Occupation
Runs July 10-Aug. 2, 8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat., 4 p.m. Sun., Shimberg Playhouse at the Straz Center, 1010 N. MacInnes Place, Tampa; half-price previews on Wed.-Thurs., July 8-9; $28; jobsitetheater.org.
Chris Holcom is busy. The director of Jobsite Theater’s Occupation has been putting the finishing touches on his graduate thesis for the USF School of Mass Communications, preparing for the birth of his first child (with wife and Jobsite actress Jaime Giangrande-Holcom), and, oh yes, readying the production of Ken Ferrigni’s satire about the Chinese takeover of Florida.
Did I say “Chinese takeover”? That’s right: in Ferrigni’s satire, it’s 2017, and the U.S. has amassed so much overseas debt, it’s been forced to sell the Sunshine State to its biggest creditor. And the Chinese haven’t hesitated to alter the ethnic makeup of the peninsula: they’ve shipped in lots of their own nationals, while requiring existing Floridians to relocate elsewhere in the country within 90 days. But all this happens before Occupation begins; what we see onstage are plots and subplots about the growing military resistance to the takeover, the struggles of the Chinese proconsul not to lose his job over his failure to quash the insurgency, and the efforts of one Florida woman to get out of state as soon and as harmlessly as possible. The actors are Nathan Jokela, Katie Castonguay, J. Elijah Cho, Emily Belvo, Carlos Garcia, and, as a 16-year-old pregnant narrator, Marlene Peralta.
Does author Ferrigni have firsthand knowledge of our sunny enclave? Yes, says Holcom, Ferrigni was once a student at the FSU/Asolo Conservatory in Sarasota. And he’s had time to refine the script during earlier productions, most recently in Los Angeles. As to how the play got to Holcom, the director says it was natural magnetism: “I’m a native Floridian: my family has been here for a long, long time. So anything that has to do with Florida, I kind of gravitate towards.” There was another reason too that the play seemed appropriate: for the last couple of years, Holcom has been teaching USF business students — most of them Chinese — presentation skills and public speaking. “And so…the show just spoke to me in that regard. And about a year ago I kind of threw my hat in the ring saying, ‘I’d really like to direct this.’”
A few years before that, Jobsite veteran Holcom was a victim of theater fatigue embarking on a new career as a graduate student in Communications. Why the change? “To be honest with you, I was starting to be kind of burnt out on the theater, and as much as I loved it, I needed to find some new way of examining what it is I’d been doing for the last 20 years.”
Holcom thought that he would concentrate on Performance Studies, but the Performance Studies faculty left the school just as he entered it, so he was forced to “create a theoretical vocabulary” with courses as diverse as Health Communication and Family Grief/Loss/Illness Communication. Even so, he began to take in certain ideas that were distinctly relevant to the actor/audience relationship: “So many aspects of meta-communication that happen. And one of the things that I particularly address in my thesis is nonverbal communication … simple things like gesture and posture and to a lesser extent tonality. Not just the words that you’re saying but how you say them can provide a richness in subtext and I think that’s very important.”
The title of his thesis is “Eye of the Beholder: Artistic Transposition of Truth in Historical Narrative from Herodotus to Hollywood.” And by the way, it’s due by the opening night of Occupation.
Now that Holcom’s about to get his master’s degree, what are his plans?
Well, he says, his love of theater has been rekindled, and he wants to direct and to write — in Tampa. “Truth be told, I’m a Florida boy. For a large part of my life I was trying to get the hell out of this state. And it just never quite happened for me. And I kind of found — re-found — my home here. And I love Florida. The weirder this state gets, the more at home I feel. I’ve got my parents here, my in-laws have moved back down from New York, Jaime has a career as a teacher at Blake High School. So I don’t really feel that I want to uproot. I’ve always thought, why do I have to go to New York or L.A. or some of these other places in order to do good work? I think the work can speak for itself. And rather than flee the area, take some of the homegrown talent here and cultivate it.”
Homegrown talent: that’s Holcom himself.
Check out his work at Occupation before the Chinese make you emigrate.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2015.
