Shakespeare this ain't, but what do you want in a bar

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By JAN GLIDEWELL

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 29, 2000

It certainly wasn't the first time I had seen a drama of love and loss played out at the bar of the Osceola Tavern. In fact, I've been a bit player in a couple of those of the real-life variety myself since I began patronizing the closest thing Dade City has to an esoterically avant-garde watering spot.

But that only made it easier Saturday for me to lose myself in Shattered, a one-act play by Saint Leo University student Amber Ernest, an aptly named serious young woman who made her off-campus writing and directing debut with the Osceola venture.

"It's not exactly dinner theater," Osceola owner Mike Agnello said while explaining to the usual crowd of bikers, journalists, competitive beer drinkers and chess players who wondered why there was a new guy at the bar and why they couldn't be. "But," Agnello added, his face brightening, "we do have some chili left if anyone is hungry."

I was turned on to the play by an old pal, Rebecca Hubert, also a Saint Leo student, who handled lights and stage design for the play when it was produced by Theatre Playhouse 90 at the university, but who got a night off to enjoy a bout with influenza while the Osceola provided real-life set and lighting for Ernest's play, which is set in a bar.

The play had done well in two performances at the university, but its principals say they were asked to tone down the language for on-campus productions and decided simultaneously to give the off-campus route a shot.

Forewarned, I had entered the bar with my knickers almost pre-bunched but heard only language that was about on a par with an average NYPD Blue episode except for one word that was only used one time.

And despite that the play deals with a writer's relationship with a psychic vampire who drains him dry of both talent and its product, the only near-sexual content (except for a chaste kiss or two) was one character's exclamation about sex, "How can anything that feels that good look that bad."

Maybe things have gotten a little tense at Saint Leo since the last production I attended there, which was, admittedly, a while back.

There are raunchier jokes in Melville and Shakespeare and worse language in Chaucer, but what do I know?

Language aside, Ernest's play is about Zack, the writer, meeting Victoria Knight, played well by a suitably vampiric Avena-Lyn Smith, and going away with her for two incredibly productive weeks as a poet and, we are led to believe, lover.

His ex-girlfriend, Tess, played by Jackie Gay, and his friend, Mort (Death? One wonders, if one knows about Ernest's neo-gothic interest in things vampiric) don't like the new woman, who comes on as less than warm and cuddly in a couple of clashes with the ex, and are there to comfort Zack when he comes back without new girlfriend or poetry.

And, mostly because I've always wanted to use the word Faulknerian, I have to make special note of experienced actor David Jay Strauss' playing of Mort's mentally challenged younger brother. Sometimes you wonder if Strauss' character, Cade, obsessed with a toy statue, a coloring book and his occasional responsibilities as a waiter, isn't one of the more together people in the play.

The one-shot production either drew a fairly hefty crowd or found one, as the tavern's parking lot was full, and, along with the students and parents in attendance, there was a crossover contingent of bar regulars enjoying a welcome break in the monotony that can be a Dade City Saturday night.

Ernest, a writing major who wants to go to graduate school to further her writing career, did a little pacing as actors, props and audience showed up late but survived long enough to smile during a curtain call that had no curtain but plenty of applause.

Oh yeah, lest anyone think that I am miffed because Odie Green, who writes for the biker magazine Pushstart, got the nod to play the part titled DRUNK, and not I, let me be the first to say that Green, who admitted to substantial method-acting preparation for his role, played an excellent drunk.

I could have done as well.

But I'm on a diet.

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