Roxanne Fay is busy.
Just a few weeks ago, she played Titania in freeFall's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and shortly afterward she directed one of the plays at Gorilla Theatre's Young Dramatists Project. She's been writing a play about Holocaust survivors and elders with special care needs for Gulf Coast Jewish Services, and she's in the planning stages for the first A Simple Theatre show — Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden at The Studio@620, in which she'll play the lead.
She's also preparing to reprise her portrayal of Salvador Dali's wife Gala for additional performances of My Unspeakable Confessions at the Dalì Museum, and she continues to work with the Blue Scarf Collective, which she co-founded and which has already presented plays at American Stage, the Palladium, and the performance space at Creative Loafing.
Is she maxed out? Not at all; she says she's "looking for work" — because, unlike most other actors in the area, she supports herself entirely with her theater jobs. She's appeared repeatedly for freeFall, and one of her best performances was as alcoholic Terry in Side Man at Sarasota's Banyan Theatre, for which she won CL Sarasota's Best of the Suncoast award. And oh yes, don't forget that she once was producing artistic director of a Chicago Shakespeare theater.
So how did this vastly talented artist get to the Bay area?
Fay, 48, was an Air Force brat, moving around from state to state, when her father was killed by a drunk driver and her mother decided that St. Petersburg would be a nice place to settle. Fay, who loved to sing, studied theater at Florida State, and then did her "apprenticeship" as an actor at the Burt Reynolds Theatre in Jupiter, Florida, where the "brilliant" Charles Nelson Reilly was her primary acting teacher. She took classes from Reynolds, too — an "amazing mind," she says — and thinks that she received her best training at his theater. Afterwards, she briefly returned to St. Pete, acted at the Showboat Dinner Theatre, and then, in 1987, moved north to New York.
She spent four years in the city and ended up on an Asolo Theatre for Young Audiences tour ("I had to go to New York to get cast by the Asolo"). Soon after the tour ended, she moved to Chicago — "and that was where I started writing, it's where I learned to stage manage," and it's where she became head of a summer Shakespeare company. It's also where she met the actor who became her husband — and when that marriage broke up, she decided it would be emotionally easier to live somewhere else. So she took a flight to Hawaii (are you following this?), acted, directed and stage managed all around the islands, but then decided, when her mother had to have hip replacement surgery, that it was time to come home to Florida.
Hawaii's — and Chicago's and New York's — loss has been our gain. Fay has been turning in stellar performances in Tampa and St. Petersburg over the last few years, and I can hardly wait to see what she'll do next.
Some of her thoughts about creating opportunities as a theater artist: "There's always going to be somebody out there who says 'no' to you — so don't be the person who does that to yourself."
About playing in the Bard's works: "If somebody had a gun to my head and said you can do just one thing for the rest of your life, I think it would be that, to perform in Shakespeare."
The best thing about being in the Tampa Bay area: "Being able to become a part of the theater community and not on the periphery… In New York, it's so huge, and so desperate sometimes. And here, I have the support of really close friends, which I never really have had."
The worst thing about the Bay area: "It's not New York — I can't run up and see a show."
Roles she'd love to play: Tamara in Titus Andronicus, the Fool in King Lear, Lady Macbeth, the two Portias (in The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar), and Iago in Othello. "And someday — someday — I'd really like to play the lead character in Wit."
She's an intelligent, passionate, talented actress who transforms for each role, and she's made our stages brighter with every part she's taken. Look for her on local stages. And hope that those roots she's been putting down are for real.
This article appears in Jun 30 – Jul 6, 2011.