Earlier this month, four Tampa leaders went to Tennessee to attend a national conference sponsored by economist and author Richard Florida. Deanne Roberts (Tampa Chamber of Commerce), Karen Raihill (Tampa Bay Partnership), Michelle Bauer (Tampa Bay Technology Forum) and Sigrid Tidmore (Tampa Chamber Cultural Arts Committee) traveled to Memphis to explore methods of encouraging the "creative class" in the Bay area and of building a more vibrant cultural life for area residents.
Well, it's nice to know that local movers and shakers are seriously concerned about the arts here. And since the theater is a central part of any region's culture, it occurred to me to wonder how things might be different if this area's theater life were really burgeoning.
I imagined the following:
A Major Regional Theater in Tampa: It's just absurd (and a little sad) that a city the size of Tampa doesn't have a major regional theater company, employing Equity actors and offering, say, 200 to 300 seats. Yes, smaller companies like Stageworks and Gorilla Theater are doing their brave best to bring us important plays, and yes, the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center wants us to believe in its erratically active Center Theater Company. But what we need is a well-funded company in, say, Ybor City or Hyde Park, to rival American Stage in St. Petersburg and bring us plays so well produced that we'll want to come back for more.
For proof that this is possible, we need look no further than the new Banyan Theater in Sarasota. Here, four excellent actors found a producer, Jerry Finn, with vision and money; found a stage, at the Sainer Pavilion of New College; and came up with a summer season: Shaw's Don Juan in Hell and Pinter's Betrayal. The acting was superb, the reviews were glowing and the company was set. Since then it has produced James Goldman's The Lion in Winter and Gardner McKay's Sea Marks. It's about to proceed with another summer series of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Tom Stoppard's Rough Crossing and Arthur Miller's The Price. A year-and-a-half ago there was no Banyan Theater — now it has already become one of the staples on the Sarasota scene. Area arts enthusiasts take note.
Festivals of Local Writing: If the community where writers live doesn't encourage those writers to ply their trade, we surely can't expect other communities to do so. Which is another way of saying that we need one or more of the theaters in the Bay area to have a yearly festival for Tampa Bay writers in which several full-length plays — not just 10-minute novelties — will be given at least staged readings and at best full productions.
Some local theaters are already doing something like this. American Stage, together with the LiveArts Peninsula Foundation, has commissioned a series of short plays on the subject of Bay area personalities, and Stageworks encourages Florida writers to submit to its Briefs (10-minute plays) and Longjohns. Ruth Eckerd Hall's Playwrights Process series produces one winning adult play each year. But we need something more sustained and visible. We need a series that's limited to local writers — not Florida-wide — that publicizes these plays widely and that showcases several writers each year. Then we might reasonably expect that local playwrights would feel encouraged to show off their talents. And some might even be launched into national orbits.
A Graduate-Level Conservatory for Theater Artists: This is the institution that could, more than any other, revolutionize theater in the Bay area. A graduate-level conservatory, like the Florida State University/Asolo Conservatory in Sarasota or the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training in my old stomping grounds of Cambridge, Mass., would first pull aspiring actors, directors and designers to this area from across the country, and then logically deliver some of these young professionals to the local theater scene. Is it possible that the new Patel School for the Performing Arts at TBPAC might turn out this kind of professional theater artist? Maybe, but I tend to doubt it because the school won't have the same rigorous standards of a degree-granting program. But add a conservatory at the University of South Florida or the University of Tampa and watch the effects on the larger community.
More Classics: One Shakespeare production per year — at American Stage's springtime Shakespeare in the Park — just isn't enough. We need a theater company that not only produces the classics but approaches them with the sort of innovative staging that might make them relevant to modern audiences. By "classics," I mean centuries-old playwrights like Sophocles and Euripides, Moliere and Racine, Marlowe and Shakespeare and Jonson and Webster. And I also mean the modern classics: Ibsen and Chekhov and Pirandello and Shaw all the way to Genet and Beckett.
I can count the "greats" whose plays we've seen in the last few years here on one hand — Aristophanes, Corneille, Shakespeare, Ibsen and Beckett. Meanwhile, local audiences are largely unfamiliar with the most formidable possibilities of live theater and don't have a context within which to view contemporary writers.
By all means, let's see the most exciting shows from off-Broadway and the regional theater (truth be told, we're not seeing many of these either). But let's also have the chance to rediscover theater's masterpieces: Oedipus and Medea, The Misanthrope and Tartuffe, A Doll's House and Krapp's Last Tape. At the very least, parents will have reason to want to take their older children to the theater with them.
Late-night Cabaret: What better way to spend a Saturday night than to go to a 10 or 11 p.m. cabaret and watch a clever group of actors take some satirical pokes at local politics and society? This is an idea to please night owls and employ actors, directors, playwrights and maybe songwriters too. You've heard of Forbidden Broadway; well, what about Forbidden Hillsborough or Pinellas? Add alcohol or coffee and some munchies and you've got true cabaret, as up-to-the-minute as the headlines.
And finally — decisively — what this area needs is someone with vision and money, like Sarasota's Jerry Finn. One without the other isn't enough. Together, they can redefine local arts.
Then we'll see an area theater scene that shines.
Performance Critic Mark E. Leib can be reached at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 305.
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2003.