Jobsite’s ‘Deep Blue Sea’ is a visceral pas de deux

Playwright John Patrick Shanley subtitled his Danny and the Deep Blue Sea “An Apache Dance.” In French culture, this refers to a volatile and often violent encounter, leavened with moments of tenderness.

In the current Jobsite Theater production, “dancers” Danny and Roberta are played by Alex Teicheira and Georgia Mallory Guy. They thrust and parry, zig and zag and stomp on one another’s feet as they move towards an inevitable clinch.

Danny and Roberta meet, awkwardly, in a dive bar in a working-class Bronx neighborhood. They’re both emotionally battered, shattered, abused and broken people.

It is not, observes actress Guy, “pedestrian broken-ness that we might find on an everyday level.”

Summer Bohnenkamp directs the dance between these two walled-up people for whom openness, and intimacy, are but distant memories.

Somehow, they connect.

Although Guy is a well-known Tampa Bay thespian (most recently seen in God of Carnage at Tampa Repertory Theatre), Teicheira is making his local debut. The California native lives in Sarasota and frequently works with Florida Studio Theatre.

Teicheira remembers performing scenes from Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, as well as Shanley’s Doubt and Savage in Limbo, during his undergraduate days at Berkeley.

He’s also a fan of actor John Turturro, who originated the character of Danny off-Broadway in 1983, and of the story’s “gritty” New York realism.

“The thing about this play,” Teicheira says, “you never can quite predict where the other person’s going. And once you see that person’s consumed in flames, how do I put out that fire? Oh, that fire’s out? Great! Now there’s another fire. I gotta put that fire out.

“Or maybe we gotta let each other burn for a while. Let it burn off, and then we can talk to each other again.”

After an initial audition via Zoom, Teicheira was called in to read with actresses under consideration for Roberta. The chemistry had to be right.

“I already had this rhythm in my head of what I wanted to do with Danny,” explained Teicheira. “Maybe he was a bit off-center, off-balance, maybe talks a little loud. Has to control something.

“And then I got paired with Georgia. And I could tell right away that she had done some homework. She had some choices made, and she was fun to play off of. So I think there was some idiosyncrasies in the rhythm of his pattern of speech, and his thought process too, that made it stand out. With Georgia, too.”

Like Danny and Roberta, they clicked.

“You could tell what she wanted, and you could tell there were moments when she was considering something and maybe making choices I wasn’t expecting. Which was fun.”

Guy, who’s also the producing artistic director of the theater company ThinkTank, fully inhabits the dramatic characters she portrays (see Jobsite’s scarily good 2025 production of The Pillowman).

“I always joke about when I have to get up and give curtain speeches, as myself, I’m never super one hundred percent comfortable in a room full of people looking at Georgia,” she says. “I’ll walk offstage and say ‘Was that dumb? Did I sound dumb?’

“But when I get to say someone else’s words, and try to find the life of them, I just feel so much more comfortable sometimes in another person’s skin.”

Her graduate school mentor told her it would take 10 or 15 years before that “another person’s skin” thing would work without her trying too hard. “And that was true. And so now, I feel like I can dig into a script and a character, and find little nuances, and trust that I’m also guided by the director who’s watching that.”

With the support of Bohnenkamp, and her co-star, “it’s not hard to go there if you just really open up. And that’s the joy of it.”

Despite the play’s dark tone, Guy insists there’s a positive message among the wreckage of the character’s lives.

“If these people can find each other and connect, I think it provides a little piece of hope that a person who’s carrying their own personal baggage – because we all do – can still find connection.

“Or move through things that are bogging them down or depressing them, or something that they just can’t seem to get rid of. For whatever reason.”

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea continues through May 31 in the Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center, Tampa. For showtimes and tickets, visit the website.