Need a Night That Feels Real?
If it feels like theater is everywhere this week, you’re not wrong.
January didn’t tiptoe into the new year — it came in asking questions. Across Tampa Bay and Sarasota, stages are filling with stories about work, intimacy, memory, survival, and what it costs to stay human inside systems that don’t always care if you are.
This isn’t a “what’s playing” list.
It’s a snapshot of where we are — and why these shows feel especially alive right now.
Already Playing
Gruesome Playground Injuries
📍 Off-Central | 🗓 Through Jan. 18
Two people. Thirty years. A lifetime of small and not-so-small wounds.
Rajiv Joseph’s darkly funny two-hander traces a relationship built around injury, reunion, and the strange comfort of being known by someone who’s seen you at your worst. Off-Central’s production leans into the play’s fractured timeline, treating memory as a shared space rather than a straight line.
It’s heavy — but not hopeless. And it’s exactly the kind of quiet, actor-driven work that asks audiences to sit with discomfort instead of rushing past it.
Read the full Arts Passport story
Avery Anderson
JOB
📍 Urbanite Theatre | 🗓 Jan. 9 – Feb. 15
This is not a therapy session.
It’s a negotiation.
Set in January 2020, Max Wolf Friedlich’s psychological thriller traps a tech worker and her assigned therapist in a single room — and lets the pressure build. What starts as a question of mental fitness quickly becomes an indictment of systems that demand productivity at any cost.
Urbanite’s regional premiere feels less like programming and more like civic engagement. It doesn’t offer answers. It offers recognition.
Read the full Arts Passport feature
Avery Anderson
Opening This Week
The Comedy of Errors
📍 Jobsite Theater at the Straz Center
🗓 Jan. 14 – Feb. 8
Shakespeare skeptics, relax.
Jobsite’s Comedy of Errors is fast, physical, unapologetically silly — and smart enough to know laughter is the point. Set in the 1960s and played at full speed, this production isn’t interested in reverence. It’s interested in momentum.
If you’ve ever felt like Shakespeare was homework, this is your permission slip.
Read the full feature
Avery Anderson
The Pink Unicorn
📍 Story Keepers | 🗓 Opening this week in homes across St. Petersburg
This isn’t just intimate theater.
It’s theater that refuses distance.
Story Keepers’ site-specific production of The Pink Unicorn brings Elise Forier Edie’s deeply personal play into living rooms — spaces already loaded with memory, argument, love, and fear. A story about parenting, gender, and trying to get it right without a map doesn’t benefit from a fourth wall.
It benefits from presence.
Why Story Keepers exists (and why it isn’t just “intimate theater”)
Avery Anderson
Touching the Void
📍 Stageworks Theatre
🗓 Jan. 16 – Feb. 1
A survival story that doesn’t blink.
Based on Joe Simpson’s harrowing experience in the Peruvian Andes, Touching the Void asks a brutal question: what do you do when survival and loyalty collide? It’s physical, unforgiving, and built on the kind of moral tension that lingers long after curtain call.
Opening Soon
Himself and Nora
📍 freeFall Theatre Company
🗓 Jan. 30 – March 8
A love story with footnotes — and teeth.
Jonathan Brielle’s romantic musical traces the 37-year relationship between James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, blending Irish folk textures with contemporary musical theater. freeFall continues its knack for unearthing underappreciated works that feel newly relevant, especially when filtered through questions of art, obsession, and partnership.
If you loved God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater or Road Show, put this on your calendar now.
One Last Thing
You don’t have to see everything.
But seeing something — in a room with other people, breathing the same air — still matters.
If you’re looking for where to start, this week offers more than a distraction. It offers connection.
I’ll see you in the audience.
— Avery
Tampa Bay Arts Passport