Daily Loaf

Zombies are always hungry — good thing they aren’t real.  Metropolitan Ministries have hungry families and their need is real, so the cast of Jobsite Theater’s Night of the Living Dead is teaming up to help!

All jokes aside (and I can’t take credit for that headline, that’s the work of our resident designer Brian Smallheer), hunger is serious business. For over 35 years, Metropolitan Ministries has helped over 150 families a day get GEDs, find employment and overcome homelessness. Their Backpacks of Hope program helps put the tools kids need in their hands to be successful students. At the holidays they provide food and toys for thousands and thousands of area families.

If you’ve spent much time in Tampa during the holidays, you’ve no doubt seen the large tent on Florida Avenue not that far north of downtown. My wife and I have personally contributed in some fashion every year, and it’s impossible not to be moved by the holiday spirit when you stop in to drop things off.

This year, I have read over and over again how many organizations like MetMin across the country are hurting far worse going into the holiday season than ever before.  The economy is still down, unemployment is still up. All non-profits are taking a hit in this economy. Even Jobsite has had some stressful moments. But not with this show, so let’s face it, when it comes to a hungry actor or a hungry family — the hungry family wins every time.  Metropolitan Ministries is facing a perfect storm: Growing need and diminishing contributions.  Over 8,000 families will need assistance this holiday season, from food to warm clothing, shelter to toys from Santa. Read the rest of this entry »

Last December, just a few months into Jobsite’s 10th anniversary season, I wrote this blog for Creative Loafing about lessons learned trying to run a theater for an entire decade.

We’re now just a few days away from the end of this 10th season, and I’ve had time for further reflection.

Left to right: Amy Gray, Chris Perez, Ami Sallee Corley, Spencer Meyers, Katie Castonguay, Stephen Ray and Jason Vaughan Evans in "Pericles." Photo by Brian Smallheer.

We finish the final show of our season, a rousing and hilarious punk rock mob reimagining of the Pericles story, with a video tribute to 10 awesome years in Tampa Bay.  From the genesis of the company, represented by a photo of five awkward and rebellious 20-somethings on the loading dock of USF’s Theater I, cycling through all of our productions and major milestones, to a staged promotional shot of our dead-sexy board in one of the Carol Morsani Hall dressing rooms, photographed by Steve Widoff.

It moves me every night.  Oh, yeah, I’ve watched every single performance of Pericles — from lights up to lights down — something I’ve never done before. Read the rest of this entry »

It was maybe the first impacting death to reach me first via Twitter: Augusto Boal died at the age of 78 Friday from respiratory failure after a long battle with leukemia.

I was immediately transported back in time to the first time I’d studied the theater legend in undergrad at USF — I’m pretty sure it was during a course taught by Nancy Cole called something to the effect of The Theater of Post-Cultural Pluralism. I’d go a lot more in-depth the next year in Dr. Pat Finelli’s Senior Colloqium class (perhaps the best class I had as an undergrad theater student). By the time I’d moved on to UF for grad school, Boal would be shoulder to shoulder in my theatrical Mount Rushmore, joining Dario Fo, Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook.

Two of Boal’s books — Theater of the Oppressed and Games for Actors and Non-Actors — still hold special spots on my bookshelf. What was fresh and exciting about Augusto Boal to me as a student in the mid-’90s (he developed his methods in the ’50s and ’60s) was that he worked lifelong to completely demysitify the form, worked tirelessly to put art and power into the hands of the common citizen and worked to use the form as a tool for change.

He worked with professionals, he worked with farmers — give him bodies and he’d create. Some of his work laid the foundation for what we’d today call drama therapy (which he called Forum Theater), where “spect-actors” would work through scenarios of oppression toward change. Boal’s methods encourage an actual dialogue with the audience as opposed to simple one-sided conversation. Theater was to be an active relationship.  He created and taught others how to create theater ripped from local news or based on current or proposed legislation. He created what was called “Invisible Theater” that could spring up anywhere and where those witnessing wouldn’t be clued in that it was performance.

His work was regarded as dangerous — the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from the ’60s to the ’80s detained, arrested, jailed and tortured Boal before finally exiling him to Argentina.  He returned home in the late ’80s after that regime’s collapse. Read the rest of this entry »

The sexier technical parts of this show – a cute girl covered in gore wielding two handguns, a blood-soaked guy clutching a dead cat prop, the gunfights, the special effects rigs that shoot blood at a rate of 80psi – have been chronicled here, on the Jobsite blog and in a feature story in the St. Pete Times.

Still, there are loads of hours spent every night on making all the behind-the-scenes preparations and even more hours spent cleaning and resetting everything after the show. This work is not so much magic as it is just plain ol’ elbow grease.

I may be in the directors chair, but with so much to do and such a solid tech crew taking care of things, I recognize how little I know about how some things work or the time that goes into making it happen nightly.  I’m around, but usually just feel in the way during setup and breakdown.  So, I decided to ask everyone just exactly how their night goes whenever they come to the theater. They’re surely not getting paid enough for all of this, the least they can get is proper credit.

If you see the show, the first thing you’ll notice afterwards is the stage manager (Jaime Giangrande-Holcom) and the two ASMs (David Valdez and Katie Grey) scurry out with buckets of warm water, mops, giant squeegees and lots and lots of rags as the audience is still exiting the theater. Time is of the essence – every minute that blood sits out, the harder it gets to clean.  Large plastic bags are brought out and maimed bodies are loaded up into them like a really weird crime scene. The set starts getting scrubbed from top to bottom and all the blood is eventually worked down into a trough, and then from trough into a bucket, where it’s then disposed.  Bits of ‘entrails’ and spent shell casings are picked out as they go for recycling or reusing. As the water activates the baby detergent in the blood (primarily Karo syrup with chocolate syrup, food coloring and Chris Holcom’s “secret ingredient”) the whole theater starts to get an odd sorta-sweet, sorta-nursery smell to it. “Smells like chocolate baby,” so says Katie. Read the rest of this entry »

We at Jobsite Theater have been collecting quotes sent to us via email or Twitter or what-have-you since Wednesdays preview production.  We’ve also culled a few soundbites from bloggers who’ve attended over this opening weekend.

The best quote though came from a bartender friend who saw the show Sunday afternoon who sent a text message late last night, as my wife and I sat on the couch watching a DVRed episode of The Dog Whisperer.

i loved your show more than pussy

Wow.  Immediately I asked the girl to text him back and ask if I could use it.  He didn’t have a problem with it (It was Jeff Diamond, New World Brewery). Thinking later on it, I REALLY wanted to use the quote but wondered if I could really get away with it officially in our online materials.  That quote actually screams to go into a print ad, which I know no paper would run (well, CL might …). Read the rest of this entry »

As a director and producer, I’m not typically easily rattled.

Jobsite Theater tends to pick material that we’re confident we can do well and that will still push us, our artists and our audience just enough to make it all worthwhile.  As a director I really only go for work that speaks to me on some internal level.  It doesn’t have to be all deep and shit, or something that has to change the world, but I certainly have my sensibilities and predilections. As a producer I’m a bit more conservative.
Every so often, though, a play comes along that everyone can see from a mile away will be a sick challenge, but one that would pay such dividends if it was pulled off well.  As a working collective, sometimes the intense discussion will in the end push us away from such work, or at a minimum hold us off for a year or so until we’re perhaps better prepared to handle it.

Kari Goetz caught this on her iPhone in rehearsal

Right now we are very literally knee-deep in one of those shows that sparked a lot of debate within the company – The Lieutenant of Inishmore.  It thrills me endlessly and makes me wanna poop my pants a little all at the same time.

Read the rest of this entry »

The highest-attended play in American Stage history.

There’s a lot being made about the state of professional theater in America these days.  You see theater closings almost daily, arts organization bailout packages are a hot topic, calls are being made for President Obama to create a Secretary of the Arts, layoffs are ubiquitous and now even the Kennedy Center is pitching in to provide support for arts organizations that may not make it another year.

Our industry is by no means recession-proof, and one that appears to be in as much trouble as the rest of the country. Yet, somehow, most of the professional theaters in the Tampa Bay area seem to be amidst their best seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Jobsite Theater officially turned 10 years old last month, which we celebrated with Jobsite’s Rockin’ 10^th Birthday Party at New World Brewery.

The anniversary got me thinking.

At the very beginning, this company was an experiment I was willing to go along with for a year. Considering my initial move back to Tampa was supposed to be to get my head straight after too many years of continuous schooling, it didn’t seem such a heavy commitment. The end of that year saw Jobsite having its greatest success to date in our original mounting of The History of the Devil, it saw the door fly wide open for us to work regularly at TBPAC, donors and sponsors started falling into place and on a personal front I’d begun a relationship with a pretty cool chick who actually put up with me and wasn’t batshit crazy.

It’s been year to year since. How are we doing? Still moving forward? Am I settling? The end of the year analysis has always pointed to things being in good, if not always magically fantastic, shape.

I still consider myself lucky to be here at all, a blue-collar kid from Jacksonville whose cultural upbringing consisted of funny car races, fish fries and turkey shoots. Honored that this thing has become something durable, dependable and necessary. Blessed to have so many people on both sides of the curtain who care enough to give, collaborate and make time to spend with us.

So – what have I learned in 10 years? Let me see if I can make a list. 10 for 10.

Read the rest of this entry »