You say there’s a recession and theatres across the nation are redoubling their efforts to keep their heads above water? Take another look—at the renaissance currently underway in Florida’s Tampa Bay Area, where both vintage and newly minted companies are expanding, producing top-tier work and playing to an audience base that’s both faithful and plenteous.
Look especially at freeFall Theatre Company, which moved onto its new $1.5-million St. Petersburg property in January of this year, and has already offered well-received productions there of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Miss Julie and Man of La Mancha. FreeFall plans to eventually host a resident company, present works on three stages (one outdoors) and operate a lively education department.
When you’re through marveling, drive a few miles east to American Stage, the 34-year-old theatre company that moved three years ago into a $4-million state-of-the-art facility in downtown St. Pete, and where this season’s shows include the regional premiere of August: Osage County, Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband and Seven Guitars, the latest in an annual tradition of plays by August Wilson. Now get back into your car, drive over the Howard Frankland Bridge and pay a visit to Tampa’s Channel District, where 29-year-old Stageworks Theatre has, just this past August, moved into an impressive new home donated by a local developer, and where the new season includes Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries, Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother and David Hare’s The Blue Room.
Still up for more? Check out the exceedingly popular Jobsite Theater at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts, or the Gorilla Theatre in the Drew Park area, or Studio@620 (in St. Pete again) or the tiny Silver Meteor Gallery in historic Ybor City, where you might have seen dramas as impactful as Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs (in a production that one critic described as Spring Awakening on amphetamines) or Neil LaBute’s Bash. And while you pause over a Cuban sandwich in one of Ybor’s storefront restaurants, tally up all the new companies that have appeared within shouting distance in just the past two years: A Simple Theatre (which opened with a taut, tense version of Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden), Tampa Repertory Theatre (Euripides’ Alcestis), St. Petersburg Shakespeare Company (Hamlet), Revolve Theatre Company (Caryl Churchill’s Far Away) and New American Theater (Pump Boys and Dinettes).
Got the picture? Theatres and theatregoing are proliferating in the Bay Area. And local residents might say: It’s about time. With an estimated population of some four million, the Tampa Bay region has long been underserved by legitimate venues. Not that there weren’t homes for Broadway tours and symphony orchestras. The local behemoth has for many years been the four-theatre Straz Center (formerly the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center), run by the cosmopolitan impresario Judith Lisi. Under Lisi’s expert guidance, the Straz, with a current annual budget of $31 million, welcomed more than 600,000 patrons last season—not a surprising number, perhaps, at what is the largest performing arts complex south of D.C.’s Kennedy Center. And there are two other sizable houses in the area—the Mahaffey Theater in St. Pete, and Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater—where area residents have typically gone to see Billy Elliot or the hundredth reprise of Les Miz.
If you were interested, on the other hand, in the more recent plays originating Off-Broadway or in the nation’s regional theatres, Bay Area venues over the last decade-and-a-half didn’t offer much to satisfy you. Many celebrated plays never made it—or they arrived like light from a distant star, long years after the fact. Aside from a few dependable houses, theatres on both sides of Tampa Bay spent most of those years in a funk.
Now that’s changing. Leading the charge is freeFall, helmed by artistic director Eric Davis and managing director Kevin Lane, partners in life as well as in theatre. “I want us to be part of the local conversation and I want us to be part of the national conversation,” declares Davis, who’s also a prodigiously talented actor. Davis, who directed all of freeFall’s initial shows, says his model for the theatre is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival of Ashland, to which he often travelled from his first home in Reno, Nev. “It’s always been the place that I’ve held up as the ideal of what a theatre can become,” he avows. Among his inspirations are “their resident company and their rep situation and the number of jobs that they create.” Davis imagines that freeFall—which has a modest $700,000 budget for the coming season—will eventually host a resident company on a yearly salary and will offer shows in repertory.
Those shows will appear on a campus that covers an entire three-acre city block, and which Lane and his mother purchased so that freeFall (which rents its spaces) could fulfill Davis’s vision. On that campus are three buildings formerly owned by a Christian Science church: a classroom (in which Meisner technique expert Larry Silverberg is already teaching); a completely renovated, flexible studio space that seats 125–160; and a larger space awaiting renovation that will feature 200 seats in a fixed configuration facing a thrust stage. There are also some attractively grassy grounds for wandering between acts, a courtyard and 160 parking spaces. The area feels welcoming, uncrowded, thinkably human. No other theatre in the Bay Area has facilities so expansive and full of potential.
FreeFall has already proved its worth with some top-notch productions. The company made its away-from-home debut in 2008 at Studio@620 with a dazzling, aggressive production of Michael John LaChiusa’s The Wild Party. For Miss Julie, in the new space, Davis placed Strindberg’s characters in the 1920s, and Greg Bierce created a set that precisely mirrored the intricate design of an onstage birdcage. As Julie, Geneva Rae was a sadomasochistic sensualist, deeply attracted to valet Jean but too young and inexperienced to make sense of their liaison once it was consummated. Shakespeare’s Midsummer, by contrast, was a postmodern feast, with costumes from all eras, the splendid Giles Davies as a savage, dangerous Puck (long hair pouring down his naked back), and the hilarious Matthew McGee as a tenderly clueless Bottom, whose toy-like ass ears would have charmed an infant. Man of La Mancha was staged, like Wild Party, with the audience seated in the midst of the action, and Steven Patterson was an ashen-faced, shell-shocked Don Quixote whom Kierkegaard could have appreciated. Even Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs, though lacking any sort of relevance, was pugnaciously ambitious—audiences and critics were thrilled to witness Becca McCoy’s performance as the sexually voracious Amazon queen Virilla, decked out in a cast-iron bra.
Impressive as it is, freeFall is hardly the whole story in this regional renaissance. The sparkling new digs of two established theatres have added a special energy to their productions. American Stage—which, prior to freeFall’s arrival, was the most prominent regional theatre in the area—moved into its new building in June 2008, and has since seen subscriptions and single-ticket sales rise in defiance of the recession. Variety is this theatre’s programming philosophy: Last year, it offered a scorching three-hour production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as well as an easygoing Barefoot in the Park, a deeply sincere Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and an entirely silly Mystery of Irma Vep. “Balance is the magic word,” says Todd Olson, the theatre’s producing artistic director. “I like it when an audience can come in and have a really different experience every time. Sometimes I’ve talked about American Stage as being Tampa Bay’s Off-Broadway series—a place where you can always see such a variety of things.” The theatre also brings in crowds with improv, late-night cabarets and a staged reading series called “Hot Off the Press.” (Full disclosure: My play An Angel from Auschwitz recently recieved a reading.) Olson is conscious that the theatre boom in the Bay Area is counterintuitive: “Somehow this part of Florida is able to buck some national trends,” he says, without offering an explanation.
At the advanced age of 29, Anna Brennen’s Stageworks is hardly a youngster. But after having existed in 17 different temporary lodgings over the years, the theatre finally moved into a home of its own this past August. That home in Tampa’s rising Channel District is in a 14-story, mixed-use building that also houses restaurants, offices and more than 200 condominiums. The theatre space—8,000 square feet on two floors—was donated to Stageworks by developer Ken Stoltenberg, who was looking for an arts facility to anchor his new building, but with the proviso that the theatre raise the sum for equipping it. Several years and $1.2 million later, Stageworks inaugurated its new 99-seat theatre with the sentimental David Friedman cabaret Listen to My Heart, which played to sellout crowds.
Cabaret is an exception for Stageworks; the theatre more frequently produces non-musical works celebrating multiculturalism, such as last season’s God of Isaac (with its Jewish theme), A Lesson Before Dying (African-American theme), MOMologues (feminist theme) and As Bees in Honey Drown (gay theme). “My key phrase is ‘challenging the thresholds of intolerance and insensitivity,’” says Brennen. “We do work that addresses the issues of the disenfranchised.” Her new season in the Channel District may not fit that definition to a T (only To Kill a Mockingbird seems pertinent), but Brennen is a tenacious presence, as is versatile associate artistic director Karla Hartley. Stageworks’s future seems assured.
Other healthy venues in the Tampa Bay Area include Bob Devin Jones’s multifaceted Studio@620 and David Jenkins’s daring Jobsite Theater. Bridget Bean’s Gorilla Theatre is fighting to survive after the death of its founder, Aubrey Hampton. Among the five new companies on the scene, C. David Frankel’s Tampa Repertory opened this summer with a rather crude Alcestis, but its next offering, A Streetcar Named Desire, promises a strong cast; Brian Becker’s New American Theater first promoted itself as a venue for musicals but has since offered local resident Natalie Symons’s charming epistolary play Lark Eden; Gavin Hawk’s A Simple Theatre was conceived as a summer house, along the lines of the excellent Banyan Theatre in Sarasota. Then there is St. Petersburg Shakespeare, which is forging ahead in spite of shaky first steps (it was born with a misguided, creaky Hamlet); this coming season it will tackle Love’s Labour’s Lost.
So why, when theatres in most locations are tightening their belts, are these new venues thriving in the Tampa Bay Area? According to avid theatregoer Paul Wilborn, executive director of the Palladium (which hosts music, opera and occasional theatre productions in St. Petersburg), “We’ve become an area that’s attracted a lot of talent. We’ve got a wealth of folks, and they’ve got to find some means of expression.” What about the recession? “Maybe people are tired of being pessimistic. I think despite the economy, they’re ready to do something.”
What they’re doing, it seems—at least in this swath of the Sunshine State—is betting on live theatre.
Mark E. Leib, a playwright, has been a critic for Creative Loafingsince 1998.
