Create
New slate of shows announced for the Off-Central
With just 42 seats, the Off-Central, at 2260 1st Avenue S. in St. Petersburg, isn’t likely to challenge the Straz Center or Ruth Eckerd Hall for live-theater supremacy in terms of production values or massive audience size.
A tiny black box theater, however, gives visitors the unparalleled opportunity to get up close and personal with a drama or a comedy. There’s no nosebleed section in the room; it’s as intimate as humanly possible.
The theater’s fourth season has just been announced, and as with previous years it’s a varied assemblage of new, boundary-breaking and familiar works, produced, directed and performed by what’s become one of the bay area’s most reliably interesting repertory companies.
Off-Central shows generally have a single set, and a small cast. “So much as I’d like to do something big, Hamilton just wouldn’t work in here,” says company founder and artistic director Ward Smith. When choosing shows, he adds, “I go with my gut, pretty much. If I like it, and I can see people doing it in here, production-wise.”
Roxanne Fay and Ward Smith in “Native Gardens,” 2023. Image: Stage Photography of Tampa.
Alan Mohney, Jr. directs Blackbird Sept. 5-15. In David Harrower’s one-act drama follows Ray (played by Smith) and Una (MacKenzie Aaryn), who’d had a brief affair when she was a pre-teen and he was an adult. Now they’re seeing each other for the first time in many years.
Roxanne Fay directs The Hollow Oct. 3-13. The versatile theater-maker wrote the one-person adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Alan Mohney Jr. stars.
Coming Nov. 7-17 is The Sound Inside, by Adam Rapp, about a creative writing professor at Yale who tutors an unusual young student. Debbie Yones directs Fay and Weston Allen Kemp.
Mohney and Smith team up for the holiday-season comedy perennial A Tuna Christmas Dec. 5-15, with direction by Ami Sallee.
The first production of the new year is Jerry Mayer’s 2 Across. Mohney directs Yones and Michael Arce Jan. 30-Feb. 9. It’s a one-act “dramatic comedy” about two strangers who meet on a rapid transit car in middle-of-the-night San Francisco; the official synopsis is “They’re alone in the car, each is married, both are doing the New York Times crossword.”
Smith directs Carey Crim’s Morning After Grace March 6-16, described as “a hilarious and heartwarming new comedy that tackles love, loss and coming to terms with growing old.” It’s set in a Florida retirement community and has not yet been cast.
Sallee directs K.T. Peterson’s Love Bird April 10-25; Fay co-stars with Katherine Yacko. The Off-Central description for this one is “Love Bird is about loneliness, queerness, the meaning of devotion in a single-use society, and the mystery of connection in a messy world.”
Each Off-Central season also includes staged readings, concerts, cabarets and comedy nights.
Season tickets and more can be found here.
