Florida Studio Theatre sets the return of provocative Stage III season

Just three weeks after announcing plans for the return of its provocative Stage III series last year, Florida Studio Theatre postponed the schedule for a year to ease the stress on the company’s staff, which was just coming back from a COVID shutdown.

As it turned out, there were more than 50 understudy performances and about 50 others had to be canceled because of COVID.

But the situation has eased enough for the theater to announce plans to restart the series in January with the same schedule of three plays. The theater had been in the middle of technical rehearsals for one of the plays, Etan Frankel’s “Paralyzed” when theaters shut down in March 2020.

At the time, Producing Artistic Director Richard Hopkins said there was a concern that positive COVID cases might cause the theater to run out of spaces to house actors and other theater workers who needed to be isolated.

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“Paralyzed” is now set to run March 29-April 21 as the final production in the series, with the same actors, Rachel Moulton and Alexander Stuart, returning to their roles of two strangers with similar names whose lives become intertwined after she finds a suicide note in a hotel room. The two actors previously starred together in the company’s production of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” and were eager to reunite on the stage.

The Stage III season will begin with a delayed production of Jacqueline Goldfinger’s “Babel” (Jan. 18-Feb. 10) and continues in March with Anna Ziegler’s “The Last Match” (Feb. 22-Mar. 17) in the Bowne’s Lab Theatre, 1265 First St., Sarasota.

Hopkins said “Babel” may be more timely this winter in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Giving new plays a launching point

FST is the last of five theaters to present “Babel” as part of a rolling world premiere program coordinated by the National New Play Network, which works with a number of theaters around the country to get new works off the ground and lighten the pressure on the initial production.

“This one has been rolling for several years,” he said.

“Babel,” directed by associate artist Catherine Randazzo, is set in a near-future when expectant parents can learn within a few weeks of pregnancy what traits and behaviors their children will exhibit after birth. The government uses those tests to determine which babies are born. It also explores the efforts two couples go through to have a baby.

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While he has seen audiences grow more “prickly as issues have become politicized and people take sides,” Hopkins said it is important for the theater to deal with a variety of subjects.

“Our goal is to put the issues on the stage and not to attempt to provide the answers. Otherwise, we would be putting our version of propaganda on stage,” he said.

He describes “The Last Match” as a “human drama about ego involving two tennis players at their peak who have to work so hard to get to that high performance and what it takes to stay there.”

One is American and the other is Russian. “Some people may view the Russian guy differently now because of what’s going on in Ukraine,” he said, but it is still a personal story about “how you set your goals in life and what happens when those goals change and evolve.”

The play, which had its world premiere at The Old Globe theater in San Diego in 2016, will receive its regional premiere in Sarasota directed by Kate Alexander, the theater’s associate director at large.

A long-delayed world premiere

To close the season, FST will bring back the same cast and director that was so close last year to opening “Paralyzed,” a play that the theater has been working on with Frankel to develop for about a decade. He has been a writer for such TV shows as “Shameless” and “Friday Night Lights.”

Moulton and Stuart are working with director Meg Gilbert on the production. Gilbert describes it as a “story about two people who have been marginalized by society in different ways and their lives kind of start spinning closer and closer to each other and eventually intersect.”

The play has had readings and workshops going back to 2007, and FST apprentices did a performance of the play in 2012.

For subscription and ticket information: 941-366-9000; floridastudiotheatre.org

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Sarasota's Florida Studio Theatre sets return of edgy Stage III series