the bar and ask a question.
D. Lynn Meyers stepped up, looked around the joint, and yelled, “Who’s done time?” The response was curiosity and confusion. Many of the customers had indeed seen the inside of a prison cell. After all, this was Mansfield, home of the Ohio State Reformatory. She then yelled, “Who’d like to be in a movie and make $100?”
“Bam! Bam!” says Meyers of her coup, with more than 100 men signing up to be extras in a film she was helping to cast. “They were perfect and real. All those guys in the prison scenes of the movie were ex-cons and guards.”
The film was The Shawshank Redemption, which was nominated for seven Oscars in 1995, including Best Picture. Of the 50-plus movies Meyers has done location casting for, it remains her favorite. “Its message of not giving up and of finding a way through corruption to justice is something that touched my soul and has never left it,” she says.
The casting decisions made in Shawshank inspired her, too. “Morgan Freeman’s role as Red was originally written for a hot-headed Irishman,” she says. “So I asked Frank Darabont, the director, ‘Why Morgan?’ He said, ‘If I was in prison for something I didn’t do, that’s who I’d want as a friend.’ It didn’t matter what race someone was. That decision has inspired every movie I’ve cast since. My casting has been ‘nontraditional’ since before that was a word.”
Meyers has put thousands of Cincinnatians of every stripe on the big screen. She’s the top location casting director in a city whose cinema business is booming. She and her associate Becca Schall booked real bikers for The Bikeriders, found a young biracial brother and sister for big roles in The Old Man and the Gun, and hired men who resembled the players in Miles Davis’s band and could also play instruments for Miles Ahead.
Some of the folks in her vast casting database include Sheila Mayer, a west side retiree who’s been an extra in six movies shot here. She gets a kick out of meeting celebrities like John Travolta and Mark Ruffalo and observing up close how the Hollywood sausage is made.
Another of Meyers’s favorites, Christine Dye, is more ambitious. She’s parlayed larger and larger roles in 10 locally-shot feature films into a bona fide international acting career. Meyers had a hand in getting her scenes opposite Robert Redford, Danny Glover, Tom Waits, Patrick Wilson, Jessica Biel, and Bruce Willis. Dye traveled to Boston for work alongside Zendaya and Josh O’Connor in Challengers, and last year flew to Europe to work with Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield. “This would not have happened without Lynn,” says Dye. “I owe that woman so much.”
As film production crews, big-name actors, and successful directors flow into and out of this region, Meyers and the nonprofit Film Cincinnati organization remain constants. “Lynn is the heartbeat of the talent we have in Cincinnati,” says Film Cincinnati President and CEO Kristen Schlotman. “Her ability to source new, interesting, unique talent is incredible. And she does not stop until she finds what the director needs.”
When Meyers isn’t casting movie productions, she immerses herself in the world she came up in: live theater. As producing artistic director of Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati, she chooses the five plays that make up ETC’s fall-to-spring season and oversees all aspects of their production and ancillary programming, such as apprenticeships and education, with an annual budget of $3.5 million and staff of 26 full-timers and about 175 part-timers. “This might not make sense,” she says, “but I give 100 percent of myself to Ensemble.”
In a small, square conference room, Meyers is finessing the casting of The Mastermind. The art heist film, set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the women’s liberation movement, stars Josh O’Connor and Alana Haim and is scheduled to premiere later this year.
In today’s digital world, casting calls often happen without hopefuls lining up in person. Meyers sits over a metallic-pink laptop to organize more than 35 speaking roles, 1,000 background actors (a.k.a. extras), and 80 “featured background” actors (non-speaking but often notable or even memorable roles.) As usual, she’s wearing black pants and comfortable black shoes, topped today with a red plaid shirt. Her strawberry blonde hair is long and loose.
A software program displays a quilt of faces. The squares link to video auditions that Meyers can shuffle, select, and share with Mastermind director Kelly Reichardt and other movie executives. Sides (small script portions) had been sent to some of the actors in advance to perform on phone cameras and e-mail to her.
Meyers clicks on Alexis Nichole Neuenschwander’s audition. To look the part of a 1970s office worker, the actor wears a bob hairstyle, vintage blouse, and frosted lipstick. Her performance, which lasts under a minute, is understated and nuanced; she does as much with her eyes and facial expressions as she does with her voice. Meyers thinks she’s perfect. Everyone else agrees, and she gets the part.
Meyers will often submit more than 100 actors for a role as minuscule as one line, so she’s always on the hunt for new talent. Social media gets the word out. “We’re looking for lots of background actors for upcoming films in the area! Especially looking for some men with longer hair or afros, and also men with beards,” reads a post on the D. Lynn Meyers Casting page on Facebook. Extras in a movie’s crowd scene could be veteran actors or just randos off the street with the right look.

Photo by Liz Dufour courtesy Cincinnati Enquirer
For anyone else, keeping track of thousands of actors with constant new arrivals on the scene would be a full-time job. But it’s a side gig for Meyers. “In the time other people would do things like go to dinner or play pickleball, that’s my casting time,” she says. “I would rather work with Becca at 10 p.m., like, We need four more 30-year-old men! It’s my kind of shopping or putting together a 1,000-piece puzzle. It’s an emotional victory for me when I cast someone who’s hoping to get a break.”
No one is quite sure how she squeezes in time for her longtime boyfriend and two dogs or to care for her nonagenarian mother, with whom she lives. She rarely has the luxury of taking in entertainment herself; she’s never seen The Sopranos or Schitt’s Creek.
When Meyers exits the casting session in the conference room at Ensemble Theatre, she finds herself in airy second-floor offices. Her large and light-filled corner office—decorated with hippo figurines, potted plants, and framed posters of past ETC plays—overlooks Vine Street between Central Parkway and 12th Street. This is home base for one of just three Cincinnati theaters aligned with Actors’ Equity, the union for actors and stage managers. (Playhouse in the Park and Cincinnati Shakespeare Company are the other two.)
“Ensemble provides offerings that are different, occasionally a little controversial, but not unacceptably so,” says Otto Budig Jr., a major arts donor in the city. “It’s a mainstay for theatergoers who want good theater and not just the folderol that sometimes occurs in the grander scheme.”
ETC is dedicated to employing professionals in the region, which in turn has boosted the base of experienced actors available for films that come here. The company houses everything under one roof, which is rare for an Equity shop. It was founded in 1986, mounting shows at Memorial Hall before moving to its own home in a 100-year-old former Fifth Third Bank branch.
“I love the steep rake [of the seats] and the high ceiling at ETC,” says Theresa Rebeck, a Cincinnati native and New York– based playwright with five Broadway shows to her credit. “Those epic proportions elevate anything you do in there.”
When a former clothing store adjacent to the theater became available in 2009, Budig bought it, sight unseen, for $400,000 and donated it to Ensemble. It houses the scene shop, and vestiges of vintage wallpaper with a belt print still adorn the walls.
In time, more space was acquired so that ETC now occupies 40 percent of the block. Concentrating all administrative and production activity in one place has generated buzz, business, and belief in Over-the-Rhine since well before the neighborhood’s revitalization.
Live theater can be a hard sell in these short-attention-span times. But Meyers has intrepidly—some say indestructibly— guided ETC through changing audience habits as well as a series of crises. There was insolvency in the 1990s, OTR riots in the aughts, the recession of the 2010s, and the fresh hell of a global pandemic in recent years. She constantly deflects praise, insisting credit go to her “amazing” staff, “brilliant” apprentices, and “world-class” actors. But everyone knows there would be no ETC without Meyers—because when she was hired in 1995, the job wasn’t to run Ensemble Theatre; it was to close it.
Meyers grew up with a sister in a multi-generational home in Bridgetown. The D in her moniker is for Deborah. Her dad was a cop. Her grandfather worked at a laundry during the week and at Findlay Market on Sundays, where he was paid in leftover goods. “I grew up thinking we were really rich because we had all this food,” she says.
Meyers was accepted into Yale University for grad school after earning degrees in English and theater at Thomas More University. But without money for tuition, she instead took a job as assistant to Michael Murray, then the producing artistic director of Playhouse in the Park. She was 19.
“He was magnificent,” Meyers recalls. “I watched every move he made.” In her decade at the city’s first and, at the time, only Equity theater, “I did whatever needed doing. I took minutes at board meetings and notes in rehearsals, I put up posters for shows, I wrote thank-you notes to donors. I cut Michael’s grass, babysat his kids, and did his laundry.”
This was where her passion for casting developed. “We were spending all this money for a New York casting director,” she says. “I told Michael, If you make it part of my job, you can save $50,000 a year. He gave me a shot.”
With her growing familiarity with local actors, Meyers, then 24, was tapped to cast a TV movie, The Pride of Jesse Hallam, about an illiterate Kentucky coal miner who moves to Cincinnati. Could Meyers find a disabled teenage girl who could hold her own opposite Johnny Cash? Of course she could. For the wrap party, Johnny and June Carter Cash cooked all the food and then gave the cast and crew a concert. “I thought, This is incredible. How is this possible?”
Meyers moved up to working on the coasts, saying, “I had one foot in New York, one in L.A., and a toe in Cincinnati.” In addition to writing plays, she directed and produced shows in a chain of theaters in Canada.
Then came the telephone call in 1995, not long after Shawshank. Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati was bleeding money.
When Meyers returned to her hometown, she says she grew angry. “Here were [founders] Ruth Sawyer and Murph [Mary Taft] Mahler—generous, caring, considerate, smart women—who bought a building in Over-the-Rhine for $100,000 and put in $3 million to turn it into a theater. They did it because they wanted a professional theater in Cincinnati for local actors, directors, writers, and designers.”
At the time, Playhouse in the Park generally didn’t hire locals. A joke among Cincinnati actors was that they had to go to New York to audition for Playhouse roles.
It didn’t seem to matter, though, how dazzling Ensemble Theatre’s shows were; patrons avoided blighted Over-the-Rhine. “There were drug dealers up and down Vine on every corner,” Meyers recalls. “Every other day somebody was shot.”
The organization, almost $2 million in debt, could not survive, its board of directors concluded. They asked Meyers to “close it with grace.” In her second day on the job, she discovered a dead body near her car in the lot nearest to the theater. A knife was still plunged into his torso.
“Everyone was looking at OTR with despair and not hope,” says Meyers. “It made me furious. I knew it had to turn around. Any neighborhood that essential to Cincinnati’s history is going to be essential to its future.” She was convinced Over-the-Rhine could recapture the vitality she remembered from her childhood, when she and her sister would safely stroll from Findlay Market to Shillito’s on Seventh Street.
Instead of shuttering ETC, she rebooted it. “It wasn’t working because it didn’t have an identity besides being regional,” Meyers says. It needed more ambitious programming, which to her meant more of-the-moment subject matter. It also needed to be more integrated into the neighborhood, not a refuge from it.
Meyers came up with a new mission: Ensemble would produce “new works with a social conscience to enrich and enliven the neighborhood.” In other words, “Where we are is who we are.” This was long before 3CDC started its Vine Street transformation.
“We invited in kids who were hanging out in the streets to do homework or color or get a juice box,” she says. “Word spread they could be there from 3 to 6 in the afternoon. That’s how you build a community. You see what it needs. Instead of only theater, we turned around and focused on OTR and finding ways to support the businesses around us.”
Meyers, well-connected on the national theater scene, pulled strings to get hot plays straight from Broadway. She secured the regional premiere of Side Man, which had won the Tony Award and was still in its original New York run. Edward Albee gave Ensemble the first regional license for his Pulitzer-winning drama Three Tall Women. By the turn of the millennium, the struggling company was starting to thrive.
The cliché is true: What did not kill Ensemble Theatre only made it stronger. “We are a constantly changing population, so I’m trying to put out stories about the change,” says Meyers, singling out recent productions featuring a Black hair salon, a man who lives as a woman during the Nazi era, and, closer to home, Fiona. “Theater lets you get out of your comfort zone for a couple of hours and walk in someone else’s shoes and see the world as they see it. It allows us to think about our fellow citizens as our peers.”
Pipeline (2021) exposed the systemic racism that impacts public schools. Garbologists (September 2024) invited audiences to metaphorically walk in the crud-encrusted shoes of a sanitation worker. (In a stroke of genius, Meyers secured show sponsorship from Rumpke Recycling.) ETC’s annual holiday extravaganza, meanwhile, offered respite with pure entertaining joy and quirky takes on crowd favorites such as Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella.
The next show, I Need That (opening February 8), is quintessential ETC. It’s comedic with a dark underbelly, newly written by a native Cincinnatian (Rebeck), and fits perfectly with the 2024–25 season’s themes of loss, grief, and resilience. The play broke box-office records at the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York City, where it premiered last fall starring Danny DeVito.

Photo courtesy Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati
Perhaps the only problem with having such a beloved force of nature for a leader is the reality that Meyers can’t lead Ensemble Theatre forever. Though there’s zero indication she’s slowing down, there is no succession plan. “I never think about retiring or changing my role,” she says. “I’ll fall over, and they’ll throw me in the dumpster on trash day.”
Her staff is less light-hearted about the prospect. “There is a lot of denial,” says Shannon Rae Lutz, who has worked at ETC for 30 years; her current role is props curator, design assistant, and director of apprentice programming. “We don’t want to think about it. That kind of change is a little frightening.”
A 40th anniversary fund-raising campaign, the company’s most ambitious, aims in part to stabilize Ensemble’s current staff and for the generations to come. Expected to run through March 2026, the $10 million campaign has already secured a $1 million kick-off pledge.
Meyers estimates she spends 70 percent of her time looking for corporate and individual sponsorships for each production and for the organization as a whole. “Most people leave the world with unfinished business, so I’d like to finish as much as I can,” she says. She intends to expand the ETC season from five to six or seven plays, do more “in-between” special events such as table readings, and nurture new works by local writers. Funding can also allow Ensemble to keep ticket prices as low as $30.
An invitation to speak to the Cincinnati Woman’s Club, a century-old philanthropic organization, afforded her an opportunity last summer to network with wealthy members. Christine Dye, Cincinnati’s highest flying actress at the moment, recalls Meyers inviting her along. Always deflecting praise, Meyers wanted to offer up Dye rather than herself as a hometown performing arts success story.
When Dye received the invitation from Meyers on What’s App, she responded, I can’t! I’m in London being chauffeured in a Mercedes-Benz to a private screening a director invited me to. Can you believe this? Who the hell do I think I am?
Without missing a beat, Meyers wrote back, “You deserve this, and more.”
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