As we head toward the usually quiet months of summer, the Tampa theater scene refuses to keep silent. Two theaters are moving into new venues, and one has, for the first time, explicitly announced the changed nature of its production philosophy. So, getting right down to it:
Cat Finds New Home Tampa's Alley Cat Players are moving into the new NT Village Music Garden and Cultural Center, a two-story building that was formerly a nightclub, at 911 N. Franklin St. in the downtown Cultural Arts District. Alley Cat, which has heretofore produced most of its plays at the ¡Viva La Frida! Café y Galeria on Florida Avenue, will become the Music Garden's theater company-in-residence and will open its first show there on June 4. That play is Mollie Bailey's Traveling Family Circus Featuring Scenes from the Life of Mother Jones, by Megan Terry and JoAnne Metcalf. But the official grand opening of the new theater space will come in August, when Alley Cat reprises its very first production (originally presented at the Silver Meteor Gallery), Emma Goldman: Love, Anarchy and Other Affairs.
According to Alley Cat cofounder Jo Averill-Snell, the move to the Music Garden came about with the help of Fred Johnson of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Johnson, who is Vice President for Education at the Center, is also Artistic Consultant for the new Music Garden and, says Averill-Snell, informed Alley Cat cofounder Teresa Gallar of the availability of the new space. Averill-Snell says that the move to the Music Garden is particularly exciting because the site will also house dance and music groups with which Alley Cat can work. For example, the Emma Goldman play will feature an original modern dance piece by Katurah Robinson (a USF dance professor and choreographer for the NT Village and TBPAC's Community Arts Ensemble), and will be set to a sound sculpture by Johnson. Further, Emma will use projections and multimedia art, and will be accompanied by a visual art collection of pieces related to the performance.
The theater area at the NT Village is a black box that can seat, says Averill-Snell, up to 300 spectators, though she imagines that her first production will be set up for far fewer. When Mollie Bailey premieres, only the first floor of the building will be open to the public. Further enhancements will be made to the space over the summer, and when Emma opens, the entire building should be in working order.
The NT Village is being run under the auspices of the National Trust for the Development of African-American Men, whose Tampa office is headed by Wali Shabazz. The National Trust is dedicated to working with at-risk youth, but that mission has expanded to include arts education and cultural outreach. Alley Cat, says Averill-Snell, will participate in that outreach when it begins, in the autumn, to provide acting and production workshops in the new downtown Tampa venue.
Finally, Averill-Snell says she "loved" being at ¡Viva la Frida!
"But this, we hope, is home."
Acorn Finally Planted After first trying to settle into a former vaudeville house just north of Tampa's downtown, and then negotiating fruitlessly to present a season at Ybor City's Cuban Club, the Acorn Theatre has at last found a theater where it can stage its first production.
"I'm really excited to announce to you that we will be doing Death of a Salesman, opening Aug. 26, at the HCC Theatre in Ybor," says Acorn artistic director Levi Kaplan. "We also have planned a fundraiser on June 25 at Artists Unlimited [in the Channel District of Tampa] to raise money for our inaugural show and inaugural season."
So what happened to the Cuban Club? "It seems that their goals and our goals were too dissimilar," says Kaplan. "They had a sizeable debt that they were looking to take care of, and so a theater company is probably not the best way to do that. We were looking for a partnership, and that's what we thought we were pursuing; they thought they were pursuing a landlord/ tenant relationship." Kaplan also looked at venues in Tampa Heights (including a firehouse), various warehouses and even Gorilla Theater (as a possible "temporary home"), but none of these offered everything Acorn needed.
The contract with the 350-seat HCC Theatre is currently only for one production — Thursdays through Sundays for three weekends — but Acorn's been told that the space is available for future productions. What's exciting Kaplan more, though, is a different possibility: the old Federal Courthouse on Florida Avenue in downtown Tampa. The Acorn Theatre, he says, in combination with seven or eight small businesses with a "creative industries base," is proposing to turn that building into a creative industries collective "that would house the Acorn Theatre as an anchor tenant, and also house marketing professionals and a bookstore and a café and artists studios and an art gallery and a history museum, and all these other ancillary creative and cultural projects that are around the city. It would be basically a city within a building."
Kaplan says that several suggestions for use of the courthouse have been made to the City of Tampa, but "I believe ours is one of the only, if not the only, cultural arts or creative arts use proposed for the building." He says the city should make its decision on the proposals in about a month.
Kaplan first announced the coming of Acorn Theatre to Tampa in summer 2003. Now, about a year later, the theater's preparing its first production. Considering the difficulties any new theater company faces, it hasn't been a long wait.
Next question: what quality of production will Acorn present the public?
Check out this column in late August.
Monkey Business It's official: Gorilla Theatre no longer sees itself as an organization devoted to producing a full theater season.
"Starting with our 2003-04 season, we decided to return to Aubrey's and my original mission for Gorilla Theatre, which was to produce our own work, and to make the theater available to outside producing organizations that would like to bring in other plays," says Susan Hussey, who, along with husband Aubrey Hampton, runs the Gorilla.
She and Hampton made this decision, she said, for several reasons: the financial strain of running a theater (costs in 2002 were as much as $400,000); the birth of their child Trevor in July 2002; Hussey's health problems beginning in September 2003 (she's since recovered); and, in general, "lots of family reasons that we needed to cut back." And that should explain, she says, why three of four Gorilla plays so far this season were productions by Lookinglass Theatre and Dog & Pony Productions — and the only Gorilla-produced play was Hampton's Sherlock & Shaw.
Hussey says she and Hampton don't really see Gorilla as a "rental house" now — "we prefer to think of ourselves as co-producers, because we're sharing our equipment, we're sharing our space … and we really like to work with groups that are like-minded in terms of the quality of things they bring in." And she can imagine circumstances that would lead Hampton and her to become producers again: For example, she'd love one day to mount a production of Caryl Churchill's latest piece, Far Away.
But for right now, and except for plays written by Hampton or Hussey, Gorilla Theatre is less a producing organization and more a venue for other makers of theater.
And considering the "co-productions" that Gorilla has offered this season — all of them troubled in some way — that isn't necessarily good news for area audiences.
Contact Performance Critic Mark E. Leib at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2004.