Pegasus PlayLab
Metro Theater Company’s Artistic Director Julia Flood recently participated in the Pegasus PlayLab which is a festival dedicated to developing plays by emerging playwrights. Playwrights are invited to University of Central Florida's campus for a two-week residency to develop their new play with students and faculty. Audiences hear staged readings and experience a full production of a new play first workshopped at Orlando Shakes’ PlayFest. Participants get to be a part of the creative process with playwrights, casts, and artistic teams!
MTC’s Season 2022-2023 production of Spells of the Sea was one of four plays in development at Pegasus PlayLab.
Julia Flood, Artistic Director of Metro Theater Company, reflected on the experience:
”This year, the new play development workshop received 900 submissions, so we felt incredibly lucky to have been invited to participate. Spells... was the only musical in the group, and the only Theater for Young Audiences (TYA) play, so, again, it was a unique privilege to be part of it.
I have participated as a director in many new works development processes, and Pegasus PlayLab has a really unusual approach to the work. The UCF (University of Central Florida) undergraduate students in both design and stage management are required to participate as part of their class work. The graduate students in both the acting and the TYA MFA programs also have the opportunity to be part of the process. This brings a wide variety of voices into the room and an interesting mix of different points of view. Most new play development workshops will have a director, actors, a dramaturg, perhaps a musical director, if it is a musical, to help the playwright and composer to work on the piece. This process had all that, but also added set, sound, lighting, costume designers and stage managers to the discussion, which gave a much more three-dimensional way of thinking to the emergence of the piece. We did not do a lot in the way of design for the public readings at the end of the ten-day process but having those voices in the room kept those elements of the play in our minds throughout.
For Spells of the Sea, UCF also invited a team from UT Austin into the process. Both Gwenny Govea, the playwright and composer, and Anna Pickett, her writing partner, graduated this spring from UT and the beginnings of the play's development process began there. It was a huge experiment in cooperation and generosity to have so many diverse voices in the room - students and faculty from two different universities, seasoned professionals and young artists undertaking their very first projects - and it ended up being so beneficial to the development of Spells... It is a real credit to the faculty leadership of Pegasus PlayLab, Julia Listengarten and Vandy Moore, that they were willing to imagine such a partnership, and to the graduate student who coordinated it all, Sage Tokach, and the teams from both UT and UCF that they were able to pull it off. What a gift to this play! And what an experience for the students who were a part of it!
Theater is a collaborative art form. At its best, theater brings many hands together to make a work that no one person could have made alone. The Spells of the Sea development process at Pegasus PlayLab was an example of that sort of collaborative work at its best. It was delightful to watch Anna and Gwenny disassemble what they had made and reassemble it - with new songs, new structure, even a new ending - in a way that made the play stronger and clearer. It was pure delight to talk with young designers about their concepts for the piece and how they saw the world of the play. It was magical to watch faculty from one school mentoring a student from another, or to watch students who were strangers a few days before come together to work through a scene, create a dance or to dissect the meaning of a moment.
New play development is hard work. The rehearsals are intense, the time between rehearsals is spent writing or meeting and planning for the next session. And yet, at the end of the time that the 30+ participants spent together on this project, I felt energized and hopeful - not just about this play, but about the future of the theater. If these young people are any indication of what is to come, we are in good hands.”
Photography by McKenzie Lakey
Spells of the Sea
Pegasus PlayLab
June 4 and 5, 2022
By Guinevere Govea and Anna Pickett | Directed by Julia Flood (Guest Artist)
This musical tale follows a fifteen-year-old fisherwoman named Finley Frankfurter and an old lighthouse keeper named H.S. Crank as they journey through the ocean to find the Elixir of Life to cure Finley’s terminally ill father.
CREATIVE TEAM
Playwright/Composer: Guinevere Govea
Playwright: Anna Pickett
Director: Julia Flood
Stage Manager: Elana Treiser*
Dramaturg: Megan Alrutz
Sound Designer: Casey Deiter
Scenic Design Response: Sonya Smith-Tembe*, Jeanna DelVecchio*
Lighting Design Response: Alex Russell*
Costume Design Response: Karina Rodriguez-Toledo*
Guest Designer: Michelle Habeck, Adriana Serrano
Choreographer: Giana Blazquez Bultman, Julia Veiga*
Music Director: Chandler Caroccio*
Music Advisor/Pianist: Deborah Wicks La Puma
*Theatre UCF student
CAST
Finley: Bethany Post*
H.S. Crank: Drew Stark*
Dad/Pirate Captain: Andre Braza*
Shopkeeper/Mermaid/Elixir/Sea Monster: Renita James
Princess/Townsperson (Kid)/Pirate #1: Madilynn Crown*
Teacher/Assistant To Pirate Captain/Townsperson #2: Hannah Schorr*
Doctor/Queen/Townsperson #1: Mia Hammond*
Pearl/Stage Directions/Understudy: Bellamy Kopesec*
* Theatre UCF student
PRODUCTION TEAM
Assistant Stage Managers: Toni Ghirardo*, Bridgett Rojas*
Assistant Director: Chanel Gomaa*
Assistant Dramaturg: Gabby Lawlor*
Producer: Megan Ann Rasmussen
Sound Designer: Casey Deiter
Assistant Producer: Christian Anderson*, Cory Kennedy*
Community Engagement: Clarie Derriennic, Xinyue Zhang, Sage Tokach*
Crew: Angelina Buck*, Laura Ferreira de Carvalho*, Samfritz Del Valle*, Sonya Smith-Tembe*
* Theatre UCF student