Six new plays debut this week on bay area stages

There’s always a lot of talk about St. Petersburg as a “City of the Arts.” To some, that implies visual art – gallery paintings, sculpture, murals and the like. In which we are certainly rich.

Other believe that not enough attention is paid to the performing arts.

Six new plays debut this week in the Tampa Bay area, and four of them are in St. Petersburg.

Can we call ourselves a “City of the Performing Arts,” too? This evidence would appear to support it.

The new show at American Stage is Meteor Shower, a bizarre comedy penned by none other than Steve Martin. Two Ojai, California couples are enjoying dinner and drinks outdoors, waiting for a spectacular view of the evening’s meteor shower.

Things don’t exactly go as planned as the cosmos come closer. “The couples begin to flirt and wild antics ensue,” according to stageagent.com. The absurdist one-act, recommended for 16+ audiences, is directed by Anthony Gervais. Find tickets, and more information, at this link.

Dylan Barlowe and Darilyn Castillo are in the cast of the comedy “Meteor Shower,” opening this week at American Stage. Photo by Anthony Gervais.

Bridging Freedom, a Tampa Bay nonprofit working to end child sex trafficking, will receive 50 percent of the proceeds from The End Slavery Monologues, onstage Friday and Saturday (at 8 p.m. and 3 p.m., respectively) at Stageworks Theatre in Tampa. It’s a “theatre documentary” with 11 women telling their stories, all of the based on real testimony from victims and those closest to them.

Director Janet Salem put it this way: “These stories are not about victims. They are about people who survived, and who are still here, telling us. Our job is to listen, and then to do something.” Find tickets, and more information, at this link.

Dan Brown’s bestselling historical thriller The Da Vinci Code has been adapted for the stage, and St. Pete’s freeFall Theatre is diving into its twists and turns starting Saturday night (with preview performances Friday evening and Saturday at 3 p.m.)

For anyone who hasn’t read the book, or seen the Ron Howard-directed film, it’s the story of mysterious clues to a murder – and something far more sinister – hidden inside the works of Leonardo da Vinci. Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, charged with deciphering the code, was played, in the movie, by Tom Hanks. The freeFall production, with James Putnam in the Langdon role and Noa Friedman as his accomplice Sophie Neveu, is directed by Matthew McGee. Find tickets, and more information, at this link.

Based on the hit 2004 novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pierson, the fantasy Peter and the Starcatcher begins a three-weekend run Thursday at the Shimberg Playhouse, the smallest theater inside Tampa’s Straz Center for the Performing Arts. ThinkTank Theatre and the Tampa Repertory Theatre are combining forces on this (Tony-winning) play about the origins of Peter Pan.

The cast blends bay area professional actors with members of ThinkTank’s Young Artists’ Ensemble Intern Company. Cameron Kubly directs. Find tickets, and more information, at this link.

Joshua Daniel Hershfield is the American/Canadian/Israeli writer, composer and lyricist of RISE: The Rock Musical. Based on the true stories of the Kashariyot (couriers), young Jewish women who disguised themselves as Aryan and traveled through Nazi territory to make deliveries for the Underground, the work will be presented in salon-style excerpts Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Florida Holocaust Museum, St. Petersburg (one performance only).

Hershfield, who holds a Master’s degree in Holocaust Studies from Haifa University, will speak following the performance. Find tickets, and more information, at this link.

Stephen Riordan directs Regrets Only, at The Studio, for his Dead Canary Theatre company. The comedy by Paul Rudnick is a “Manhattan comedy of manners,” set in a Park Avenue penthouse, focusing on the close friendship between a wealthy Manhattan socialite and a successful gay fashion designer (played, in the original Broadway production, by George Grizzard and the estimable Christine Baranski).

Regrets Only opens Thursday and will run at the venue formerly known as The Studio@620 through Nov. 15. The cast includes Andresia Moseley, Peter Jackson, Travis Moore and others. Find tickets, and more information, at this link.

The curtain comes down on Jobsite Theater’s stage adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery (at the Jaeb Theatre, Tampa) this weekend. Sunday’s matinee will be the final performance.

Two more productions join the club next week: Story Keepers’ A Bodega Princess Remembers La Fiesta e Los Reyes Megos 1998 at First United Methodist Church fellowship hall, Pinellas Park, and Destroying David at the Off-Central in St. Petersburg. Both are one-person shows and both are scheduled to run Nov. 12-22.