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Drama ‘So Long Life’ reprised at Ybor City’s LAB
For Owen Robertson, the founder and heartbeat of LAB Theater Project, a rule is a rule – especially when it’s a cornerstone of the company manifesto.
The Ybor City theater company, now in its 10th season, only does new shows, those that have never been previously produced, anywhere.
Until now.
So Long Life, which has just begun its first weekend at LAB’s intimate black box theater, was first performed eight years ago.
It’s a dramatic rollercoaster, an emotional journey, and it knocked audiences at the then-new LAB right out of their seats. And so bringing it back for the 10th anniversary season seemed a bit of a no-brainer.
The first play Owen Robertson wrote, So Long Life is the story of aging stage actor Ned Masters, who lives in a small room over the bar he’s owned for years, the very watering hole where he and his acting colleagues used to hang out after the evening curtain came down.
That, however, was long ago, and Master’s is mostly empty these days. Day-to-day operations are handled by Ned’s longtime friends Sam and Mary, and by the actor’s daughter, Maggie.
Maggie’s main job is looking after her father, who has Alzheimer’s. It’s a tough gig, and she is stressed, afraid – and not a little resentful.
“They say write what you know,” Robertson explains. “So I wrote about caregiving and theater, the two things I know about.”
Robertson cared for his father, who suffered from COPD, for the last nine years of his life. Some of the feelings Maggie expresses in the show came from his own thought processes. “I theatricalized it a little bit, but the truths are still the truths,” says Robertson, who also directed this production.
The Masters family dynamic is revealed, bit by bit, as the story progresses. Ned has moments of clarity, but their brevity is maddening for his caregivers. There’s a deep and painful mystery at the heart of his history, and the search for truth is complicated by the arrival of a stranger, who has a surprising twist of his own to add.
While there are a few lighthearted moments in So Long Life, for the most part it’s serious and sometimes heartbreaking drama, expertly put across by actors Michael C. McGreevy (Ned), Lisa Malloy (Maggie), David Malloy (Sam), Isabel Natera (Mary) and Ricardo Fernandez as Charlie, the newcomer.
It’s not the same show that audiences saw eight years ago – the cast is different, and so is the script. Both details were important to give it fresh breath and new life.
“This play’s gone through many revisions and changes, but this version came down to nitty-gritty details,” Robertson reports.
“In some cases, just word adjustments. And this cast was very involved in that process; I worked with them very intensely, looking at lines and talking about them. ‘You’re creating this role – does it feel right to you?’ and everything like that.”
So Long Life, he believes, “is a story about hope. It’s a story about friendship, and what the power of friendship is. And what it means to be friends, even through tough times.
“We need things to give us hope, but we also need to be able to look at the difficult things and be OK with looking at them. We live in a world that’s full of people caring for other people. And there’s a catharsis that I think happens for people when they see this show.”
Find showtimes and tickets at the LAB website.
