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BonitaNews.com
By Jessie L. Bonner
Friday, October 13, 2006
Yes, the Gulfshore Playhouse will launch its first play next
week.
No, the up-and-coming theater group still doesn’t have
a home.
There’s still no stage for performances.
It still will be a couple of years before the lights go down
on the 35,000-square-foot performance facility organizers
plan to build in Estero.
But that hasn’t really stopped them before.
“We’re not taking no for an answer,” said
Kristen Coury, a New York theater buff who came to Southwest
Florida to found the Gulfshore Playhouse two years ago.
The playhouse will launch its production of “Oleanna”
next week in performance facilities in Naples and south Lee
County.
The play will star Tony Award nominee Alan Campbell, who lives
in New York and met Coury while working on the Broadway musical
“Sunset Boulevard” during the late 1990s. Campbell
starred as one of the play’s lead actors and Coury helped
manage the production.
“She was the person who gave me my check every week,”
Campbell said.
The two have kept in contact ever since, said Campbell, who
jumped at the chance to support Coury and her ongoing efforts
to raise the $27 million it will cost to build the facility
that will house the Gulfshore Playhouse.
“I can’t imagine anyone better qualified to start
a theater,” Campbell said.
The regional theater will be built on land donated by the
D’Jamoos Group at the corner of Corkscrew Road and U.S.
41, a project that is still in the permitting stage in Lee
County.
While Coury has already moved forward with the development
of theater programs that will be introduced into local schools
next year, the lack of performance space in Southwest Florida
made it difficult for her to find facilities for her first
production.
“In New York there’s a theater on every corner,”
Coury said. “In Naples, it’s just the opposite.
What is available is packed all the time.”
Coury would eventually find space for her first production
at the Norris Center in Naples and the Lab Theatre at Florida
Gulf Coast University, where the first run of the play will
kick off on Monday.
Coury and the cast of “Oleanna” have spent the
past 10 days in New York rehearsing the two-person play by
David Mamet, a production that portrays the power struggle
that takes place between a professor and a college student
who accuses him of sexual harassment.
Campbell performed “Oleanna” earlier this year
in Raleigh, N.C., where it received a positive reaction from
audiences, he said.
“The play itself is very interesting, it’s not
a sleeper,” Campbell said. “It just has everything
in it that makes good theater.”
Coury is already planning the next Gulfshore Playhouse production,
which is being scheduled for February.
The production “Inspiration” will feature a compilation
of famous plays such as “Romeo and Juliet” and
songs from “West Side Story,” said Coury, who
is writing the play and plans to run it close to Valentine’s
Day.
Tickets to the Gulfshore Playhouse’s production of “Oleanna”
are $35, or $25 for students and senior citizens. For more
information call 213-3058 or visit www.gulfhsoreplayhouse.org.
© 2005 Bonita Daily News and The Banner. Published in
Bonita Springs, Florida, USA by the E.W. Scripps Co.
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