It’s been a good year for actors in the Tampa Bay area. They’ve been given a lot to work with — plays from Jacobean England and inner-city Pittsburgh, by Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatists and daring local talents, taking place in timeless Illyria and cocaine-addled 1980s Manhattan. Here, in alphabetical order, is my list of the actors who offered the 10 most memorable performances of the year. I haven’t tried to rank them: every one of these portrayals was stratospheric.
LARRY ALEXANDER. Playing all the parts in the Stageworks version of This Wonderful Life, Alexander was a heartwarming George Bailey, a snarling and malevolent Mr. Potter, a bumbling, gently coaxing Clarence the angel, and an earnest girl-next-door Mary Hatch along with what seemed to be dozens of others. Alexander didn’t miss the individuality of any of these characters; nor did he fail to make us feel that behind them all was a decent and generous human being.
GILES DAVIES. Davies was hilarious in Jobsite Theater’s Twelfth Night as the snobbish, patronizing Malvolio, so enamored of himself as to think that the Countess Olivia, whose steward he was, had fallen in love with him. The scene in which he was tricked into dressing ridiculously for his ostensible lady love was one of the high points of the theater season. Arrogance, beware: you may end up looking like Malovolio.
EMILEE DUPRE. In the lead role of local playwright Bill Leavengood’s Money Maker, Dupré gave what amounted to a clinic in dramatic realism, showing, on the tiny and unforgiving Heather Theatre stage, what splendors are possible when a superlative actor gives herself completely to a role. This was a finely detailed performance that welcomed scrutiny and repaid it with profound emotional truth.
JACK HOLLOWAY. If you asked his viperous wife, she’d tell you that Macbeth was too full of “the milk of human kindness.” But in Jack Holloway’s portrayal of the ambitious Scottish thane, that milk had curdled long ago, leaving him ready for regicide even without his Lady’s wheedling. Spectators who made it to the new Tampa Shakespeare Festival got two rewards this year: the doom of the wicked Macbeths and the return of Mr. Holloway.
ALAN BOMAR JONES. In August Wilson’s Radio Golf, superbly presented by American Stage, Jones portrayed Harmond Wilks, a realtor preparing (in 1997) for the demolition of an old house in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. But as the moral meaning of that house became clearer, Jones’s Wilks made a turnaround, showing us real backbone and a resonant capacity for self-criticism. The result was meaningful and profoundly affecting.
BETTY-JANE PARKS. Looking uncannily like the woman in photographs, wearing a bland, formless dress and glasses, Parks impersonated author Flannery O’Connor so well in A Peculiar Crossroads, you’d think she’d risen from the dead just to appear at the Silver Meteor Gallery. The slow, labored Southern drawl, the fatigue, the crutches — we could have enjoyed this portrayal far beyond its short half hour. At least we still have the stories.
PAUL POTENZA. This stunning performance provoked wonder and worry — wonder at the unstinting detail with which Potenza, in Jobsite Theater’s Annapurna, played Ulysses, a dying, slovenly American poet; and worry that the actor would simply go too far personally in showing us the character’s emphysema, self-hate, existential dread. Happily, it seems that Potenza survived this accomplishment; but some of us are still reeling.
OLIVIA SARGENT. She may be just a kid, but this actress was all too convincing as mean Mary Tilford in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour at Tampa Rep. Sargent’s Tilford was no sympathetic adolescent; she was a narcissistic, poisonous brat, a girl who lied and bullied and blackmailed her classmates while destroying a couple of teachers who passed too near. Anyone who survived middle school knows that Mary Tilfords exist; kudos to Sargent for painfully reminding us.
KATHERINE MICHELLE TANNER. If you’ve been following area theater for the last few years, you know that Tanner is an amazingly versatile and prismatic actress. In the freeFall production of Natalie Symons’s The Buffalo Kings, she was suicidal wife and mother Olive, trying desperately to mend the lives of those around her when she herself was badly damaged and in need of rescue. Depend on hyper-talented Tanner to provide us with all these complexities and many more besides.
LUCAS WELLS. The 1980s didn’t seem so far away in freeFall Theatre’s Bright Lights, Big City, about the dizzying, dangerous life in the fast lane. Guiding us through a vertiginous Manhattan was superb Lucas Wells as Jamie, a likable type so addicted to the high life, he didn’t realize that it was killing him. Wells did it all: sang and spoke and strove to survive as his world imploded. And after it was over, we were all ready for rehab.
This article appears in Dec 17-23, 2015.