Florida Studio Theatre premieres 'America in One Room' that takes pulse of the nation
Nearly everything about the creation of Jason Odell Williams’ new play “America in One Room” has been surprising to the playwright.
It was commissioned by Florida Studio Theatre during the early days of the pandemic, which gave him financial support to write when other options dried up. None of his plays has ever moved faster through the writing and preproduction stage.
And this week, the theater will present the world premiere of his play, which brings together a group of politically divided people and asks them to listen and talk to one another.
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The play is loosely based on an actual event, the 2019 America in One Room conference that was held in Gaylord, Texas. A diverse group of 500 voters gathered to discuss a wide range of issues. They represented different aspects of the political spectrum so that many ideas and opinions were expressed.
Williams’ early drafts were probably 80% political talk.
“Now it’s just about the reverse,” he said. “I never wanted this to be like a CNN town hall.”
He was more interested in the people and the interactions among the participants. Williams said politics now serves as an excuse “for these people getting together. What they connect about is on much more of a human level – sports, relationships with parents. Do you have kids? What about your grandparents?”
In effect, he said it’s what all plays are about, human relationships. “They just happen to be strangers. How do you get along?”
Though tempted to set the play today, he kept it in 2019 in part to avoid references to the pandemic, which might have made it dated in future productions.
Director Kate Alexander, the theater’s associate director at large, has followed the play’s progress after an initial draft of the script was sent to the theater and said the human interactions give it drama and heart.
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“With social media, liberals and conservatives, we’ve all gotten narrowed into little silos, where social media is projecting what we want to see and hear,” she said. “We’re not getting to see or meet the other. This is a perfect opportunity to meet and see other people who make up America.”
Alexander said she fell in love with the play during readings of the script that were conducted on Zoom. “I love them for the crude level of hearing the words and you can see if something’s going to work or not. I fell in love with the play then.”
Creating a new blueprint
She’s also excited to be directing a brand new play with the writer either in the rehearsal room or close enough to reach.
“If you’re directing ‘Hamlet,’ you’ve seen 20 ‘Hamlets’ and you know the blueprint,” she said. “What’s so exciting about this process is we don’t have a blueprint. That’s what each actor is excited about. We’re going to create that first blueprint.”
The play involves nine characters played by a diverse cast including several performers returning to FST. Almeria Campbell and Lawrence Evans were both featured in “American Son,” while Sheffield Chastain and Marina Re have each appeared in numerous productions at the theater. Sarah Stockton, an FSU/Asolo Conservatory graduate previously starred in “Blackbird” and “In the Book Of.” Newcomers include Linden Tailor, Lipica Shah, Nicholas Caycedo and Charlotte Cohn, who happens to be Williams’ wife.
“She is a brilliantly talented actress in her own right and would have won the part without knowing me as well,” Williams said. Alexander said Cohn went through the same audition process as the other cast members.
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Alexander said it also was fun to have Williams in the audition room.
“Every person brought in different vantage points so it was great having in that part of the process. It put Jason and I in the same mindset and we agreed on every person.”
But Cohn, who plays a woman named Jessica, may have had an advantage because Williams likes to write with the specific voices of actors in his head, and Jessica was written with his wife in mind.
The characters include a Miami Jewish mother, a retired military officer in a wheelchair, an African-American, middle-of-the-road Democrat with some conservative points of view. Stockton plays Lisa, the moderator.
“She’s the one there to kick off the questions, take the temperature, be positive. She really believes in the American experiment,” Williams said, prompting Alexander to add, “and she gets challenged every step of the way.”
It has been less than 18 months since Williams first proposed the idea to the theater, which commissioned the play in April 2020 based on an initial pitch through its Playwrights Project. An earlier play, “Handle With Care,” was presented by the theater in 2019.
The theater created the Playwrights Project using the federal Paycheck Protection Program in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic to hire more than 30 writers and theater artists to create new plays, musicals and sketches.
Williams said it was both nerve-wracking and freeing when Producing Artistic Director Richard Hopkins encouraged the playwrights to think big.
“Playwrights tend to keep costs down by limiting the cast size, but Richard said to think bigger,” Williams said. Working through Zoom made a lot of things easier and faster to put together reading sessions with actors and to meet with the literary team.
‘America in One Room’
By Jason Odell Williams. Directed by Kate Alexander. Runs Dec. 8-Feb. 27 in Florida Studio Theatre’s Keating Theatre, 1241 N. Palm Ave., Sarasota. 941-366-9000; floridastudiotheatre.org
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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: World premiere of 'America in One Room' at Sarasota’s Florida Studio Theatre
