The inaugural Tampa Bay Theatre Festival takes place at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts, Stageworks, and the Courtyard by Mariott. Includes full-length play performances, a free networking social, an Improvisation workshop, and a 4-hour Acting Boot Camp taught by Hollywood actress Tasha Smith. Participating in the festival will be local theater personalities Gavin Hawk, Georgia Mallory Guy, Anna Brennen, Lil Barcaski and Nate Jacobs. $15-$20, workshops $10-$15, and the Acting Boot Camp $95. tampabaytheatrefestival.com.
The biggest mystery about this weekend’s Tampa Bay Theatre Festival is the man who organized it. How is it that a figure little known to most theater folk was able not just to imagine this area’s first dramatic festival, but to enlist the Straz Center, Stageworks, and a wide swath of local playwrights, performers, and teachers in its service? Who, in other words, is Rory Lawrence? And why haven’t most of us ever heard of him?
I sat down with Lawrence — featured in last week’s Fall Arts Preview as one of Tampa’s newest art execs — at a café in North Tampa and asked him to explain himself. (Full disclosure: I’ve agreed to leading a playwriting seminar at the festival.) He told me he’s originally from Mulberry, Fla., attended a Bible seminary, is married to a local psychologist, works as a background investigator of people applying for sensitive jobs, and has spent the last several years becoming an actor, director, playwright and producer.
Lawrence began training with Corinne Broskette of Venue Theatre a few years ago and acted in community theater in the Clearwater area, following that with work in independent films. But when he found it difficult to get cast by the Bay area’s professional theaters, he decided, typically, to make the road by walking: “I went to a couple friends of mine and said, ‘Hey, let’s start our own production company. They looked at me like, ‘We don’t do that.’ I said, ‘it can’t be too hard!”’
He called the new entity “RQL Productions,” and under that name mounted plays on the mainstage at the HCC Ybor Performance building, as well as at Stageworks and the Jaeb Theatre of the Straz Center — both of which he rented for the purpose. Having an outlet now for his acting and writing — two of the plays he produced were his own — he also became a fundraiser, selling advertising in theater programs, and starting a relationship with the immigration law firm Maney & Gordon, which has provided crucial backing for the Theatre Festival.
On that subject, he first had the idea as a visitor to a local enterprise. “I was in a film that was selected to be in the Gasparilla Film Festival. And I was like, ‘What’s that? I didn’t know what it was.’” What he discovered, to his surprise, was a “community of actors coming out, and the different films, and the people really coming together, having a good time, learning about the industry, and I was like, this is cool, is there anything like this for stage? ’Cause I didn’t know.” A while later, he says, “I got with my team, by then my team had gotten a little bit bigger, and I said, ‘We need to look into doing this.’” Searching online for existing festivals, Lawrence found the D.C. Black Theatre Festival in the nation’s capital as well as another festival in Atlanta. He submitted his new play Fighting God to both and was delighted when it was accepted for production. His experiences in Washington and Atlanta, he says, were eye-opening. He returned to Tampa, and “I sat in a room with about 20 people, and I said, okay guys, this is what we want to do. We sat in there for three-plus hours the first day,” considering, among other things, “what’s the budget. I had maybe $900 to start.”
Lawrence used his contacts at Stageworks and the Straz Center to help him secure both venues for workshops and play productions. He started a website (tampabaytheatrefestival.com), made a call for play submissions, and began hiring teachers. His intended audience, he says, was the sort of amateur in search of guidance that he knew well from his own experience: people with “a lot of raw natural talent but no training.” After a healthy response, he now allows himself to hope that as many as 1,500 people might come out for festival offerings. As for getting back some of the money he’s personally invested, “If I break even, I’ll be good.”
Lawrence thinks that TBTF will provide a service to the Bay area that it didn’t even know it was missing. “You don’t know you want something or need something until it’s there,” he says. Well, Rory Lawrence is here. And his festival is upon us. In a few days we’ll discover whether this little-known impresario, with his remarkable tendency to take the initiative, has brought to the Bay area an event our more seasoned professionals never imagined.