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Arts Alive! podcast: Creating Jobsite’s ‘Butterfly’
The latest production from Tampa’s Jobsite Theater is a low-key, minimalist interpretation of a play written by a Spanish poet over 100 years ago.
Federico Garcia Lorca’s The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, an English translation of his very first theatrical work, El maleficio de la mariposa, opens tonight in the Shimberg Playhouse, the intimate black box theater at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts.
Today’s guests are Jobsite artistic director David M. Jenkins, who directed the production, and actor/singer Spencer Meyers, a longtime Jobsite associate who’s not in the Butterfly cast, but whose input was essential to the overall look, and feel, of the show.
The six actors onstage portray insects in a meadow. Garcia Lorca’s gently poetic words – some of which have become song lyrics – are channeled through hand puppets.
Spencer Meyers created the unusual, futuristic-looking “bug puppets.”
The Butterfly’s Evil Spell also uses the talents of musician Jeremy Douglass, who composed the music and plays it from a perch on the side of the stage; set designer Chris Guiffre; choreographer Alexander Jones; lighting designer Jo Averill-Snell; and costumes by another longtime Jobsite company member, Katrina Stevenson, who also plays the titular butterfly.
This rich collaborative tapestry forms the nucleus of today’s conversation. Jenkins also explains how a decidedly non-commercial, but creatively stimulating production fits alongside sure-fires like POTUS, Macbeth, The Pillowman and Gorey Stories into the Jobsite season.
Click on the arrow to listen to the interview:
