By Ilana Jael
Even in South Florida’s lively theater scene, it’s not every day that audience members have the chance to bear witness to the birth of a brand-new company.
This year, though, sufficiently adventurous theater-goers will have just such an opportunity as Sticking Place Theatre Collective celebrates its inaugural season, starting with the opening of their debut production of Greater Tuna in early August.
For company cofounders Matthew Dickinson and Matthew Paszkiet, this is a moment that’s been a long time in the making — and the fact that the two theater-makers share a first name is actually part of the duo’s origin story.
After initially befriending one another as the “two Matthews” in the theater program at Bak Middle School of the Arts, the two remained close as they progressed to the Dreyfoos School of the Arts for high school.
From there, though, their paths started to diverge, with Dickinson choosing to major in economics in college as Paszkiet continued to study theater in a California BFA program. Upon returning to South Florida, Paszkiet became a familiar presence on local stages as he continued to pursue an acting career. And while Dickinson stayed involved in theater as well, he seems to have been devoting most of his time and energy to establishing himself as a high-level professional in human resources. But now, that’s all changed.
“I quit my job, I liquidated my 401k, and I’m like, let’s do this,” he said, describing how he left a long-term position at Florida Power & Light to give his full attention to Sticking Place.
“At one point I think it kind of hit me that so much of what could be great theater doesn’t exist,” he explains as one of the major realizations that fueled this decision. “And now we’re starting a theater company specifically dedicated to telling those stories that we know haven’t been told yet and typically aren’t.”
And they mean it. Though the team made the strategic decision to launch their company with an established piece in Greater Tuna — first in a 1981 series of plays by Jaston Williams, Joe Sears and Ed Howard — their second scheduled production is a world premiere of a new play called Snakes.
An original piece written by Dickinson, this coming-of-age drama draws on their shared history at Dreyfoos to explore some of the “harsher truths” about the pressures that come with being a student in a prestigious art program.
“They’re putting themselves on display for the world to see but they aren’t perfect… it’s not something that people really want to think about,” Dickinson notes.
And for future productions, the floor is more or less open.
In fact, Dickinson made a point of mentioning that his inbox is open to anyone who wants to submit a script for the company’s consideration through a form on the website or even a direct email.
“Since going live and putting ourselves out there, we’ve just had so many people reaching out, saying, hey, yeah I’m down the road …. by the way, here’s my fully written script, would you mind looking at it,” he says.
“One of the things we want to get to … is having a playwright competition where we will not only give a table read to an original work but we actually want to produce an original work … sometimes the roughest stuff is the rawest and most original, so we want to produce those diamonds,” Dickinson added.
“There are a ton of people in this community that want to put on something cool, risky, unique, they’re not scared about how they’ll look or how successful they’ll be … and from a realistic level a lot of people can’t go out to LA or New York to do risky art, so we’re like, well, why not bring it here to them?”
Paszkiet sounded equally passionate about offering something truly unique to South Florida artists in the opportunity to explore bold original ideas at Sticking Place.
“It’s about creating an environment and a space that continually fosters new work, that fosters a collaboration from everyone,” he says about the team’s vision, later adding:
“We see it as a theater that not only showcases strong work but is the ground floor for things that can go on to become bigger and better. We want it to be a birthplace … a cultural epicenter,” he says.
For now, the two Matthews are channeling this spirit of creativity and collaboration into co-direction of Greater Tuna, a shared authority that Dickinson describes as essential to ensuring an unusually deliberate approach to the piece — which Paszkiet also happens to be starring in.
“I think what this process has taught me at least is trying to strike a balance between what’s going to work storytelling-wise, and what I know as an artist and actor,” Paszkiet notes about the difficulty of juggling the contrasting roles.
But maybe that, too, was in a sense good practice, considering that he and his co-star, Kyler O’Brien, will together play more than 20 characters in the two-hander.
Paszkiet and Dickinson chose Greater Tuna for Sticking Place’s debut largely because of its high comedic potential, hoping to draw in audiences by offering them a chance to laugh together.
Both seem confident that their production will deliver on this promise while offering more than just humor.
“We know this is a funny show … but we also want people to have a feeling that these are real people … they had real lives,” Dickinson says of the colorful characters of Tuna, Texas, that the play focuses on.
“This is a real place,” he emphasizes.
And in recreating that place onstage, Sticking Place Theatre Collective is almost becoming a real place too, meaning that with the show’s premiere, the venture will shift for the first time from ambitious plans into actual theater-making.
Hopefully, that transition will be a seamless and a sticky one — and if you’re wondering where the name “Sticking Place” came from, you’ll find your answer in the following quote from Macbeth: “We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking-place / And we’ll not fail.”
For Dickinson, the most difficult part of bringing Sticking Place to life may have been screwing up that courage, in taking the personal leap of faith that allowed the company to come into being. But now that he’s crossed that bridge, it’s been easier than he feared for him and Paszkiet to keep the project moving forward.
Yes, “success” may still not be guaranteed — but neither co-founder seems to be seriously considering the alternative. And to an extent, that level of confidence alone speaks volumes.
If you go
What: Greater Tuna, performed by the Sticking Place Theatre Collective
Where: The Lighthouse Theater, 6743 W. Indiantown Road, Suite 35, Jupiter
When: 7 pm Friday, Aug. 7 and Saturday, Aug. 8
Tickets: $30
More information and tickets: StickingPlaceTheatre.com