For Jobsite Theater, these are the good old days.The Tampa-based theater company, which is opening Paula Vogel's The Mineola Twins at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center this weekend, has in the course of five-and-a-half years become a staple of the Bay area theater scene. Under the artistic direction of David Jenkins, the company has graduated from a rocky start at the Silver Meteor Gallery in 1998 to become Tampa's most dependable producer of Off-Broadway and regional-theater-quality scripts. Now finishing its first year as resident company at TBPAC, Jobsite was responsible for four of the Weekly Planet's Top 10 Shows of 2003: Cloud Nine, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Bloody Poetry and The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged). And audiences are responding to Jobsite's good work: regularly, the company sells at least 75 percent of its seats at the 130-seat Shimberg Playhouse, and several shows — like this season's A Girl's Guide to Chaos — have been sellouts.
Which brings up another Jobsite success: While theaters like American Stage seem to be attended mostly by 60-year-olds, almost half of Jobsite's audience members are 18 to 35, a group that otherwise seems to spend its time at the movies.
I sat down with Jenkins the other day and asked him to talk about Mineola Twins, about Jobsite's success, about his satisfactions and disappointments. He wanted to produce Mineola Twins, he says, because it's about a fundamental polarity in American life: "between right and left, black and white, good and bad, NPR and Fox, Britney or Christina — we've just become so very, very divided, and the play really is to me mostly about that national divide that exists within our own families, even." The play is about two sisters — one conservative, one radical — who grow up during the Eisenhower, Nixon and Bush Sr. administrations, and eventually raise children who throw their beliefs into question. The play is cartoonish in its presentation of the sisters — Jenkins says "it's a very over-the-top, broad campy comedy a la Carol Burnett" — but it's also all-too-serious: by the final scenes, one sister is planting bombs at abortion clinics while the other has become a lesbian with a life partner, and a committed worker for women's reproductive rights.
Jenkins feels that the play fulfills most of Jobsite's "mission points": "It's still a fairly new play by a contemporary playwright, it is a lesser-known play by that playwright, it's incredibly politically and socially relevant. … It's also a feminist piece … and we've had an audience that's been very supportive of that." And there's one further reason why he finds the play exciting: "This is a really great actor piece, especially for the person who's playing the twins [Jobsite regular Katrina Stevenson]. It really is an opportunity for a performer to show off her virtuosity."
Moving on past Mineola, I ask Jenkins, who recently turned 30, if he feels that Jobsite is successful. He expresses discomfort with the term: "A word like 'successful,' that's a dangerous word, and I think you can get trapped in it. I think we're doing very well, I believe we've grown, I believe that every year we improve on what we do, we continue to attract audiences, our audiences continue to grow from year to year, so if that means successful, then sure. And our grosses are up from year to year, so if that's successful, then sure." But he also wants to qualify his answer, to point out that money is still a secondary incentive for Jobsite's personnel, that all Jobsite principals still have day jobs that they depend upon, and that the company's determination to keep ticket prices low — top price currently is $19.50 — also means that there's a limited financial return on energy expended. Eventually, he says, he would like to see three Jobsite administrators put on salary — the artistic director, the managing director and the technical director. But until then he, like everyone else involved with Jobsite, will have to look elsewhere for his daily bread (he's got a 9-to-5 marketing job at TBPAC).
What changes would Jenkins like to see as Jobsite evolves? Again, finances figure significantly — particularly the need for more corporate grant money and individual donations (about 95 percent of Jobsite's income now comes from ticket sales). Jenkins is also committed to building his subscription audience from about 450 to 1000. As for the residency at TBPAC — which, he says has brought Jobsite "visibility and stability" — he'd like to see it continue. But "we do have a very long-range goal — it's a dream, more than a goal — of one day having our own space. We're not anxious for that at all, because we're not anxious for all the bills that come with it. But one day, finances willing, we really would like … to have café/bar space out front, gallery space, rehearsal space, and a proper black box theater somewhere, 200, 250 seats, that would probably be as big as I'd ever want."
Jenkins' best experience over the last few years? "Personally, and nothing to do with the company, but just me personally and very selfishly, I've really enjoyed working on the 'abridged' shows [The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) and The Bible (abridged)]. They're a lot of fun — they're so much fun, I could do those shows forever." As for his biggest disappointment, it was the lackluster response to Eric Bogosian's subUrbia in the 2001-02 season. "We just couldn't sell tickets to it, we had a miserable time getting people to come out and see that show, and that was a huge disappointment for us." Similarly, this season's American Buffalo didn't attract audiences as expected.
And in the last analysis, Jenkins says, running Jobsite is about grabbing — and holding — an audience. "People vote with their feet. And if people don't like what you're doing, they just don't go. We firmly believe in that. And we firmly believe that is the greatest indicator of 'are we doing all right?'."
American Buffalo and subUrbia aside, Jobsite Theater is clearly doing all right. Five-and-a-half years after its first, tentative productions, it's one of the hottest tickets in town.
Or, as Jenkins more modestly puts it, "I think in five years' time, to have not lost money, to not have just tanked something …
"That's not so bad."
Contact Performance Critic Mark E. Leib at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Jun 3-9, 2004.