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With live shows canceled for a year, Tampa Rep to take ‘Flying’ virtual

Bill DeYoung

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This was to be a year of celebration for Tampa Repertory Theatre. The nonprofit professional theater company will celebrate its 10th anniversary in the fall.

Instead, its founder and chief visionary, C. David Frankel, died in March after a long struggle with cancer. And a week later, Covid-19 shut all performing arts organizations down indefinitely, including Tampa Rep.

Artistic director Emilia Sargent, who took over for Frankel, has decided that the company will not return in 2020, but will wait Covid out, with plans of re-launching with its 2021-22 season.

Along with the overall uncertainty about the return of “normalcy,” Sargent tells the Catalyst, Tampa Rep doesn’t not have its own home theater, but relies on rentals from the likes of Hillsborough Community College and the University of South Florida.

“We already needed to put off The Elephant Man at HCC until the fall of 2021,” she explains. “That was already going to be done.

“But with King Lear in January at USF, it’s really looking like we will not be where we thought we were going to be with the re-opening phases. And further, they’re going to be more conservative with the schools, understandably. So in an effort to make things a little more streamlined, we’ve chosen to go ahead and postpone the entire season.”

King Lear was scheduled for the 50-seat TAR theater at USF. “With distancing and capacity limitations with Phases 2 and 3, we really couldn’t sell many tickets – nor could we ensure the safety of so many actors in one space. Not to mention that King Lear is an older adult. It’s just not safe.”

In the meantime, the company’s first virtual production will stream live Aug. 16. It’s a re-mount of St. Petersburg playwright Sheila Cowley’s historical drama Flying, which Tampa Rep debuted in 2017.

Noted director L. Peter Callender will helm the virtual production, which will feature an all-Black cast.

Sargent explains that she had been thinking about how to brand Tampa Rep as an anti-racist company. “As small as we are, and in this growth phase that we’re about to jump into, it’s the perfect timing for us to take a pause, and take a look, and take action.

“So this is the first action that Tampa Rep is taking to engage our community of Black artists, specifically.”

Callender is Artistic Director of San Francisco’s African-American Shakespeare Company.

Flying is meant to be the first in a monthly series of virtual plays.

One more thing: There’s still a USF reservation in the big book of placeholders for Tampa Rep for June 2021. “So if by chance, a little less than a year from now, if we’re at the Phase 4, herd immunity and all of that, we would like to go ahead and do King Lear then,” Sargent says.

From June 4: Emilia Sargent on The Catalyst Sessions.

 

 

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