Homeless Gypsy gazes into the future
The gay theater company has three plays in the works. All it needs now is a place to stage its productions.
By JOHN FLEMING
Published June 18, 2007
ST. PETERSBURG - Party animals are not necessarily theatergoers.
That's one lesson Trevor Keller learned during the last four years when his gay theater company was located in a gay resort.
Keller is artistic director of Gypsy Productions, which put on plays in a small theater at the Suncoast Resort. The 9-year-old hotel, retail and entertainment complex on U.S. 19 in St. Petersburg closed after one last bash Sunday, the property sold to make way for a Home Depot.
Suncoast went out with a Tea Dance. The Sunday afternoon parties were some of the resort's most popular events, but it was rare for anyone who attended them to make it past the crowd around the pool to take in The Boys in the Band or Corpus Christi at the theater.
"If anything, people would see the advertisements for our shows when they were there for the Tea Dance, and they might come back another day, " Keller said last week over breakfast at a diner. "But most of the time they were there for just the bars."
Keller, who operates Gypsy with his partner, Daryl Epperly, got the notice just a month ago to vacate the 88-seat Suncoast Theatre. Before setting out to find a new venue, the company finished off the run of Two Spoons, a comedy by Peter Mercurio about two men whose relationship is thrown into turmoil by a brief menage a trois they have with a male model.
"Suncoast was a good place for us to get our feet wet, " Keller said. "But I also think it was a huge obstacle. I think the heterosexual community is comfortable enough to go see a show that has some type of gay theme, but to go to a gay resort is a bit much. I also heard from a lot of people in the gay community that they would not set foot on the property, because their perception of it was that it was a glorified bathhouse."
Keller estimates that only 2 percent of the theater's audience were resort patrons. "Partially I think the resort didn't get the word out to them, " he said. "But mainly people who were coming to stay at the resort were coming to go to the bars."
Gypsy had some successes, such as Thrill Me, an innovative new musical by Stephen Dolginoff on the infamous Leopold-Loeb murder case. The biggest hit was the 2004 production of Martin Sherman's Bent, a classic of gay theater about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals.
"Bent was my highlight, " said Keller, who directed the play. "When I was in my first year of high school, my drama teacher, who was my mentor, handed me a script and said, 'Read this and never forget it.' It was Bent, and I read it, and it haunted me for years."
Not just gay theater
Keller, 42, grew up in Lancaster, Pa. He moved to the Tampa Bay area in 1993 and worked in the hotel business and was board president of St. Petersburg Little Theatre. He was in Jeffrey, the Paul Rudnick comedy about looking for Mr. Right in the age of AIDS, at Central Stage Theatre in St. Petersburg. He was development director at the theater when its founder, Brett Lassiter, died in 2003. It was Lassiter's vision for gay theater that inspired Keller to form Gypsy at Suncoast.
Many great playwrights have been homosexual, from Oscar Wilde to Noel Coward to Tennessee Williams to Edward Albee, but their work is not defined by their sexuality. On the other hand, since the 1960s, a body of specifically gay plays by writers such as Mart Crowley, John Glines and Charles Ludlam has flourished.
"I don't look at what we do as just gay theater, " Keller said. "Theater has been gay since it started. Shows that I program are either written by a gay person or have a gay subtext."
Some of the most important gay theater has been concerned with the AIDS crisis. Tony Kushner's Angels in America and Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart are among the most honored and widely produced plays of recent times.
"Early on I chose not to do shows that dealt with AIDS and HIV as their sole text, " Keller said. "So much of the gay community deals with it every day, and I don't think there's anything entertaining about HIV and AIDS, though a lot of the scripts deal with it in some manner."
Keller himself has been HIV positive for 18 years and has lost two partners to AIDS. "That's probably part of the reason I don't do AIDS shows, " he said.
Bridging a gender gap
A big part of the theatergoing audience Gypsy has struggled to reach are women - perhaps not surprising at a gay male bastion like Suncoast.
"Our first year we did The Kathy & Mo Show, and it did not do well at the box office, " Keller said "Even though it didn't deal with mainly lesbian issues, I thought it would be a nice draw for them. It was also a way to reach out and say we're not just a male organization. Each year we've tried."
Keller was disappointed more women didn't attend this year's production of Independence, a play by Lee Blessing that features four female characters and deals with lesbianism.
"Independence was one of our worst attended shows, " he said. "The women did not support it. And the men did not support it because it was for women."
One show about women drew good crowds. "Last year Women Behind Bars did really well - gay men love their B-movies, " Keller said.
Gypsy is looking for a new home in St. Petersburg, focusing on the Grand Central neighborhood around Central Avenue just west of downtown. The company has three plays scheduled for the rest of its season, beginning with The Jocker, a play by Clint Jefferies about men riding the rails during the Depression that opens Aug. 24 in the yet-to-be-determined location. Also on the agenda are What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moises Kaufman.
"I think it's the perfect time for us to be moving off site, away from the resort, " Keller said. "The Jocker is a docudrama about actual events, so people who have some knowledge of it will be attracted to it, even though it has a gay theme to it."
John Fleming can be reached at 727 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com.