In the summer of 2005, when I reviewed the premiere of March of the Kitefliers, by local writers Neil Gobioff and Shawn Paonessa, I gave away an Act 1 plot twist and suffered the Wrath of the Jobsite Faithful. Jobsite Theater artistic director David Jenkins sent a letter to everyone on his e-mail list, asking all to protest this critic's review. Subsequently, Creative Loafing received a slew of letters questioning my ethics, my aesthetics and the advisability of my continued employment. My revelation didn't hurt ticket sales — the show sold out, night after night — but that seemed beside the point. I'd revealed the Secret of the Kitefliers. What other crimes must I be capable of?
I reminded David Jenkins of this flap the other day when we sat down to talk about the return of Kitefliers to the Shimberg Playhouse of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. I'd heard that this time around, he was going to insist that all critics sign a statement saying they wouldn't reveal any plot surprises. Was this still his intention? "We have a friend who's an entertainment lawyer, and she was going to look into it for us," he said. But she only found evidence of such signed statements in the film industry, and besides that, it now looked like Kitefliers might not get reviewed at all (this being its second time around). So the point is probably moot, Jenkins said, and there'd be no documents for loose-lipped critics to initial. In any case, the point had never been to threaten details-spilling reviewers with a lawsuit: "If anything, we just thought [secrecy] was a courtesy."
If a confidentiality agreement is out, another of Jenkins' intentions is still very much in: bringing producers from New York and elsewhere to consider Kitefliers for showings outside of Tampa. "We've had a lot of contacts with various producers and entertainment groups, not necessarily that are just directly theater-related, but film-related," he said. Encouraging this initiative has been Judith Lisi, president of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center: "She was a major supporter of the show the first time around," Jenkins said, adding that she was the first one to say that "'I really believe that this has a life past Tampa.'"
With her help, Kevin McCollum and Jeffrey Seller — producers of Rent, Avenue Q and High Fidelity, among other plays — have made a verbal commitment to see Kitefliers on its first weekend. And Jenkins thinks they're just right for this show: "They're young people like us, and we feel like the material will really speak to them." After all, the play is about a young coffee-shop manager, the woman he falls in love with and the question of whether he is mature enough to sustain a relationship. Just about any young man or woman, Jenkins suggested, will recognize the characters and their problems.
The evidence from the August 2005 run of the show is that it does speak to young audiences. "Every once in a while we do a show and it just kind of surprises us," said Jenkins. "Kitefliers, the first time around, basically outsold every other show we did on that season, you know, by name playwrights. It was a huge shock. And it impacted people in such a way that really surprised all of us. We loved the show because we felt it spoke to us, you know, the age that we all are, in our 20s and 30s. … But when we really had it validated by like 1,400 other people, we went, 'Hell, that's something to look at.'"
Demand for seats was so great that Jobsite extended the run for an extra weekend, and the result was more full houses. "It was insanely, insanely, insanely successful," Jenkins said.
Is there a good reason to see the show a second time? Well, according to Jenkins, there will be changes. "There's one entire scene that was cut. … It's been completely replaced," he explained of the new production directed by Kari Goetz. "The actors have done a lot to try to add more depth to what they're doing and to really improve on what they did. We've refined the comedy; we've added a lot of good bits, I think. The visual elements in the show are really very different. We've got the projection system that we didn't have before; there'll be live video.
"It's almost like going back and watching the director's cut of something. …You see the film that the studio put out and then, after a couple of years, you see the film that the director went back and went, 'This is what I wanted.' And we have that opportunity now, and you don't normally get that opportunity, ever."
The reprise of Kitefliers is also important, Jenkins noted, because Jobsite is trying to reverse the negative trend of its last two productions. "[This year] has not been kind to us so far," he said. "We've had both All the Great Books (abridged) and This is How it Goes, both of which underperformed for us, and it was a little disheartening."
The problem with Books was probably a production of the same play several weeks earlier by American Stage in St. Petersburg. "We didn't lose money on Books," Jenkins said. "But we didn't make the sort of money we're used to making on a show like that. … This is How it Goes never really found an audience, and that was a little upsetting to us. That show did lose some money, and we're not exactly sure why."
He suspects that the problem was timing: "We were fighting against that whole month of Gasparilla; we were fighting against the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl, which historically has not hurt us, but, we got killed."
As we left the Shimberg Playhouse together, Jenkins remembered one more reason why the return of Kitefliers is going to be special: Tampa's mayor has decided to introduce the play on opening night. "I just received confirmation yesterday or two days ago from the mayor's office that Mayor Iorio and the City of Tampa would be officially recognizing and making a presentation on behalf of the city for the show on opening night, which is March 29th," he said.
And why is Kitefliers important to the mayor? "Because this show belongs to Tampa," said Jenkins. "It will always belong to Tampa. Regardless of if it ever became a film, if it ever became a Broadway hit, or if it did nothing else ever.
"This is something that this city can embrace as theirs."
This article appears in Mar 28 – Apr 3, 2007.