@dramatistsguild

Greetings from St. Petersburg, the “City ofWriters” at the center of Tampa Bay and an epicenter of a theatrical upswellingin West Florida. November’s Third Annual Theatre Tampa Bay Awards attest to the ascendancy of Sunshine City by doling fifteen out of nineteen “Bests” to freeFall Theatre in obvious appreciation of the extra twists Eric Davis and Jim Sorensen give to well-known classics like Into the Woods and One Flew Out of the Cuckoo’s Nest, fostering the Young Dramatists Project with Gorilla Theatre and presenting solo performances by Roxanne Fay, the first recipient of the Jeff Norton Dream Grant to fund the creation and production of her novel and play, Upon This Rock: The Magdalene Speaks. Fay’s collected plays, Home Fires Burning, were chosen to be presented in the 2014 United Solo Festival in New York City.

St. Pete is also home to stalwart American Stage which has a vibrant After Hours lineup and the new Emerging Playwrights Festival, organized by two-time O’Neill playwright and St. Petersburg native Bill Leavengood along with Artistic Director Meg Heimstead. Celebrating its second year in November, the three-day festival featured new works by emerging playwright Bob Clyman, St. Petersburg native Gabe Neustadt and short plays by some of Tampa Bay’s young playwrights. Readings and talk-backs were mixed in with discussions and a workshop on The Art and Craft of Playwriting led by Clyman and Leavengood, who is also the recipient of the 2015 Innovative Playwright Instruction Award from the Southeastern Theatre Conference.

Meanwhile, the Studio@620 marked a decade of always saying “YES!” to everything with Project GenYes!, a “Concept to Performance Accelerator for Jazz, Dance, & Theatre Artists of the Millennial Generation” featuring playwright Karleigh Chase in her one-woman show about homelessness called LESS. The Studio@620 really does say “yes” to artists of all persuasions, gladly cultivating young/new playwrights from across the country as well as the efforts of more established local playwrights like the Suncoast Playwrights and Lil Barcaski’s Gypsy Stage Rep presentation of Life Upon The Wicked Stage – six intertwined plays by Jo Morello and Jack Gilhooley. Bob Devin Jones, Artistic Director @620, encourages avant-garde performance art and revivification of older forms including The Radio Theatre Project, where some old and many new plays are recorded with a live audience by playwrights/producers Sheila and Matt Cowley. The Radio Theatre Project takes submissions from playwrights around the country.

The Cowleys and the rest of the bootstrap playwright group Stagewrights were also pivotal in establishing TampaWorks, an annual program of short plays set in West Florida and hosted by Stageworks, whose founder Anna Brennan was recognized at the TTB Awards for three decades of edgy, gender and race-bending works – a tradition newly designated artistic director Karla Hartley promises to continue. University of South Florida instructor and Tampa Repertory Theatre producer David Frankel admits to prodding Sheila Cowley into writing for the live stage after her many years of radio work. “Sheila said she did not know how to write a play for the stage, so I told her to go read a few. She read everything she could get her hands on!” His advice clearly taken to heart, Cowley’s plays have been developed in Florida at American Stage, The Gorilla Theatre, Stageworks, the University of South Florida and the Players Theatre, and at the Alliance of Resident Theatres in Manhattan. Her play Stay premiered at the Wimberley Players outside of Austin, Texas in 2014.

Frankel’s Tampa Rep produces classics by Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams next to newer works like Imagining Madoff by Deb Margolin and The Apocrypha of Theodore Roosevelt by Steve Mountain. Tampa Rep’s laboratory theater aka TRT2 also presents the annual series Tampa Wrights featuring new one-act plays by writers in the Tampa area. In January, Jobsite Theater presented the Job-Side Production of Local One Acts by writers Shaina Sine and Graham Morris.

For formal training, the USF School of Theatre and Dance is developing an undergraduate playwriting concentration. Bill Leavengood taught playwriting in the fall and will do so again during the spring semester. The USF St. Petersburg campus is also developing a creative writing certificate, and there are many informal writing groups and reading opportunities, including Stagewrights, the Suncoast Playwrights and pop up events at coffee shops and seaside parks where poets, playwrights and other writers mingle for camaraderie and comparison. Laptop or paper? Both sides, or just one? Pencil or pen? It doesn’t matter how, really, so long as you just write – because opportunities for your production are blossoming in West Florida.

ddavis-thompson@dramatistsguild.com