It's almost noon, and Jim Rayfield is teaching a first-year acting class of 40 students at the Blake High School for the Arts. Today the class, in a black box theater, is all about improvisation. "The thing is, through these improvs, you're going to find yourself doing some things that surprise you," he tells the students. But first, he adds, you have to supply the energy: "It's like life, isn't it? If you're not enthusiastic about it, it's not going to be much fun."
Rayfield's students are clearly enthusiastic about their instructor. Says 11th-grader Bijani Casalan, "He doesn't treat us like little children. He treats us as functioning human beings and he comes to school with a goal of making his students better performers and that's exactly what we become."
The 62-year-old instructor may know local theater better than almost anyone else in the area. Ever since making his debut at age 12 on the stage of the now-defunct Tampa Little Theatre, he's become a staple of area stages as producer, director, playwright and actor. His reach as playwright extends well beyond the Bay: his plays for adolescents, with names like I Hate Mothers, Attack of the Giant Ex's, and Senior Year Survivor, are produced scores of times every year, in high schools from California to Massachusetts. His royalties may not be high — he only earns about $2,500 a year from countrywide productions — but he has the satisfaction of knowing that even his earliest plays are still considered vitally relevant to high schoolers.
Students at Blake are very much formed by Jim Rayfield, says Casalan: "We become attached to him. We grow up with him while we're here at high school." What they're learning may yet have a significant impact on Tampa theater.
Rayfield, who has also taught at Brandon and Chamberlain high schools, regularly tells his students that, before trying their luck in the major markets, they should demonstrate their talent locally. "We talk a lot about it," says Rayfield. "And we definitely say … if you want to go to New York, you want to go to Los Angeles, OK, fine, that's great. Do something here first. See if you can get people interested in you on this level." And his students are responding. Recently, Blake students or graduates have appeared in productions at Gorilla Theatre, Alley Cat Players, Stageworks and Jobsite Theater. At least one Blake playwright is represented every year in the Young Dramatists Project at Gorilla Theater. And about half of each year's group of 20 actors go on to further theater study at such universities as USF and NYU, where they can take Rayfield's teaching — which leans heavily on gurus Stanislavsky and Viola Spolin — to the next step.
Rayfield is originally from Roanoke, Va., but moved with his family to Tampa when he was 10. He's a Chamberlain alum (one of his fellow students was model-to-be Lauren Hutton), and studied theater at Florida State and the University of Texas. Before beginning his high school teaching career at Brandon, he founded a theater company called The Bokonenists, after a character in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, which produced plays for three years in Sulphur Springs, Lutz and Ybor City.
The heyday for local theater, he thinks, was in the 1980s, when the Tampa Players and The Playmakers were active. (He directed at both.) "We had two incredibly active, semi-professional theater companies, and they were doing really interesting plays. They were doing Sam Shepard, they were doing Caryl Churchill, Mamet, [Martin Sherman] and Christopher Durang." He attributes the demise of the theaters to the oft-published complaints of then-Tampa Tribune critic Porter Anderson.
As to the current scene, Rayfield is cautiously optimistic: "We've got a new theater coming to town. We've got the Acorn. … It's interesting that there are so many theater groups springing up." But he's also conscious that no Tampa theater, existing or projected, has attained critical mass: "I think it's sad that we don't have a professional theater in Tampa. And by that I mean a fully real resident theater company of some sort, that is in a nice facility, and is consistently turning out quality productions. I mean, most major cities have something like that." When he wants his students to see top-notch professional theater, he takes them to the Asolo in Sarasota, where the actors, he says, have the marks of professionalism: "polish, complexity of performance, depth of the performance … and, you know, this whole thing of charisma, I think you've got to have it if you're going to be an actor. If you're going to ask people to look at you and watch you, you need to have something there, a special quality."
A special quality — Jim Rayfield's got it. In his case, it's dedication: to his students, to teaching, to the life of the drama. There aren't many theater professionals in this area who have kept the faith for so long — about 50 years, in fact — and who still think there's a reason to encourage neophytes. The Tampa arts scene has defeated a lot of artists; but teacher/director/writer/actor Jim Rayfield is undeterred.
Toward the end of the improv class, Rayfield tells a student to mime an activity — say, playing an electric guitar — that others — more guitarists, a drummer, adoring fans — can join. As the improvs proceed, Rayfield prods, explains, praises, warns. "What I'm looking for is that you're going to unite," he says to the students at the imaginary rock concert. "Because that's the ultimate good on stage: to work together."
Our area's young theater hopefuls couldn't ask for a better guide.
Blake High School's production of Shakespeare's The Tempest, directed by Jim Rayfield, runs Nov. 4-7. Tickets cost $7.
mark.leib @weeklyplanet.com or letters@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Aug 19-25, 2004.