Bob Devin Jones returns with some seriously ‘Mad Panic’

Retirement looks good on Bob Devin Jones.

After 20 years in the managerial saddle, the writer, actor and director passed the reins of The Studio@620 to someone else (Erica Sutherlin) a year ago. He’d co-founded St. Petersburg’s community venue for performing and visual arts, and discovered that his creative side more often than not took a back seat to keeping the place humming.

“I find I’m not a multi-tasker,” said the 70-year-old native Californian. “My generation says ‘I can do it all.’ No, you can’t. And nor should you try. Because you’re not going to be present. I can be present a finite number of places, and I realize that.

“And I’m a late bloomer, and I take things in sequentially, not all at once. And the older I get, the older I get.”

Jones the creator is back in action this weekend with a new production at The Studio. Onstage Thursday through Saturday, A Delicious Evening of Mad Panic presents four actors (Lance Felton, Alex Jostura, Troy Brooks and Sharon Scott) performing an intimate one-act play in the first half, and narrative readings in the second. He is the show’s director.

“Delicious” might be Bob Devin Jones’ most-used adjective. It’s his go-to, as part of a larger diorama of food metaphors. When he describes something that way, he’s implying that it’s so good it’s almost indescribable.

And life after retirement is delicious, indeed.

“I think creativity, arts and culture is a daily nutrition,” he explained. “So even when I’m not charging forward, I’m still charging. And St. Petersburg is just a fascinating, relentlessly delicious city to live in. We’re dieting ourselves on splendidness. The city nurtures us the way Paris was a moveable feast.”

Stepping away, he said, has made him appreciate the “deep bench” of talent, and opportunity, available to one and all in his adopted city.

“I didn’t have the bandwidth to take it all in. Now, ostensibly, I have the time – but I still have the appetite for creativity. And there are a lot of creative people living here.”

Four of them, he stressed, are part of his Delicious Evening. “I’m blessed with actors who, at some point in my journey as an actor, I was that way. It’s nice to see them hungry and desirous of laying it in.”

Lance Felton. Photo provided.

Felton, Jostura and Brooks appear in Kevin Wardlaw’s one-act Battle Wounds at the top of  the show. “It’s a character who’s suffering from manic and depressive occurrences – so there’s Frank, Frank Manic and Frank Depressive,” explained Jones. “The easiest thing to do now is tell the truth; Kevin tells the truth in this play.

“I was committed to mounting it before I retired, but oft times the plans of mice and men, and all the rest of it … and I have these three actors who are just deliciously brilliant. Great actors with great words to speak.

“And the way they’re lifting the play off the page made me want to add these narratives. So the full title of the evening is A Delicious Evening of Mad Panic: Narratives of Resilience, Gratitude and Thanksgiving.”

He added: “Mad like Beethoven, mad like Miles Davis, mad like James Baldwin.”

The Act Two narratives include two readings from Jones’ own Uncle Bend’s: A Home-Cooked Negro Narrative, and several others.

Jones will be back June 24, directing a staged reading of Felton’s Black History They Don’t Want You to Know, with the author in performance, at Webb’s City Cellar, part of Green Bench Brewing (“Which is a little bit ironic, given the title of the play”).

Felton has been in Jones’ creative orbit for several years, and the old director is one of the young actor’s biggest fans.

“He’s just a little bit over Jesus’ age, but he’s on fire,” Jones said. “I didn’t get on fire until my 40s. And he has the credentials – just by the fact that he’s living – to speak his truth. And he definitely knows how to do that.

“And that, James Baldwin says, is all you can write about, what you know to be true. It can take different forms, but ultimately you’re writing about what you know. It can inform your imagination, and your wisdom, and your flights of fancy.

“But if you ain’t lived it, how could you write about it? How could you speak on it?”

For showtimes and tickets to A Delicious Evening of Mad Panic, visit this link.

For tickets and info on Black History They Don’t Want You to Know, visit this link.