Welcome to Clearwater's TheatreFor, where co-founders hope to offer theater for everyone

Eleven actors. Forty-two roles. And a woman who’s spent more than 50 years teaching and directing Shakespeare. Those numbers form the backbone of “The Man from Stratford,” now playing at TheatreFor in Clearwater.

Talk about backbone. The five stage veterans who co-founded TheatreFor have done what many would have considered impossible. Graham Jones, Dee O'Brien, Stephen Bell, Mike Cote, and Susan Dearden have opened a nonprofit professional theater company at a time when many theaters are struggling to survive.

Not that there’s been any lack of struggle to get TheaterFor up and running at 1863 N Highland Ave. The team toiled valiantly over two years to find and transform its new space—the former home of Meraki Solar in the Sunset Square Shopping Center—into a theater.

“It took a lot of work, millions of man-hours (not really, but a lot!), paint, lumber, screws and nails (Lowes loves us),” say the co-founders in a playbill note.

The plan was to open in January, but multiple permitting hurdles delayed progress. Finally, an inaugural show, “Academia Nuts,” was set to open on Aug. 22nd—when a massive rainstorm flooded the back of the set and shorted out the dimmer board, forcing them to perform the entire play under house lights.

Mike Cote directed “Academia Nuts.” A graphic designer who once owned a theater company in New Hampshire, he worked with Graham in creating renderings for the architects, Dunedin’s David L. Wallace & Associates, and contractors Roger Steinruck, LLC. The theater has an expansive playing space, a capacity of 40-60 seats, and dressing rooms donated by Nestor Betancourt in memory of the local theater champion and Grapevine publisher Dee Ray Crews.

I met Cote in the spiffy lobby during the closing weekend of “Academia Nuts” and asked what he was feeling now that TheatreFor had finally opened. His answer, understandably enough: “Relief.”
Graham Jones was there, too, that night, on stage manager duty. He said the launch of TheatreFor was the realization of a dream he’s had for 15 years.

Born in Central U.K., the 75-year-old traces his love for the stage back to his first role as a tree at age four and multiple productions at the all-male King’s School in Worcester, England. A career in software design and engineering (he designed the software for Wales’ water utility) took him to Australia and California and away from the theater. But then, he says, “I realized I was on the wrong West Coast.”

He moved to Pinellas, where he acted, designed and managed theaters, including a stint as president of Francis Wilson Playhouse, Clearwater’s oldest community theater.

A desire to branch out from Francis Wilson and do the kinds of plays he wanted to do was part of the impetus for TheatreFor. As his wife and co-founder Dee O’Brien puts it, “We wanted to be our own bosses.”

“We thought it would be feasible to do this in Clearwater where there’s a definite lack,” said Graham. In addition to offering more variety in programming, TheatreFor—unlike all-volunteer community theaters—pays its actors.
O’Brien, 77, is the Shakespeare expert who created “The Man from Stratford.” She moved to Florida in 2014, having retired from a longtime job as an English teacher in the NYC suburbs, where she created “the longest continuously running Shakespearean performance company for teenagers in the U.S.A.” For 39 years, she directed and costumed approximately 4,000 teenagers in productions ranging from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to “King Lear.”

She enjoyed watching her former students flourish. One of them was the Emmy-nominated actor Kevin Dillon of HBO’s “Entourage,” brother of Matt. She says that when people asked Kevin if he started acting because of his brother, he would answer, “No, it was my eighth grade English teacher.”

In Florida, the Bard beckoned to O’Brien again. She directed eight Shakespeare productions for Tarpon Arts, including “Twelfth Night,” which is where she met Jones. He played the rabble-rousing Sir Toby Belch.

The two of them pooled their resources, both creative and financial, to create TheatreFor, along with their collaborators and donors. Cote, says O’Brien, is “wonderful, wonderful… He fixes so many things in the theater.” Dearden, Cote’s wife, is an experienced actress who brought comic sparkle to her role as a down-on-her-luck stripper in “Academia Nuts.” Bell, a respected local director and set designer, had begun his own journey toward creating a company, TheaterOne, when Covid got in the way.

O’Brien’s Shakespeare pastiche sounds like it should be a good time. “Most of the scenes deal with family dysfunction in kingdoms,” she says, an analysis which pretty much sums up the back-stabbing disputes in many of the tragedies. And she’s hoping her music choices will surprise audiences. “I want to see you dancing in your seat.”

Plus, “after all this tragedy gloom and doom,” the company is finishing out the evening with Tom Stoppard’s comical “15-Minute Hamlet.”
Following “The Man from Stratford,” Samantha Parisi is slated to play firebrand Texas humorist Molly Ivins in “Red Hot Patriot” in October. Next up is Jones’s November production of “Desdemona, A Play About a Handkerchief,” Paula Vogel’s bawdy take on Othello’s not-so-innocent wife. A holiday show directed by Bell is set for December, followed by his staging of David Ives’s sexy suspenser “Venus in Fur” in January 2025. “The Complete History of America (Abridged)” brings the laughs in February, Steve Martin’s “Meteor Shower” is scheduled for April, and additional spring shows are to be announced.

A very busy schedule for the first year of a brand new company, and eclectic enough to live up to its name: TheatreFor wants to be theater for everyone.
Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.

Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter