‘Talking With’ makes a return visit to Stageworks

The true identity of the playwright known as Jane Martin may never be revealed. Many believe it’s a pen name for Louisville, Kentucky theatrical director Jon Jory, whose Humana Festival for New American Plays premiered Martin’s first show, Talking With, in 1982, and the dozen that followed (including Sez She, Jack and Jill and Vital Signs).

Talking With, which begins a three-weekend run at Stageworks Theatre Friday, is a collection of female-centric monologues, poignant and humorous. Whoever wrote the play – male, female or somewhere in between – gave each character a unique perspective on the human condition.

“It consists of 11 women telling their personal stories to the audience, and drawing the audience into their world,” explain Stageworks director Rosemary Orlando. “They’re all separate but all, in a way, at the end of their rope – or they have been pushed to the limit in one way or the other.”

The 11 “characters” are given loose-fitting names to describe the subjects of their monologues: Fifteen Minutes, Scraps, Clear Glass Marbles, Audition, Rodeo, Twirler, Lamps, Handler, Dragons, French Fries and Marks.

Take gender and all other so-called “definers” off the table, suggests Orlando, and every member of the audience will find fragments of familiarity in its lines somewhere.

“It’s about how people define themselves. So that it can relate to anybody. We’re talking about losing your faith. Getting older. Grief. Something that affects and touches each and every one of us.”

Stageworks Theatre founder Anna Brennan was fond of Talking With; she directed the show twice. In both productions, Orlando – a longtime Tampa-area performer –  had the Clear Glass Marbles monologue, in which a young girl copes with her mother’s death by sweetly recalling her eccentricities.

The new production, the first in the Channelside theater Stageworks has called home since 2011, is being presented as a tribute to Brennan, who died in 2021.

“She had a keen eye for character development,” Orlando reveals, “and personalization. The first time I did Clear Glass Marbles, my own mother was dying. And I think that was something Anna could talk about – she could get into your psyche and help kind of shovel around in there.”

Orlando pauses. “Sometimes she was a little brutal when she did it.”

Orlando is playing Clear Glass Marbles in the 2023 production. Many of the “new” performers are theater students at the University of Tampa, where she is an adjunct professor and has, in fact, directed another Talking With production (she also helmed another Martin comedy, Cementville).

In earlier times, when Stageworks was a “gypsy” theater without a theater of its own, rehearsals were held in Brennan’s living room. And because of the tight squeeze, the cast rarely rehearsed on the same days. Sometimes they didn’t even meet one another until they arrived at whatever theater Brennan was renting.

All of which emphasized the “separateness” of the individual monologues, Orlando remembers.

“Now we have the luxury of platforms, and lighting,” she says, “and our own, big stage.

 “I’ve tried to tie it all together and make it more of a look into a group of women. We have a violinist who kind of links everybody together.”

Details and tickets are here.