Get ready for some changes at the theater in Delray Beach’s Arts Garage.
For starters, the storefront performance venue underneath a municipal parking garage is opening a black box second space, where two of the company’s four plays will be presented. But more importantly, there has been a changing of the guard, with Keith Garsson taking over as producing director of the Theatre at Arts Garage, after Lou Tyrrell abruptly announced in March that he was stepping down.
Garsson, 54, headed the board of directors of Boca Raton Theatre Guild, turning that company from a community theater into a fully professional troupe. But he and its resident director Genie Croft were straitjacketed, left to producing Neil Simon comedies and familiar musicals by the city’s insistence on family fare. To satisfy his preference for edgier, political theater, a season ago Garsson created a Fort Lauderdale-based stage group called Primal Forces. That is where he would be today if the opportunity had not opened up at Arts Garage.
In effect, he is folding Primal Forces into the Delray operation, while the Boca Guild was left to expire from natural causes. As a result, Garsson hired Croft to be his resident director at Arts Garage, sharing those staging duties with her.
Of their move to an organization that encourages his taste for hard-hitting, thought-provoking plays, Garsson says, “We both feel liberated. This is actually a logical next step that we didn’t know was coming.”
He has announced a four-play season for Arts Garage, cannibalizing the slate he expected to be producing at Primal Forces. Garsson calls his play selections “slightly more commercial than Primal Forces,” where he did lesser known works by David Mamet and Lanford Wilson. Still, his play selections at Arts Garage emphasized a move to “shift the Delray Beach venue towards edgier and darker material.”
Perhaps, but one other thing seems certain. Garsson intends to de-emphasize the new play development that had been Tyrrell’s hallmark, going back to his heyday at Florida Stage. The new producing director got considerable blowback from playwrights when he announced that programming shift as he took the job.
“What I said was that picking brand-new original works that hadn’t been done before, as was the model for Florida Stage, was, I used the phrase, ‘gambling the ranch.’ That was interpreted unfortunately as risking too much by doing a play that hasn’t been done before,” says Garsson. “What I meant was I don’t think I’m the artistic director to do that.”
Future seasons will naturally reflect Garsson’s taste in plays, so he expects audiences to see a difference from the Tyrrell years. “I noticed the plays here were predominantly deep explorations of friends and family and past memories,” Garsson says. “Examination of dysfunction, examination of past hurts. My favorite thing to do is invert that. Start with two characters and they create their own hurt and go forward with it, as opposed to looking back. I like the audience coming in fresh with the characters.
“I do see it as a shift in gears from the prior season. Hopefully it will be seen as a different kind of good.”
Theatre Arts Garage’s season opens with Laura Eason’s Sex With Strangers (Oct. 24-Nov. 15), whose title alone would have kept it off the Boca Raton Theatre Guild stage. Eason, a staff writer of Netflix’s House of Cards, pits an infamous 20-something sex blogger against a gifted, but obscure chick lit novelist. They are attracted to each other’s writing style, an attraction that leads to — what else? — sex. “It’s technically a romantic comedy, but when you think you’re following it or you’re worried about the stereotypical next step, it totally veers left,” says Garsson. “This is a great showcase for two top actors.”
Inaugurating the black box theater will be Reborning by Zayd Dohrn (Jan. 23-Feb. 14), a psychological thriller about a sculptor whose life and art become disturbingly interchangeable. “That one appealed to me because I thought, ‘Let’s get something with a crazy plot.’ It asks, ‘What if you’re too good at your job, what happens to you? If you’re an exceptionally talented artist, if you take that to infinity, what do you become?”
The third show may sound familiar to Florida Stage veterans, for The Devil’s Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith by Angelo Parra and Joe Brancato (Feb. 27-March 30) was produced in Manalapan in 2001. This dramatized concert by the “Empress of the Blues” has “the best book I’ve read for a musical bio,” according to Garsson. In the clean-up spot is Kim Davies’ Smoke (March 26-April 17), a series of sexy and humorous mind games between a college student and a wannabe artist. Garsson, who met the playwright when he saw the play in New York, says, “You would not believe this tiny, 28-year-old British woman wrote this harsh, hardcore, erotic, New York play.”
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So who is Keith Garsson? A nice Jewish boy from Westchester, N.Y., he caught the theater bug hanging around the synagogue where his mother directed huge Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals to help the temple pay off its mortgage.
Not Asian enough to play a youngster in South Pacific or The King and I, he had to wait until high school to make his stage debut as Snug the Lion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He later played piano in the pit for the school’s musical and continued in college, playing jazz piano while majoring in physics.
His first paid theater job was musical directing for the Madison Avenue Players, an amateur group that performed near Manhattan’s advertising district. Later, he served as production chairman for the St. Bart’s Playhouse, an off-Broadway theater that specialized in musical revivals. “That’s where I learned how to produce a season,” he recalls. “Staffing, producing, stage managing. All the training for today I really learned there.”
By day, he worked on Wall Street, on the stock market’s trading floor, “writing non-stop programs analyzing mortgage portfolios, and scribbling a few theater notes on the side.” With the advent of the Internet, he began a career in web design, which he continues to this day. In 2000, realizing that his work could be done from anywhere, he moved to Florida for the better weather.
Garsson settled in Boca Raton and, before long, he auditioned at the Jewish Community Center’s West Boca Theatre Company — for Genie Croft. “I thought, ‘I’ll play piano, do one or two shows a year —music direct a show, be in a show — that would be fine.’”
He followed Croft to the Boca Raton Theatre Guild, where he was asked to join the board — not for his theatrical acumen, but for his web design skills. He rose in the organization and gradually persuaded the group to raise its talent level by starting to pay the cast members.
So Arts Garage is not Garsson’s first professional theater group, but it is the first with an actual staff. “They have made it very clear, ‘These are the things we’re going to do for you’ — the marketing, the box office, house management, fundraising. All the things that were a lot of time and got in the way of my working with the actors.”
At Primal Forces, Garsson put together a season with similar subject matters, like the three plays there that looked at the Baby Boomer generation and how it lost its idealism. “It was a very thematic season. Once people catch on that you are doing plays that hit a nerve from their past, they’re with you,” he says. For Arts Garage, “The theme of this first season is twisted forms of love. In a way, it is a branch of the Baby Boomer theme,” he explains, “because its regular everyday people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Every season’s going to have a theme, whether or not it builds on the prior season.”
Garsson hopes to shake the Arts Garage audience up, with talk about “pushing them out of their comfort zone. If they say, ‘Wow, that edgy stuff gave me nightmares. I thought about it for days,’ that would make me happy, so we’ll be sure to give them more of that.”