Ladd, Leavengood: Together again at The Studio@620

In a manner of speaking, Bill Leavengood found his muse when he met Amanda Ladd.

Ladd is his favorite actress. And Leavengood is her favorite playwright/director.

The theatrical twosome first met in 2018 at New Circle, the developmental theater company in New York City where Leavengood, who a longtime theater instructor at St. Petersburg’s Shorecrest Preparatory School, often went to work out, and workshop, his plays. He directed there, too.

Ladd and her husband live in Brooklyn, and when she wasn’t on the road as a thespian-for-hire, she was at New Circle.

To date, she has appeared in numerous Leavengood works, including the critically-acclaimed one-woman show The Azure Sky in Oz.

Gabriel Neustadt

They’re together again this weekend at The Studio@620. Leavengood is directing Tail of the Bell, a drama by Gabriel Neustadt. There are performances Thursday through Sunday.

Here’s where irony plays a major role. Ladd, Leavengood discovered in time, had grown up in St. Petersburg, a graduate of Northside Christian School’s Class of ’98.

Eric Jacobson

Playwright Neustadt studied under Leavengood, at Shorecrest, for four years. Here in St. Pete. As did Eric Jacobson, the actor playing opposite Ladd in Tail of the Bell.

It was all coincidence. Well, mostly.

“Gabe sent me the play, and I was just so taken with it,” Leavengood recalls. “Not only was I crazy impressed with Gabe’s work, but I said ‘He did it exactly like I taught him how to write a play.’ All these things that I preached, preached, preached. He has his own voice, but he listened and he learned everything I taught him.”

After St. Pete, Neustadt continued to hone his craft as a student at Harvard University, and was currently working as a screenwriter and playwright in Los Angeles. Via email, he and Leavengood used each other as sounding boards for their scripts.

Jacobson, meanwhile, was working as an actor in Chicago.

Leavengood and Ladd pulled everyone together to workshop – and hopefully produce – Tail of the Bell at a repertory theater near Asheville, North Carolina, where the Ladds have a second home.

Because that’s what theater people do.

“The process has been dreamy in the sense that everybody was available,” Ladd reports. “They came and stayed with me for a week, and we workshopped it together.

“It’s not like we were working all the time. There’s just something that happens when you get the opportunity to really live in the work, and with the people. And they did this when I had a 2-year-old in the house!

“But that was wonderful. That’s what I hope for my kid, is that he’s surrounded by goofy artists.”

In Tail of the Bell, Ladd plays the divorced mother of a teenage girl. Jacobson, the only other performer, plays the girl’s tutor.

“This really has been a foursome made in heaven,” Leavengood adds. “We work so well together. We’re on the same wavelength. None of us have a problem with saying ‘Well, yeah, I don’t know about that’ or ‘This line doesn’t work here – how about this?’”

Tail of the Bell had a successful run in August at Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre in Mars Hill, North Carolina. Not a single member of the creative quartet, however, wanted the process to end there.

Leavengood remembers saying, out loud: “Wouldn’t it be cool for us all to come down to St. Pete and do the play while it’s still fresh in our heads?”

He teaches acting and other theatrical pursuits at The Studio@620, so he contacted venue director Erica Sutherlin, who agreed to put on Tail of the Bell. St. Pete’s Dean Wick built the set.

Reflecting on those early days in New York, Leavengood described Ladd as “not only a great actor, she’s great to work with. I just really liked her energy. Then I found out she was from St. Pete! And just as soon as I cast Amanda in something I said ‘I love this person.’”

Some directors, Ladd stresses, are just not receptive to suggestions from members of the cast. “I realized that Bill wants whatever is going to make the moment better,” she says. “And actors can help you do that. They shouldn’t re-write a playwright, but they can help find stuff. And we figured out a way to communicate with each other that made that happen.

“There’s just certain artists that you have a vibe with. And we have a vibe.”

Find showtimes and tickets for Tail of the Bell at this link.