Here’s what’s behind the curtain this week in Tampa Bay theater…
MINER PROBLEMS: A hit on the fringe festival circuit, Butcher Holler Here We Come from Brooklyn’s Aztec Economy arts collective comes to the Silver Meteor Gallery this Thursday through Saturday. Crammed into a crawlspace following a coal mine collapse, the play taps immersive staging and lighting techniques to trap the audience with imperiled diggers who confront “the male psyche-in-crisis where secret desires, carnal urges, and hidden memories come boiling to the surface in a primitive territory of Earth that mirrors the subliminal mind,” because slowly suffocating in a dark hole is in itself perhaps hypodramatic. The cast features TheatreUSF grad (summa cum laude, girlfriend!) Adam Belvo of the Belvo stage dynasty; his sister Emily Belvo just closed Bethany for TRT2 and opens in Orlando at Jobsite Theater in two weeks.
WORD PLAY: According to Publisher’s Weekly, poet Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary features “diverse prose poems, exhaustive alphabetical language-salads like ‘Jinglejangle’ (‘Mingus Among Us mishmash Missy-Pissy mock croc Mod Squad mojo moldy oldie’), surrealistic odes to her erotic other, Oulipian word-replacement poems” and other amazing wordfoolery jinglejangled up in the African American experience. Improbable Athenaeum will dramatize collection selections, with dance enhancement, in a free performance at 2 p.m. this Saturday at the Seminole Heights Branch Library, featuring actress Kimberly Webb (Steel Magnolias at American Stage) and dancer/choreographer Trel Lamont.
ONE IS THE UNLONELIEST NUMBER THEY'RE ABOUT TO DO: Just ahead of the March debut of the new Tampa Shakespeare Festival, our good neighbors to the south are also festing up something fresh. Inspired by the six-year-old United Solo festival in NYC, from which organizers Ann Morrison (freeFall Theatre's Into the Woods) and Blake Walton have carried home prizes, SaraSolo 2015 kicks off what will become an annual outing of one-person plays, Sarasota-side. Starting Saturday and running through Mar. 1 at Crocker Memorial Church, the inaugural solofest features 16 works, including turns from Tampa Bay favorites Roxanne Fay (The Testament of Mary) and Lynne Locher (the original musical cabaret Once Upon…).
GOLF COURSE DISCOURSE: Monday night at American Stage, Your Real Stories hosts “an evening of theater, storytelling, and conversation” inspired by August Wilson’s Radio Golf, just extended by popular demand at AmStage through March 1. The free event generates a live theater experience drawn from interviews with community members exploring the questions of identity and race plumbed in Golf, followed by a panel discussion. CL critic Mark Leib gives Radio Golf 3.5 stars.
HOROVITZ IS IN THE HOROHIZZY: In case you hadn’t heard, celebrated playwright, filmmaker and rare Yankee inductee into France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres Israel Horovitz is workshopping Sins of the Mother, a play from his Gloucester cycle, with Jobsite Theater this week, culminating in a public staged reading Saturday night. CL Arts & Entertainment Editor Julie Garisto will have more about the event in Art Breaker tomorrow.
SAY! WHAT? READ. DISCUSS. REPEAT (MONTHLY): Studio@620 kicks off a new monthly playreading/discussion series, Say! What?, tomorrow night with Johnna Adams’ Gidion’s Knot, a drama about the worst middle-school parent/teacher conference EVAHR, revolving as it does around bullying and suicide. The series is hosted by filmmaker Erica Sutherlin and TheatreUSF prof Fanni Green, both of whom were castmates of Kimberly Webb in Steel Magnolias, because the world is as small as a collapsed coal mine.
Got a tip for SCENE BREAKER? Email Scene Breaker in care of A&E Editor Julie Garisto, julie.garisto@creativeloafing.com.
This article appears in Feb 12-18, 2015.