Having run the state’s successful medical-marijuana campaign, Jonathan Leavitt has found a new calling – theater.
Leavitt has now written, and will be directing, a show called “An Evening at Dave’s Sauna,” based on “a legendary Maine hotspot,” leather thongs, straps and jock-style harnesses included!
The play, which has experimented at small venues, is slated to debut in full production this May at Stevens Square Theater in Portland.
The show is based on some of the sauna’s regular customers, such as “Dave and Nancy – once had sex in a Walmart parking lot,” and “Masshole who once drove from Saugus, Massachusetts all the way to the sauna in South Paris, Maine without wearing pants.”
Oh, and “Trailer Park Queen, who raised five children, worked full time at Kmart, and drank Allen’s Coffee Brandy for breakfast for over twenty years.”
“A cult musical about a weird place in Maine” got its start in 2019 when, Leavitt says, “a ridiculous little song lyric got stuck in my head: ‘I’m Just a Jewish Refugee’
“What began as a bizarre earworm quickly snowballed into a full-blown musical obsession,” he recalls.
Within two months he had “cranked out thirteen original songs, compiled them into a songbook, and was halfway through plotting a full musical script.
“Fueled by cannabis and creative mania,” Leavitt reached out in vain to several Portland theater companies for support.
In fits and starts, now finally comes “Dave’s Sauna,” about which Leavitt has also written a book talking about memories of the place.
The sauna was the brainchild of Dave Graiver, a Jewish refugee and hippie outcast from Massachusetts who in 1966 opened an old-fashioned, wood-fired sauna in South Paris, Maine.
The sauna inspired the book and the play about a place Leavitt says for 30 years “broke a lot of laws and hearts.”
Leavitt, now a married father with two kids, is the former executive director of the successful Maine Marijuana Policy Initiative, which helped loosen the state’s medical-marijuana rules.
He wrote the 2009 ballot question and ran the campaign that created the distribution system for medical marijuana in Maine, later creating the state’s first trade association to advocate for small-scale growers throughout the state.
Leavitt also organized the annual Maine Fungi Fest, which ran from 2022 to 2025 and is now looking for a 2026 venue.
