He could just rest on his laurels from having created one of the most effective youth-empowerment-through-theater projects ever seen: Project: Shattered Silence, which provided local adolescents with a dramatic outlet for their personal histories and yielded an award-winning PBS documentary. But he’s now moving on to another theatrical frontier. With partners Erica Sutherlin and Robert Morris, he’s opening the Space at 2106, a multi-use arts center on Old West Tampa’s Main Street, with theater, dance, jazz, cabaret, visual art and more on tap opening Oct. 24. If anyone can make a go of such a potentially risky venture, it’s O’Roark, whose passion, smarts and sense of humor have already helped him forge new chapters in many young people’s lives.
This article appears in Best of The Bay 2015.
