Daily Loaf

Jessica Rothert is a charming and exceedingly talented actress, and Bad Dates is a charming and exceedingly insignificant play. As it escorts us through the dating jungle, Theresa Rebeck’s one-woman show has nothing new or important to say about love, sex, men, women, shoes, blouses or any of the other subjects that come up over its 90 minutes. Still, there’s Rothert’s performance to enchant us and keep us from glancing too often at our watches. Here she is trying on clothes, brushing her teeth, crying, laughing and eating a pretzel as she regales us with stories of men who repeatedly turn out not to be keepers. And, wonderful to recount, she never once strikes a wrong note. In fact, Rothert’s character, the Texan-turned-New Yorker Haley Walker, is so completely believable, you’ll want her for a buddy with whom to drink late into the night while recounting your relationship woes. As for dramatic urgency….Who said the theater had to be special, anyway? Read the rest of this entry »

There are two sets of crises in 100 Saints You Should Know, one religious, one sexual. The religious crises are experienced by a priest named Matthew, who’s losing his faith, and a cleaning woman named Theresa, who’s just beginning to gain hers. The sexual crises involve Matthew again – he’s discovering that he’s gay and that he needs physical intimacy – and 16-year-old Garrett, who already knows that he’s gay, but is reluctant to out himself. There are two other important characters — Abby, Theresa’s rule-breaking daughter, and Colleen, Matthew’s dogmatic mother — and then there are the two near-nude dancers who, in Kerry Glamsch’s ambitious staging of the play, punctuate the action with intense slow-motion homoerotic couplings set to music including Gregorian chant.

The ultimate result is mixed: the play is original in its treatment of the ebb and flow of faith, formulaic in its scenes of gay self-actualization, and both spectacular and overly pious — sexually pious! — in its choreography. Still, author Kate Fodor is unafraid to aim for big game (her previous play was about who else, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt), and on several occasions she scores a direct hit. This may not be a totally successful work of theater, but it’s provocative and daring. At the very least, it’ll give you something to talk about. Read the rest of this entry »

Yasmina Reza’s Art has two subjects, one of them serious and worthy of attention, the other slightly embarrassing and perhaps even philistine. The better theme – and the one that gets most of the stage time – is male friendship and the unspoken agreements that sustain it.

The three men in this case are Marc, Serge and Yvan, whose comradeship is threatened by a disagreement over a painting, and who eventually discover what awkward and never-admitted assumptions have bound them together for over a decade. The painting they disagree about – an all-white canvas by a celebrated modernist named Antrios – is the occasion for the second theme: the imaginative bankruptcy of modern art and the pretentiousness of those who claim to admire it.

From the moment that Serge admits he paid 200,000 francs for the monochromatic rectangle, Reza implicitly makes the case that today’s art world is a den of con men and women supported by suckers who wouldn’t know a masterpiece from a mud puddle. This argument is ridiculous. Read the rest of this entry »

Good improv requires a lot more than acting talent. It requires intelligence, a wide-ranging imagination, split-second decision-making and an unfailing instinct for what’s comic in the human condition. Where Gavin Hawk and Ricky Wayne of The Dumb Show (photo, L-R) are concerned, it also means the willingness to appear utterly ridiculous in front of a crowdful of strangers. Whether impersonating Britney Spears trying to make up with Kevin Federline, a sadistic father and his horrified son playing racquetball, or two U.S. Airway pilots overshooting their destination by several hundred miles, Hawk and Wayne repeatedly aim for the dangerous heights – or is it depths? – of vulnerability, absurdity, insanity and just plain silliness. They’re not always successful, but at their best they find more humor in their unscripted hijinks than most actors ever find in the most celebrated of comic texts. If you love to laugh, you ought to give them a look. Read the rest of this entry »

Jobsite Theater’s Night of the Living Dead isn’t even very funny. Insofar as it has a plot, it’s tiresomely repetitive, and the script, by Lori Allen Ohm, isn’t within miles of being the sort of inspired Charles Ludlam-like parody one might have expected. There are a few good moments — a couple of graphically gory shockers, some silly combats, and all the much-too-short scenes involving Jason Vaughan Evans — but in general this is a sloppy, flaccidly directed yawner that’s short on invention and memorable acting. In its 75 minutes, it offers about 30 seconds of real hilarity.

The play begins with Barbara (Kari Goetz) and Johnny (Matthew Lunsford, pictured left), siblings who’ve come to a cemetery in order to place a wreath on their father’s grave. They’re rudely interrupted by a zombie (Evans, pictured right) who struggles with Johnny, leaving Barbara to escape to a house in the vicinity. There she tries to call for help, but her cellphone’s not working, and the blood she sees on her hand seemingly sends her into shock. A rescuer arrives: Ben (Dayton Sinkia), a forward-thinking good guy who helps her fight off more ghouls and then proceeds to board up the visible doors and windows with a few unconvincing planks. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Rudnick’s The New Century starts out incandescent, loses a little effulgence in its second scene, becomes decidedly lackluster in its third, and fizzles out completely in its fourth and fifth. The American Stage “After Hours” production offers two outstanding performances — by Annie Morrison and Matthew McGee — and even during its least interesting moments, there’s always a chance that witty Rudnick will deliver another zinger. But clever jokes aren’t enough to hold a play together, and The New Century comes off finally as a series of unconnected sketches. It’s too bad, because the author has a message to deliver about the need for straight/gay cooperation. As it stands, that message can just barely be heard. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re interested in hearing some superb gospel singing, don’t miss Sharon E. Scott in Just As I Am: The Life, the Times, The Voice of Mahalia Jackson.

But the title is misleading: in fact, Scott’s script leaves out huge chunks of Jackson’s life and times, leaving audiences pretty much uninformed about more than a few important events in the great vocalist’s biography. Not that it matters too much: the attraction here is Scott’s soulful, stirring singing, which would be phenomenon enough even if there were no accompanying play.

With songs like “Lord, Don’t Move That Mountain,” “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands” and “There Will Be Peace In The Valley,” Scott proves once again that she’s an area treasure, a super-talented actor/singer who possesses deep reserves of spiritual honesty, and great charisma to boot. So what if we hear next to nothing about Jackson’s two failed marriages, about most of her encounters with racism, about her movie appearances? Just to hear Scott sing “We Shall Overcome” is reason enough to be glad you saw the show, and “There Is No Color Line Around the Rainbow” speaks volumes about the civil rights struggle. Read the rest of this entry »

Christopher Rutherford (Nicole Jeannine Smith photo)

The Woman in Black is an entertaining, unusually literary ghost drama for the Halloween season, though one that lacks much reason for existing outside its capacity to excite a degree of fear. Beautifully acted by Christopher Rutherford and Glenn Gover, the current Gorilla Theatre production is genuinely spooky — several times spectators shrieked — and pleasingly original. It won’t remind you of anything else you’ve seen.

It features wonderfully discomfiting sound effects, super-serious characters (to raise the level of terror), and a ghost of dreadful countenance with nothing the least bit friendly about her. Skillfully directed by Ami Sallee Corley, Woman has everything but substance — some perspective on reality that might remain with us after the final curtain falls.

I suppose it’s wrong to want more than chills and thrills from a Halloween play, but this drama is so consistently intelligent, a little authentic significance would hardly be out of place. Oh, well. If you’re looking for a spine-tingler more intellectual than ZooBoo, this is your poison. It’s about as nerve-wracking as these things get, and so gore-free that you can bring the (older) kids. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tampa Bay area’s Amnesty International Group (Group 240) is actively looking for new members to help in their campaigns for human rights around the globe and at home.

Hillsborough and Pinellas residents are welcome to come to the group’s meeting on Wednesday, October 14 at the Jan Platt Regional Library, 3910 S. Manhattan Ave. (near the intersection of Manhattan and Euclid), Tampa, from 7 to 8:45 p.m.

Among the Amnesty priorities this year: Read the rest of this entry »

Paula Vogel’s And Baby Makes Seven has all the ingredients for a successful play, and none of the results.

This ultimately tedious exercise has one wonderfully interesting idea – that a lesbian couple has invented a small group of imaginary sons – and then restates it relentlessly without any real development or variation. The three actors in the play – Alison Burns (pictured center), Jessica Rothert (right) and David Jenkins – are talented enough, and Karla Hartley as usual offers vibrant and intelligent staging. But this is a text without real insight, without larger meaning or even suspense, and no collection of artists can make it stageworthy for more than a half hour.

I’m a big fan of Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive, but you’d never know from watching Baby that its author is the same one who gave us precocious Li’l Bit and her deviously abusive Uncle Peck. Read the rest of this entry »

Fences is a character study of a flawed man whose defects aren’t entirely of his own making. Troy Maxson is an African-American garbage collector who spent 15 years in jail for killing a man in a robbery, who afterwards became a star baseball player in the Negro Leagues, and who then married a good woman with whom he settled down to raise a family.

But he’s also a tyrant and a philanderer, a man who doesn’t love his needy son, and who takes on a mistress with whom he has another child.

As one expects in an August Wilson play, society’s culpability in creating such a person is not to be ignored. Wilson makes it clear enough that Maxson’s stifling of his son’s opportunity to play college football is a result of the bitterness he still feels toward white team owners who wouldn’t let him into the major leagues (in the pre-Jackie Robinson days). And he has Maxson himself attempt to explain to his incensed wife Rose that he took a lover because after 18 years “on first base” he desperately needed an experience that could convince him he’d made some sort of personal progress.

Wilson in several of his plays examines the perversions that occur to characters who are prevented from fully expressing their talents, and Troy Maxson is one of these: a gifted, charismatic man to whom white American society has offered next to nothing. As Langston Hughes famously said, a dream deferred can fester or stink — or explode.

In the fine American Stage production of Fences, Maxson, wonderfully played by Evander Duck, Jr. (above, center, with Travus Leroux and Jayne Trinette), is already poisoned by deferred dreams when we first meet him. Read the rest of this entry »

Actor/writer/performance artist Danny Hoch has made it his personal mission to bring an unusual type of character to the live stage. This character usually shows up only in the margins of dramatic literature: he may be a criminal or a drug addict or physically or mentally damaged. He may be a white kid who wishes he were black, a crippled man who wants to join the Air Force, or a poor guy who figures that prison is better than the outside world because in prison he might get experimental drugs for his AIDS.

In his preface to the published edition of Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop, Hoch explains that for most people, the characters of Stoppard, Pinter and company are too unfamiliar to really matter, and that he made it his task to dramatize the people he grew up with in New York. “To put it Brooklyn style: Showboat and Sideshow ain’t don’t got nothin’ to do with my life. I had mad beef with this situation.”

Now actor Curtis Belz (above: photo by James Lennon) is bringing Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop to the Performing Arts Building at HCC Ybor, and it’s a powerful presentation. Playing nine different characters – one of them a woman – Belz skillfully puts the margins at the center, compelling us to find America in places where David Letterman fears to tread: rundown apartments, back alleys, holding cells and physical rehab wards. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the pleasures of being a consistent witness to Bay area theater is watching new stars come into their own on local stages. I still remember the first area performances of Colleen McDonnell, Linda Slade, Jack Holloway and others, and I still savor those moments when I first recognized a talent that would shine in any setting. Some of these actors have stayed and have matured in front of us, others have moved on to work in other cities, but all of them graced us, at least for a time, with stunning performances. Tampa/St. Pete may not be a hub of American theater, but it has its luminaries, and they can make theatergoing thrilling.

Well, now I’ve watched yet another performer blossom. Dahlia Legault first caught my attention in USF’s Bobby and the Chimps and further impressed me in Stageworks’ Shining City several months ago. But in Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa! (also a Stageworks production) she reaches levels of artistry that those two earlier performances barely suggested. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the musical that had to be written. And only Gil Perlroth could be trusted to bring it off.

When Gulfport:The Musical premieres in January, 2010 at the Catherine Hickman Theater as part of the town’s centennial celebration, it will feature the book, music and lyrics of one of the most prolific and successful playwrights in the Tampa Bay area. At age 81, Gil Perlroth (pictured) has written over 20 shows, including the recent hit at the Venue Theatre, Ain’t Retirement Grand?

After the break, read more about Gulfport:The Musical and listen to my interview with Gil Perlroth on Creative Loafing’s ArtsSpeak podcast. Read the rest of this entry »

August Wilson’s best play, Fences, is about Troy Maxson, an African-American rubbish collector whose bitterness and sense of lost opportunities make him a problematic husband and father.

Set in Pittsburgh in 1957, it’s also about a time when new opportunities for black citizens were slowly becoming real, but the indignities of the past were too raw to be forgotten.

As in all Wilson’s plays, the language is poetic, the characters are indelible, and the metaphors — including, in this case, the trumpet carried by Troy’s brain-damaged brother Gabriel — are brilliant. What happens to a dream deferred? Wilson’s answer is riveting.

American Stage, Sept. 25-Oct. 11, 163 Third St. N, St. Petersburg, 727-823-PLAY, www.americanstage.org.

Read more CL’s Fall Arts Preview.

Ami Sallee Corley and Stephen Ray in "Pericles." Rehearsal photo courtesy of David Jenkins.

Pericles is a fitting cap to Jobsite Theater’s tenth season, a noisy, funny, unpredictable rock musical featuring the impressive guitar work of Joe Popp and the splendid performances of seven inspired actors.

Neil Gobioff and Shawn Paonessa’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play makes more sense than Shakespeare does; by turning the Bard’s characters into Mafia thugs, and his locations (Tyre, Tarsus, Pentapolis) into recognizable American locales (Coney Island, the Bronx, Cape Cod), Gobioff and Paonessa have succeeded in domesticating one of the wildest, hardest-to-follow plays in the canon, while still showing remarkable fidelity to the original. Read the rest of this entry »

What a gift John Patrick Shanley gave to middle-aged-and-over actresses when he brought Doubt to the stage. The role of Sister Aloysius is the sort performers dream about: dominating, unpredictable, withering, unwittingly comic, getting by not on glamour but on ugly old self-righteousness, mean-spirited certainty and unflappable overconfidence. Sister Aloysius is a Dirty Harry of a nun, unbothered by fine moral distinctions, and willing to plug any culprit she suspects of malfeasance, sufficient evidence or not. She’s the perfect anti-heroine for our youth-obsessed, politically correct culture, the Shadow figure we’ve all repressed in favor of Miley Cyrus. Sure, she’s a bad-tempered old prune. Nevertheless, she’s quite wonderful. All she’s missing is a pistol and the words “Make my day.”

Still, she does have tricks of her own — and as played by Christine Decker (above) in the fine production at American Stage (which I saw in a preview), she’s willing to use them all to demolish a young priest whom she suspects of sexual misconduct. In case you’ve already seen the film with Meryl Streep as Aloysius, let me assure you that there’s still reason to visit the stage version starring Decker. Read the rest of this entry »

The Doors, by local theater artists Jack Holloway and Joe Winskye, is a not very interesting play on a very interesting subject: the American paranoia about terrorists since 9/11. If a play could be judged solely by its theme, this Hat Trick Theatre production would win lots of prizes for timeliness and good sense. But satisfying plays provide more: suspenseful action, three-dimensional characters, and inventive dialogue, for starters. Even more to the point, successful plays keep sending new information our way every few minutes: new conflicts, dilemmas, encounters, ideas.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Little Dog Laughed is a smart, sophisticated satire about a gay Hollywood actor who wants to come out, but who is pressured by his flamboyant and high-powered lesbian agent to stay in. It’s also about the relationship this actor has with a young New York hustler, and about the woman this hustler has been intermittently sleeping with. Douglas Carter Beane’s play is scathingly original, fearlessly explicit — it includes full male nudity — and about as wise about Hollywood cynicism as anything I’ve come across since I read Theresa Rebeck’s Free Fire Zone. It’s also the occasion for two wonderful performances: Julie Rowe as super-cynical agent Diane, and Nick Horan as ambivalent prostitute Alex.

Read the rest of this entry »

(L to R) Alison Burns, Nadeen Holloway and Heather Krueger

Respect: A Musical Journey of Women (****1/2) is a lot of fun. Thanks to four terrific performers — Alison Burns, Ashley Blake Fisher, Nadeen Holloway and Heather Krueger — it’s a delightful tour of the songs women have been singing for the last century or so, and a welcome reminder that there’s nothing innocent about Top 40 music, nothing that’s not touched by history and social mores.

Created by Vanderbilt professor Dr. Dorothy Marcic, Respect is a funny, rousing and occasionally thrilling medley of about 60 songs from 1901 to the present, featuring hits by everyone from Billie Holiday to Mariah Carey, and favoring melody over meaning so completely that occasionally its sociological intentions get lost in foot-stomping rhythm. Not that it fails as political theater: you couldn’t ask for a more entertaining look at American women’s history during a period that has seen progress beyond most turn-of-the-century feminists’ dreams.

So come one and all: teenagers who don’t know the long struggle behind gender equality, baby boomers who hadn’t realized just how political their radio days had been, and grandparents who simply want another listen to their whole lives’ soundtrack. And don’t just bring your female friends: men need to know this stuff too. If we’re cognizant of each other’s past, we’ll be much less likely to fall back into obsolete patterns. Read the rest of this entry »

Arts on 9th is a new facility in Ybor City, featuring a theater, art gallery, photography studio and shop. It’s a welcome addition to the Bay area scene, which ought to have 20 such spaces. But the first play offered there — Bathhouse: The Musical by Tim Evanicki and Esther Daack — is far from impressive.

Treating gay life as if it had no reality outside the sexual, it’s essentially an evening of soft porn, of real and metaphorical crotch-grabbing with songs titled “Penises are like Snowflakes” and “Clicking for Dick.” The irony is that the four onstage performers — Toph McRae, Jason Crase, Alexander Ferguson and Christopher McCabe — are expert singer/dancers, and a few of the show’s songs feature attractive melodies and thrilling harmonies.

But again and again, the lyrics aren’t much better than what you’d find on a bathroom Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Edwards and Chaz Mena in "Tuesdays with Morrie."

Tuesdays with Morrie is a lovely play about dying and living, about making the most of one’s life and learning the importance of expressing love. In Jeffrey Hatcher’s intelligent adaptation of Mitch Albom’s bestselling book, all the drama in Albom’s story is gently brought to life, and Albom’s message to the planet — you’d better love now, tomorrow is the night — is communicated with only occasional wandering into sentimentality. Much of the success of the American Stage production is due to the wonderful direction of T. Scott Wooten and the superb acting of Michael Edwards as sociology professor Morrie Schwartz, and Chaz Mena as sportswriter and former Brandeis student Mitch. I’d seen Morrie before — several years ago at Sarasota’s Asolo Theatre — but the St. Petersburg version showed me possibilities that only remained latent in the earlier one. It’s true that the play has its limits — its vision of a well-lived life is surprisingly narrow, and it reaches a thematic plateau about halfway through its length which it only surpasses in its very last moments. But still, this is the sort of drama that gets under your skin and challenges you to evaluate not just its characters’ lives but your own. Unless you’re planning on living forever, it wouldn’t hurt to have a look. Read the rest of this entry »

I had the pleasure of attending the “Theatre 620: Sweets and Shorts” fundraiser Monday night at the gorgeous new American Stage site on 3rd Ave. N. in St. Petersburg. Over 100 people showed up for this Studio@620 event, drank and ate to the accompaniment of Paul Wilborn on piano and Eugenie Bondurant on vocals. I had a good talk with actor Eric Davis about his search for a permanent space for the freeFall Theatre Company, and I was happy to chat with St. Pete poet laureate and CL columnist Peter Meinke and his artist wife Jeanne. Serving drinks was American Stage jack-of-all-trades Andy Orrell, and moving graciously from guest to guest was Studio artistic director and co-founder Bob Devin Jones. After a half hour, we all moved in to the theater proper, where 12 acts presented — among other things — excerpts from Lane DeGregory’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story “The Girl in the Window,” presented in Living Newspaper style, and scenes from Bill Maxwell and Beverly Coyle’s play Parallel Lives and Mark Medoff’s The Same Life Over. Artistic director Jones introduced the readings and dramatizations, and actors included Jones himself, Sharon Scott, Bonnie Agan, Robin O’Dell and Wilborn. Poet Enid Shomer read from her own work, and guitarist Nick White accompanied it all with lovely acoustic music. A quick overview of the audience reminded me of how much good Jones has brought to area arts with his Studio, and how willing the Bay area is to welcome new theaters. It was a delightful evening: and it suggests once again that Tampa/St.Pete has huge potential for growth in the arts.

(times and ticket price below)

David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole is a carefully observed, lovingly detailed study of the effect of a child’s death on his family and others near to him. If the subject sounds too somber to make an enjoyable drama, let me assure you that the current Jobsite Theater production is poignantly engaging.

Compassionately directed by Paul Potenza, it introduces us to four of the infant’s family members – his parents, aunt and grandmother – as well to the teenaged driver who hit and killed him while swerving to avoid his dog. All these persons have been shattered by the death of four-year-old Danny, though his mother Becca is having the hardest time recovering.

Everything reminds her of her lost son, and as the play progresses she tries to rid herself of all objects that bring him, painfully, to mind: his clothes, his toys, his dog, even her own house. Opposing her to a degree is her husband Howie, who positively wants the reminders, and who’s ready, eight months after the tragedy, to resume something like a normal existence. Read the rest of this entry »

Gorilla's Aubrey Hampton with four of this year's Young Dramatists.

The Tampa Bay area needs more playwrights. In the region of West Central Florida there are only 41 members of the Dramatists Guild — the national playwrights’ professional association — and of those 41, fewer than ten were sufficiently interested to come to Guild meetings in St. Pete last March, April and May. Where are the playwrights? Biding their time?

Maybe Gorilla Theatre can help. For the ninth year, this organization is hosting the Young Dramatists’ Project, a festival devoted to the best writing of local high school and middle school students. I attended last Sunday not to review the show, but to discover what our youngest playwrights might have to offer the area. Is there imaginative, innovative work coming from these teens? Might they eventually infuse the region with new talent?

Yes and yes. The first of the five plays that made it to the Gorilla stage this year uses instant messaging to tell us the story of a doomed love affair. Amanda Buck’s Sweet Nothings is about XXX2593 (Jamaica Reddick) and YYY4168 (Adom McRae), schoolmates who become sweethearts after she shows up as new girl at his high school. Buck has us watching on a large screen as the two lovers write each other over a period of months, and intersperses their writing with glimpses of their daily lives. Directed by David O’Hara, the play graphically demonstrates that even the most digital behavior can ingeniously be made theatrical. And even in the era of IM, love is still maddening.

Next on the lineup is Sam French’s This One Night in the Warehouse, a Pinteresque mindgame which sees two men (Chris Jackson and Curtis Belz) thrown into a locked room containing a gun with one bullet. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Leib

In a move that could significantly enhance the visibility of Tampa Bay area playwrights, a group of writers met Tuesday night at St. Petersburg’s Studio@620 with a representative of the nationally based Dramatists Guild as well as representatives from Tampa’s Stageworks and Sarasota’s Florida Studio Theatre. The meeting was organized by Bradenton playwright Jack Gilhooley and was limited to members of the Guild in the area from Clearwater south to Venice.

Ten persons, including several whose work has been produced in New York and locally,  talked with DG representative Rob Anderson of Orlando about starting a website, organizing play readings, publicizing local playwrights and stimulating local theaters to be more accepting of locally produced work. Following a welcome from the Studio’s artistic director, Bob Devin Jones, the playwrights spoke of the difficulty of getting produced locally and expressed a desire to emulate Miami-area DG members who have recently had success in making themselves more prominent.

A common theme in the discussion was the seeming refusal of local theaters, from St. Pete’s American Stage to Sarasota’s Asolo Rep, to promote and produce the work of their areas’ writers. Read the rest of this entry »

Susan Hussey with her husband, Aubrey Hampton.

I’ve just found out that Susan Hussey, co-artistic director of Gorilla Theatre, has succumbed to cancer after a brave struggle. Susan was a playwright as well as a producer, and her work confronted issues of social and national significance. She was also one of the kindest persons in the theater, here or anywhere. I never heard her say a negative word about anyone – not another theater person, another writer or critic – and she brought dignity to every project she participated in.

Creative Loafing sends its warmest condolences to her husband Aubrey Hampton and to their son Trevor. Susan was a unique personality. Her gentleness, her thoughtfulness and her talent will be sorely missed.

On Sunday, John Fleming’s article accusing me of a conflict of interest was published in the St. Pete Times. I’ve already responded to these charges in earlier blogs. But Sunday’s article upped the ante: John said that because my review of Tommy J and Sally came out in Creative Loafing a week before my review of Jobsite Theater’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, I could be suspected of showing favoritism to the Studio at the expense of Jobsite. This is nonsense. The fact is that Tommy J was only running for two weekends while Picasso was running for three, and therefore I had to get the Studio review published first if I were to review the show at all. Reason: For over a decade, Creative Loafing’s policy has been only to publish reviews of shows that are still running when the review comes out. If I’d waited a week, the show would have closed before my review appeared — meaning no review at all. I was aware that Studio artistic director Bob Devin Jones had worked closely with author Mark Medoff on the play in the Washington D.C. area, and that Medoff was coming to St. Petersburg for the premiere. The production sounded important and I didn’t want to miss a chance to weigh in on it. So I reviewed it first, and the next week reviewed the Jobsite show.

But as long as John Fleming has put my treatment of the Studio out there as possible evidence of favoritism, let’s look at the two plays that premiered there before Tommy J . In early December, the Studio offered Circumference of a Squirrel — and I gave 90 percent of my column that week (Dec. 10-17) to Six Degrees of Separation at Gorillla Theatre, and a total of one paragraph at the end of the column to Circumference. Is this favoritism? The Studio show before that one was Terrible Jim Fitch (November 6-7). But because that was only running for one weekend, I didn’t review it, preview it, or even mention it in my column at all. Is that favoritism? I only wish that John, in his phone conversation with me about the article he was contemplating, had asked me about the Tommy J review. Then he might have refrained from suggesting, to all the thousands of SPTimes readers that my integrity had been compromised. I’ve been theater critic for Creative Loafing for more than ten years, and this is the first time that anyone has suggested that my opinions have been influenced by any sort of favoritism for any sort of reason. I don’t like it and I’m not going to sit back quietly while it happens.

So now we’re less than a week away from the staged reading of my play A RIVER IN THE DESERT at Gorilla Theatre and I get an e-mail from John Fleming, arts critic for the St. Petersburg Times. What he wants to know is, isn’t it a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of such a conflict, for me to have a reading at a theater that I also review? And further, isn’t this also the case with the full production of my play ART PEOPLE at The Studio at 620 later in the spring? Am I perhaps being unethical? Please comment. I call him immediately and leave a message on his voice mail. Then, this morning, he calls me at home and asks for a response. I tell him this: During the ten years that I’ve been theater critic for Creative Loafing, I’ve made it a policy never to ask a local theater to produce one of my plays. I’ve always felt that that would be putting an intolerable pressure on the theater’s artistic director, who might worry that I would review his theater’s work negatively if he/she didn’t produce my work. But last year, Bob Devin Jones of The Studio@620 asked me to be one of the writers interviewed in the Studio’s writers series. Read the rest of this entry »

A rare opportunity for Tampa Bay area playwrights to work with a nationally acclaimed dramatist will occur this Saturday at The Studio at 620 in St. Petersburg. Playwright Mark Medoff, celebrated for When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder and Children of a Lesser God, will be in town for the premiere of Tommy J and Sally (at the Studio), and he’s agreed to run a free workshop there from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday the 10th of January. There’ll even be food. For more information, call the Studio at 727-895-6620.  Tommy J and Sally runs Jan. 8-10 and 15-18.

With only two weeks before the staged reading of my play A River in the Desert at Gorilla Theatre, we’ve had to make some quick personnel shifts. First Michael O. Smith, who’d agreed to play one of the two leads, had to pull out because he had too many other commitments. We asked another fine actor, Bob Heitman, to take the role and he graciously accepted. Then Chris Rutherford, who had agreed to play the other lead, also had to drop out because of prior engagements, including one that occurred on the same night as the reading. We’re still in the process of finding another actor. Now I should say that these sorts of problems are not at all unusual in the theater. In the years that I’ve been writing plays I’ve seen a lead actress break her foot the night before opening, a hired press agent fail to bring any press to a NY show, a director tell actors that he “couldn’t put his finger on” the problems that were leading these actors literally to beg for help, and several other sorts of mishaps too distressing to recount. And I’ve learned that I just have to accept them and move forward as quickly and confidently as possible. I have faith that River’s director, Jim Rayfield, will work swiftly to solve whatever problems come up, and I’m willing to provide any help when needed. Hopefully, when the reading premieres January 15, we’ll have the right cast and a sharp audience. Read the rest of this entry »

In addition to being Creative Loafing’s theater critic, I’m also a playwright (my first professional U.S. production was in 1980 at the American Repertory Theatre), and I’m about to embark on one of those experiences that makes playwriting so pleasing and nerve-wracking at the same time: an early exposure of a new play to an actual audience. In future posts, I’ll talk about the rehearsal process and the play itself, what drove me to write it and what sort of response it provokes. For the moment, I’ll talk about the chapter of the adventure I’ve just completed: the NY reading-that-wasn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

A late-night run of The Vagina Monologues as a boost for a theater facing hard times? Doesn’t sound likely, especially in Tampa Bay, but that’s what happened at American Stage. The company staged the Eve Ensler play as part of its After Hours series; according to Artistic Director Todd Olson, almost 1,600 people came to see the show, each paying an average of $10 per ticket (the series is pay-what-you-can). On three nights, there were so many would-be spectators, people had to be turned away, and on average the show brought in 65 audience members per performance. Local celebrities took turns as guest monologists throughout the run, among them CL Publisher Sharry Smith and Events Editor Leilani Polk.
“We knew going into this year that we had to have our main asset, which is our stage, work for us more if we were going to counter all of these cuts that we were getting from various places. And that’s how the After Hours series was born, out of necessity,” Olson told me… Read the rest of this entry »

Top Bay area actor Brian Shea is going to be back on the boards after a year-and-a-half hiatus. Shea, who has three times won CL’s Best of the Bay award will be appearing in The Santaland Diaries, After Hours at American Stage. The show will run December 2 – 28, with showtimes at 10:30 p.m. Tuesdays to Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays. Shea hasn’t been on stage since October 2007, when he had a small part in American Stage’s Othello. Congratulations to American Stage artistic director Todd Olson for rescuing one of the area’s finest actors from an undeserved oblivion.

And here’s word on the new theater season about to begin at Bob Devin Jones’ Studio@620. (The Wild Party, which played at the Studio a few weeks ago, was a freeFall, not a Studio production.) First play on the schedule (Nov. 6-7) is James Leo Herlihy’s Terrible Jim Fitch, about a violent small-time crook who tries to explain himself to the girl hustler he’s just brutalized. Appearing in the play are Tom Stovall and Hersha Parady.  Then (Dec. 4-14) the Studio offers John Walch’s Circumference of a Squirrel, performed by Gavin Hawk. The one-man show is about Chester, an odd rodentophobe who recalls how his father’s irrational hatred of squirrels ultimately affected every aspect of his, and his son’s, lives. With the Studio’s theater series, combined with American Stage’s new After Hours program and the recent appearance of freeFall, there’s a small surge in Bay area theater underway. Considering the vastness of the Bay area metropolis, it’s surely about time.

Tampa’s Jobsite Theater has just announced a new Monday night play-reading series that may lead to at least one mainstage production each year. According to Jobsite artistic director David Jenkins, ensemble member Lori Shannon expressed an interest in running such a series – and he handed her about 40 scripts that he’d received from all over the U.S. (he gets about 400 scripts a year). Shannon read through the collection and chose four promising plays: The Ballad of Johnny 5 Star by David Hauptschein and David Vlcek (reading Nov. 10), Two Gentlemen of Corona by Jim Geoghan (reading Jan. 19, 2009), Magenta Sunsets and Brown Silk by P.J. Gibson (reading Feb. 23), and Hugging the Shoulder by Jerrod Bogard (reading April 6). Jenkins says that the authors may not necessarily attend the readings – there’s no money available to pay their way – but Hauptschen and Vlcek have said they’ll come to Tampa from Chicago anyway. In any case, the majority of the Jobsite board of directors will be present at each reading in order to determine whether the play should move on to the mainstage. Admission for the public will be $5 (free to season ticket holders). Readings are at 7:30 p.m.

Congratulations to Jobsite as it takes one further step toward becoming an important regional theater power.

Meanwhile…Gorilla Theatre has announced which shows it’ll have to cancel or postpone because of the Fire Marshall’s insistence that an additional exit and a firewall be built. Bill Leavengood’s staged reading of Charley and Emma – about Charles Darwin and his wife - won’t take place till November, and the full production of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest – about the overthrown of communism in Romania – is being cancelled. So Gorilla’s next full show will be John Guare’s fine play Six Degrees of Separation, opening Dec. 4. It’s not too early to buy tickets, though: call 813-879-2914.

The premiere of freeFAll Theatre Company’s The Wild Party at The Studio@620 is unprecedented in that 13 of the show’s 15 actors are members of the Actors’ Equity union. Usually – though not always – Equity actors are those with more experience and, arguably, more talent. But most smaller theaters can’t afford the minimum salaries that Equity demands for its artists. So it’s common to find one or two Equity actors in the smaller theaters, while the rest are non-union. Outside of Broadway tours, it’s unusual to find even six or seven Equity actors in a show. (For that matter, it’s rare these days to find 15 actors of any sort in a show: much easier on any budget are the six-or-fewer-actors shows that you find so often on national stages.)

I asked freeFAll’s artistic director, Eric Davis, a fine actor himself, how he was able to afford so many union actors. Read the rest of this entry »