‘Good Peaches’ is a three-way creative collaboration

It’s right there, stated in bold black and white in the playwright’s notes for The Good Peaches: It asks for a “collaboration of the boldest kind.”

Quiara Alegría Hudes, who co-wrote the In the Heights musical with Lin-Manuel Miranda, and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Water By the Spoonful, insists that The Good Peaches be performed with an orchestra – not a backstage band, not a pit combo, but a full orchestra.

That’s a tall order, especially in this age of shrinking budgets and government funding cuts. Helen R. Murray, however, would not be dissuaded.

“I worry all the time about the state of the arts in America,” said the producing artistic director for St. Petersburg’s American Stage. “One of the ways in which I know that we can be stronger is when we collaborate. And I actually really do enjoy collaboration.”

And so The Good Peaches, presented at the Mahaffey Theater for two performances (2 and 8 p.m.) Saturday, is a full-on collaboration between American Stage, The Florida Orchestra and the dance company projectALCHEMY.

The scale of the project – because it involves so many participants  – dictates that everyone can only come together on this single performance day. “We’ve all learned from each other on this,” said Murray. “Because the way projectALCHEMY works, and the way they schedule their logistics is different. And we’re different from The Florida Orchestra’s logistics.

“And guess what? We’re all different from the Mahaffey’s logistics as well. So pre-planning and pre-production have been a really big deal on this – getting very detailed schedules and really understanding when each union has to take a break, who needs to be fed when, all of those things.

“How long before they get into body mics? How long do they need for costumes?”

Murray, Florida Orchestra resident conductor Chelsea Gallo and Alexander Jones, projectALCHEMY’s director, have been working, almost as a single creative entity, to deliver this envelope-pushing play to Tampa Bay.

“I love the collaboration we have going on. Alex and Chelsea are incredible artists in their own, individual way, and yet they’re so easy to work with in the room. And so malleable and adaptable. The give-and-take is very natural. It’s been pretty amazing.”

The story of a young girl (Aurora) who fights to survive a storm (both the physical and emotional kind), The Good Peaches features the orchestra not only punctuating and pulsing beneath nearly every scene, but creating the swirling brutality of the weather event as it happens (Murray: “The orchestra is truly woven into the fabric of the play.”) The show also utilizes lighting effects and projections.

Onstage are three actors – there’s no singing – and eight dancers.

“Chelsea, Alex and myself have spent a lot of time in pre-production and really mapping how the piece will work,” Murray explained. “So that by the time we got in the room together they wasn’t this big ‘What comes next?’ Especially because orchestras need their music six weeks in advance, and you’re not allowed to add anything once you give it over.”

Murray sees all sorts of positives in the cross-pollination exercise that is The Good Peaches. Regular American Stage audiences will learn about the orchestra, and about the dance troupe. And vice versa, and thrice versa.

And there’s one more thing: “It is something that this community faces every year – another hurricane season,” she pointed out. “So often we are the central character – we are Aurora – in the storm here.

“There’s a resiliency in the play, this idea of survival through the big storm, and what enrichment that we can find afterward. That we can carry forward. How we manage through a storm.”

Additional information, and tickets, can be found at this link.