Tampa Bay Theatre Festival

Tampa Bay Theatre Festival

  The Tampa Bay Theater Festival returned for its second year in a row, Labor Day weekend. The three day festival ran from September 4-6. The festival was three days of workshops, play viewing, and networking, sprawled across Tampa with events happening at the Straz Center, Stageworks, and HCC Ybor’s own Main Stage theater. The HCC Ybor Theater Club was invited to attend the workshops and competitions free of charge. The staff at the festival also provided media passes to one of the full-length show viewings.

  On the first day of the festival, there were two workshops. The first was about starting a theatre company, ran by a panel of different company founders. In this session, attendees were reminded that theater is a team sport and when building better actors, better people are built as well.

  The second workshop covered playwriting. In this session, a panel of playwrights established the primary target is the audience;, and the secondary is the actor. They discussed the perks of talkbacks, helpful software programs, and rewriting the script.

  After a day of widely varying workshops, the first full length show of the festival, Hour Confessions, premiered. Produced on by RL Stage Inc., the play explored the comedic happenings in the lives of five men meeting weekly to discuss life’s journey. The play was both written and directed by Rory Lawrence, the festival founder. After the sold out show, there was a networking event, consisting of laughing, dancing, and the exchanging of business cards and resumes.

  Day two started with a workshop discussing the basics of finding a talent agent. The speaker at this workshop was Darcy Britton-Kant of Level Talent Group. She told the audience, “When an agent brings you in to interview they want it to go well,” setting a positive atmosphere for the Q &A session.

  Amidst the extensive classes, actors competed against one another in a monologue competition seeking to earn the Crystal Award. The competition saw performers of all ages presenting widely varying monologues that raged from dramatic, comedic, and even monologues from Life Theater shows.

  In the evening, festival goers chose between three more full-length productions. Stageworks Theater hosted Dinner for Six, a comedy about a group of friends that revisit a life changing play they viewed in high school. The Jaeb theatre at the Straz hosted a fictional WWII drama, Six Triple Eight, a story about an entirely African-American female battalion, 6888, charged with delivering two years of mail in three months. The daily struggles of racism, war, and sexism, were present in the story, highlighted by a well-crafted script. The third show, The Green Grass, played on the main stage at HCC Ybor, exoring the truth behind the well-known expression “the grass is always greener on the other side.” After all of the shows ended, an open mic night was held at Stageworks, where volunteers sang the night away.

  Two sessions of shortplay competition set off the final day of the festival. Afterwards, the remaining two full-length shows closed out the activities for this year. The musical American Heartbeat explored the unusual relationship between a Vietnam veteran and an illegal immigrant, while The Nearly Final Almost Posthumous Play of the NotQuite-Dead Sutton Mcallister was more than just a difficult title to say. This comedy featured a hilarious ensemble with ulterior motives, a near death experience, and a world-renowned playwright.

  Aside from Lawrence’s opening play Hour Confessions, the other five fulllength shows featured at this year’s festival were all written by women: Tiffany Edwards, Martha Valez, Kris Bauske, and Lil Barcaski ,of Gypsy Stage Repertory. The festival closed with the Awards Party revealing the winners of the various competitions. Matt Mecurio won the monologue competition; April Lee with The Sub won the best short play, and Mary McCallum’s Six Triple Eight won the full-length competition. The Tampa Bay Theater Festival proved to be a highly educational, enlightening, and entertaining weekend for theater!