Nathan Jokela has rapidly become the Tampa Bay area’s favorite leading man. It started just over a year ago, when he played George in Stageworks’Of Mice and Men, continued last May, when he portrayed Brick in Tampa Rep’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and is going on this very weekend, when he’ll be acting as Joe Farkas in Jobsite Theater’s continuing The Last Night of Ballyhoo.
Can one young (29) University of Tampa graduate really convince us he’s a penniless Depression-era wanderer in the American West, then a wealthy drunk from a fraught Southern family, and then a Jewish Brooklynite who’s just arrived in 1939 Atlanta? Yes, Jokela can. In each part he’s been superb, finding the heart of his character with apparent effortlessness, and giving his audience a complex experience that rewarded scrutiny.
No wonder Gavin Hawk of A Simple Theatre has already tapped Jokela to play the lead part of Benjamin Braddock in next month’s reading of The Graduate. No wonder Connie LaMarca-Frankel has asked Jokela to play Jack Worthing in the soon-to-be-recorded radio version of The Importance of Being Earnest. When there’s a talent like this available, directors take note.
I sat down with Jokela and asked him how he got to the Bay area. He told me that he grew up in Naples, Fla., matriculated at UT as a theater major, and then moved to New York. There he repeatedly faced frustration.
“You know, projects never went anywhere sometimes. ... The cattle call auditions were a total brand new thing that I had never seen in my entire life. So getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning, and going to a giant room with hundreds of other people who were vying for the same one part as you. And you’re not even guaranteed to be seen that day.” After five months, Jokela decided to return to Naples.
Back home, he contemplated giving up the stage forever. But he couldn’t: “I was miserable,” he said. “I think every artist kind of has something innately inside them that if they’re not doing it somehow, it just kind of eats away at their soul.” So with Bay area theaters in mind, he moved to St. Petersburg, found a day job to pay the bills, and started going to auditions. He was picked immediately — for a Stageworks evening of short plays. That led to a part in Hat Trick’s And Then There Was None, which was seen by actor/director Richard Coppinger, who asked Jokela to audition for Of Mice and Men. “And it just kind of kept going,” Jokela said: each job led to another. And another. And now Ballyhoo.
He said his method as an actor is pretty straightforward: he searches for a personal connection with his character and builds on that. For example, Brick in Cat: “Brick is a former athlete and raging alcoholic. I’ve never been either of those. What I took from there was the despair and the disappointment and the overall depression and his isolation from his surroundings. And we’ve all been there. It may not be to that degree, but you can kind of find that little nugget in the Venn diagram that connects you to him, and you just push on through with that.”
As for playing Joe Farkas in the current production of Ballyhoo, “It’s a lot of fun. ... He’s just that classic story of lone wolf, fish out of water from out of town, who shakes things up in his surroundings that previously seemed to be going fine.” Jokela said that he benefited mightily when director Gavin Hawk invited a rabbi to come talk to the cast about the show’s Jewish themes. And he thinks the “bigger message” of the play is that “we’re all interconnected. Everybody can get along, everybody can enjoy and appreciate other people’s cultures and be open-minded and accepting.”
As to the future, well, he wants to get into some acting classes, do more film and TV, and find an agent. And he’d like to play John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible¸ a play he deeply loves. And, he told me, he has a dark secret: “I’m not a huge Shakespeare fan: It never grabbed me.” Still, he wouldn’t mind playing Iago. “It’d be fun to play the villain, I think.”
I suspect he’d be fine as Iago — and in a hundred other roles besides. Because Jokela is the real thing, a natural talent whose capacities are still being sounded. Watch for him in Ballyhoo— and expect him to turn up in many plays to come.
The Last Night of Ballyhooruns through Sept. 28, 8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat., 4 p.m. Sun. Regularly priced tickets start at $28. Straz Center’s Shimberg Playhouse, Tampa, 813-229-STAR, jobsitetheater.org.