What is TheatreFor? This one’s for North Pinellas County

Eric Misener, left, and Paul Foisy appear in "A Steady Rain," onstage through Nov. 22 at TheatreFor. Mike Cote is the director. Publicity photo.

The Details

You’ll need both hands to count all the professional theater companies in the Tampa Bay area, those that pay their actors for their work, with staff and crew devoted 24/7 to the creation and production of comedies, dramas and musicals.

By 2024 Graham Jones, a retired software designer and engineer, had been involved in community (volunteer) theater in Pinellas County for decades. Jones and six like-minded friends, including his wife, Shakespearean scholar and longtime drama teacher Dee O’Brien, launched a nonprofit production company called TheatreFor. “I couldn’t find the kind of theater around here that was doing the work I wanted to be involved in,” says the softspoken Englishman. “So I started agitating my friends, lovers and neighbors, until they finally agreed to do it to shut me up.”

Jones and his associates believed a void needed filling. “Our goal here is to bring in the best theater we can make to Northern Pinellas. We feel that, apart from us, it’s a bit of a desert for theater.”

Since launching two years ago as an intimate black box space in a nondescript Clearwater shopping center, TheatreFor (1863 N. Highland Ave.) has produced dozens of plays. Its reputation has grown exponentially.

At TheatreFor: Graham Jones, left, Dee O’Brien and Peter Balaskas. Photo by Bill DeYoung.

The current production, running through Nov. 22, is Keith Huff’s psychological drama A Steady Rain. It’s the hard-hitting story of two Chicago detectives whose friendship is tested by the levels of moral decay they encounter.

Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig played them on Broadway.

“We want to bring things that have been seen either in festivals, Off Broadway or on Broadway, that ordinarily you won’t see anywhere around here,” Jones says. “You may see it at the Straz or Ruth Eckerd, with ticket prices that make your nose bleed.”

Sometimes it’s a world premiere, sometimes a Florida premiere, “anything we think is an excellent piece of theater that needs to be put in front of an audience.”

Coming in the current season, among other titles, are the musical The Book of Merman (as in Ethel) and the tender solo show Every Brilliant Thing. The latter will be paired with Samuel Beckett’s one-person Krapp’s Last Tape.

O’Brien will direct the Shakespeare romance

Previous TheatreFor Shakespeare productions have included

A Winter’s Tale. — The Merry Wives of Windsor and O’Brien adaptations including The Main From Stratford and Close Encounters of a Shakespearean Kind.

O’Brien had been adapting and directing Shakespeare since her arrival in the area in 2013. She had also soured on community theater work and desired a location “where we didn’t have to respond to so many restrictions.

“Some restrictions, of course we get. But every time we were going to do a show somewhere else, there would be the craziest things. Like there would be an outdoor car show, with horns blaring and music playing. And the bathrooms wouldn’t work because there were so many people using them.”

It was, as the saying goes, always something.

“The things that people come up with as the owners and operators of theatrical spaces!” Jones laughs. “The rules that they come up with, for you, are nuts.”

A native New Yorker, O’Brien taught English, literature and creative writing in a suburban Manhattan school from 1971 until her retirement (to Florida) 13 years ago.

She introduced middle and high school students to Shakespeare. “I started with eighth graders,” Jones says. “Every day after school in my five classes, they were all doing different plays. I was terrible! But the kids loved it.”

The popular programs expanded. O’Brien even began an all-Shakespeare high school company, which took students through all four years of school. “I did ten performances, in six days, of two plays, double-cast,” she recalls. “And I did that for I don’t know how many years. Until I retired.”

O’Brien was directing

Twelfth Night at a Tarpon Springs community theater when she became acquainted with Graham Jones, who was playing Sir Toby Belch.

Jones and O’Brien, along with co-founders Mike Cote, Susan Dearden and several others, settled on the plaza at Highland Avenue and Sunset Road for their performance venue. The 3,000-square-foot storefront they leased had been home to Meraki, a solar panel installation company.

Photo by Graham Jones. — “There was a big open space that we could do something with,” Jones recalls. “It already had ADA bathrooms, and the landlord was amenable to ripping out the drop ceiling.”

Walls were moved, spacious dressing rooms created, and a lobby materialized. The company purchased theater lights and sound for the newly-liberated ceiling.

Seating capacity is 54. — “We chose the name ‘TheatreFor’ because we see ourselves as a theatre for the community, for the artists, and for the work itself,” Jones declares. “It represents our mission to be a platform for everything we support.”

New board member Peter Balaskas, a published novelist and playwright, co-directs (with founder Cote) Next Stage, TheatreFor’s development program for playwrights.

“That’s a way of giving back,” Balaskas says. “That’s a type of creative volunteerism. So I bit at it.”

Writing fiction, he goes on, “is a pretty lonely business. Whereas playwriting, you get to collaborate with a wonderful team of individuals, you get to see your work come to life, you get to basically collaborate with other people’s creativity.

“And I want to help, and give what I’ve learned as a storyteller to my community.”

Balaskas is an avid Tampa Bay theater-goer, and TheatreFor’s fertile blend of new works, established hits and Shakespeare “all have one thing in common, and that’s that theatrical excellence is universal. That’s what I saw here, and that’s why this is practically my second home.”

Graham Jones has a home, too, but he pretty much lives at his theater.

“I love our community theaters,” he stresses. “They do a fabulous job. But for the kinds of things that we wanted to do, I wanted to get actors who could commit to the next level of work.

“Nearly all of the community theater actors around are very dedicated, hardworking people. But I wanted people who were going to work harder than that. And I figured the only way to do that was to pay them enough for maybe a sandwich. And so that’s what we do.

“The only thing that we can think of, to get people to come and see it, is to be better. And so we try, every day, to be better.”