2006 – 07 Season
Creative Loafing Best of the Bay
- Best Theater Company
In a little less than 10 years, Jobsite has become the closest thing to a top Off-Broadway theater that the Bay area has to offer. Artistic director David Jenkins and his clever board of directors have an uncanny ability to find important and demanding plays: How did they know to program Jean-Claude van Itallie’s avant-garde The Serpent in the same season with Neil LaBute’s uncompromising This is How it Goes and Alan Ayckbourn’s undervalued tour de force Woman in Mind? How did they know that audiences would turn out for the scorching Pillowman and David Rabe’s withering Hurlyburly?
While the productions put on by other local theaters last season were hit-and-miss, Jobsite shows were consistently first-rate. If you believed in theater as an art form, if you looked to stage plays to provide you not just with entertainment but with illumination, Jobsite had to be your destination. Bay area culture wouldn’t be the same without it.
– Creative LoafingMainstage Season
The Pillowman
By Martin McDonagh
Directed by David M. Jenkins
Oct. 12 – Nov. 5, 2006
Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm
Tickets: $19.50 – $24.50
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
The Pillowman is an exhilarating and vicious comedy-drama about a fiction writer (Steve Garland) in a totalitarian state who is interrogated when a number of bizarre incidents occurring in his town resemble the gruesome content of his short stories. When the writer’s mentally impaired brother (Paul Potenza) is also brought in for questioning by two officers (Ryan McCarthy and Matt Lunsford), the police procedural takes unforeseen twists and turns.
The Serpent
By Jean Claude van Itallie in collaboration with The Open Theater
Directed by Chris Holcom
Extended! Dec. 8 – 17, 2006
Fri. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm
Tickets: $15.50
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
The Serpent is a poignant, provocative parable which takes its cue from the legends about Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and traces the legends backward, forward, and sideways to track a path through existence. Alternately, the parable is fierce and funny, myth and reality, and mingled with contemporary experience.
All The Great Books (Abridged)
By Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor
Directed by Katrina Stevenson
Jan. 12 – Feb. 4, 2007
Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm
Tickets: $19.50 – $24.50
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
Get your learn on when Tampa Bay’s original “Bad Boys of Abridgement” return to give audiences a crash course on the best of Western Literature in All the Great Books (abridged). This time around, they cover 89 of the greatest books in 90 minutes. They study hard so that you don’t have to!
This Is How It Goes
By Neil Labute
Directed by Ami Sallee
Jan. 25 – Feb. 11, 2007
Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm
Tickets: $19.50 – $24.50
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
The southeastern US premiere of This is How it Goes! The black jock, the fat dork and the white cheerleader – 12 years later. In true Neil LaBute (The Shape of Things, Fat Pig, In the Company of Men) fashion, 45-degree turns run rampant, keeping both the audience and characters on their toes. He targets small town middle America for a new tale of manipulation, exploitation, race and infidelity through the story of an interracial love triangle.
The March Of The Kitefliers
By Neil Gobioff & Shawn Paonessa
Directed by Kari Goetz
Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm
Mar. 29 – Apr. 15, 2007
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
The Triumphant Return!
When Sam (Shawn Paonessa) graduated from college with a double major in art and marketing, he had big dreams of a career in advertising. The corporate world submitted him to a mediocre job, while he chronically pursued his dreams through vivid fantasy. When Julia (Meg Heimstead) walks into his life, Sam is suddenly forced to decide whether to finally grow up and pursue the woman he loves, or follow the footsteps of his best friend, Jack (David M. Jenkins), who lives in a perpetual state of childhood. What ensues is an endearing romantic comedy and a hilarious post-modern satire that asks, “Who are we really, and what ever happened to the dreamers within us when we were children?” See more about The March of the Kitefliers.
Woman In Mind
By Alan Ayckbourn
Directed by David M. Jenkins
Jun. 7 – 24, 2007
Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm
Tickets: $19.50 – $24.50
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
Sir Alan Ayckbourn (Norman Conquests, Absurd Person Singular, Absent Friends), one of the most popular and prolific playwrights in the world, goes deeper and darker in Woman in Mind – a play about a bored housewife named Susan who is married to a stodgy vicar. After regaining consciousness from a comical accident, Susan experiences a series of hallucinations in which her tedious, loveless and oppressive everyday life is replaced by a fantasy world where she is the ideal wife and mother of an ideal family. The two halves of her life eventually collide with hilarity and heartbreak.
Hurlyburly
By David Rabe
Directed by Jason Vaughan Evans
Aug. 9 – 16, 2007
Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm
Tickets: $19.50 – $24.50
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
In Hurlyburly, Eddie’s world exists at the very juncture where Hollywood meets the mountains, where the almost-rich and not-yet-famous live on cheap thrills and heady ambition while searching for true love and redemption. Here, Eddie and his three best friends engage in a wild life of witty repartee and snappy come-backs, of ex-wives and future lovers, of hard partying and late nights, of sex, lies and self-obsession.
Encore Production
The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (Abridged)
Nov. 10–12, 2006
Fri. – Sat. 8 pm, Sun. 4 pm
Shimberg Playhouse, TBPAC
FREE for Jobsite season ticket holders.
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
Having shrunk Shakespeare’s wit and wisdom into manageable morsels of madness, Jobsite returns with an encore performance of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) to tear around the stage in doublets and Chuck Taylor’s on a riotous romp through all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays plus the sonnets all in an hour and a half.
