Nicole Jeannine Smith in a preview of "Lady Love" at CL Space the night before the Fringe. Smith was also the festival's associate producer. Credit: Jennifer Ring
Nicole Jeannine Smith in a preview of “Lady Love” at CL Space the night before the Fringe. Smith was also the festival’s associate producer. Credit: Jennifer Ring
Perhaps the best thing about the Tampa International Fringe Festival, which ran May 11-14, was its reminder that there’s a lot of plucky, innovative theater going on locally and otherwise, and that now we needn’t resign ourselves to missing it. The fact is, there are only a handful of professional theaters in the Tampa Bay area — nine, by my count, and not all of the same quality — and you can attend every one of their productions (touring companies not included) and maybe see 50 plays in a year. But the Fringe Festival brought us 29 shows in one weekend, and that included work as satisfying as anything available during the “regular” season. Of the three plays that I saw, one introduced me to the work of a superbly gifted local actress, another warmed me with comic writing of professional quality and a third introduced me to the avant-garde imagination of a Tampa resident I’d only known as a performer. Here’s my report from the field:
Marie-Claude Tremblay in a preview of “Dark Vanilla Jungle” at CL Space the night before the Fringe. Credit: Jennifer Ring
Splendid One-Woman Show. A shattering performance by Marie-Claude Tremblay of a powerful play by Philip Ridley makes Dark Vanilla Jungle sharply unforgettable, more affecting than most dramas I see in a typical season. Jungle, tautly directed by Staci Sabarsky,is about Andrea, a naïve young British woman whose relations with two men drive her from innocence through experience all the way to near-madness. On a stage bare except for a table and a chair, Tremblay, who only recently relocated to the Bay area, wrenchingly guides us through Andrea’s life: The mother who abandons her, the grandparent who adopts her, the man who betrays her, the damaged half-person with whom she believes herself married. Author Ridley is sharply attentive to the way ignorance and neediness can make a young woman prey to an unscrupulous male; but even more than the fine writing, Tremblay’s brilliant performance wins your guts and your heart and gives your mind enough truth to keep you cogitating for hours. In an earlier incarnation, Tremblay acted in Montreal and Toronto; now she’s come south, and local producers would be smart to take notice. Local psychologists, too: Tremblay’s Andrea is so convincing, she could serve as a case study.
Danny Baynard (L) and Thom Mesrobian in a pre-Fringe preview of “Callbacks” at CL Space. Credit: Jennifer Ring
Actors Are People Too. Lakeland resident Thom Mesrobian’s Callbacks is about two middle-aged actors, Mike and Terry, who meet at an theme park’s audition for a Lewis and Clark attraction, and whose prickly friendship continues through the many changes that follow. Mesrobian’s comic writing is confident and wise, and he’s unfailingly humane in dramatizing two careers that are far from stellar. Or maybe I should say three careers — since the men are joined after a while by actress Catie, hired to play Sacajawea following protests from Native Americans. These three enjoy each other’s company, make only the occasional humiliating gaffe, and have a lock on their acting gigs — until married Terry finds himself falling in love with Catie. What happens next is a mess that’s treated with poignant seriousness, raising the play above its jokey surface to something genuinely suspenseful and worthy of our concern. Writer Mesrobian plays Terry as a deceptively cheerful good sport, while Danny Baynard portrays Mike as crusty but available to any upturn in his search for a livelihood. As Catie, Sarah Lockard is ebullient and self-assured. Mark Hartfield directs this unpredictable, knowing, finally tender story.
Slivers of a Life. In smart modernist fashion, Nicole Jeannine Smith’s Lady Love, performed by the author, shows us shards and splinters of the life of a certain Joy Richards. Though it’s not always easy to say which fragment fits where, Joy seems to begin as a lovely child wondering if God put her favorite lake in the landscape, matures to become a teacher who tries, with little success, to teach philosophy to kids, and then enters a relationship with a man apparently accused of murder. When the play starts, Smith is supine in bed, listening through headphones to a music only she can hear. Then she gets painfully to her feet and, after some moments, comes fully alive, enacting disconnected moments in her provocative story. Smith is a Tampa-based actress whose performance in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis four years ago still resonates; now we see that she’s also a courageous writer, and one who aims for difficult heights. Directed by Giles Davies, Lady Love offers much that’s baffling — but in a tradition that includes Beckett, Pinter, and Caryl Churchill.
Bottom line: Something good happened in Tampa last weekend. Looking beyond the individual shows to the Festival itself, I’m tempted to think that Bay area theater just turned a corner. It’s none too soon. We’ve been needing this for years.
Can hardly wait for what comes next.
Mark E. Leib's theater criticism for CL has won seven awards for excellence from the Society for Professional Journalists. His own plays have been produced Off-Broadway and in Chicago, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and the Tampa Bay Area. He is a Continuing Instructor at USF, and has an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama, where he won the CBS Foundation Prize in Playwriting. Contact him here.
