Shorty Shorts and Secrets

Three men. One farm. A story that won’t stay buried.

by Avery Anderson

There are only 43 seats at The Off-Central Players.

Which means when something cracks open onstage, you’re not watching it from a safe, upholstered distance. You’re in it. You can hear the breath catch. You can see the moment someone decides whether to tell the truth—or protect it.

Beginning March 5, the crack is called The Drawer Boy.

The quietly devastating (and unexpectedly funny) play by Michael Healey drops us onto a remote Ontario farm in 1972, where two lifelong friends have built a routine sturdy enough to hold grief at bay. Then a young actor arrives to interview them for a research-based theatre project.

Billed as a show about “memory, friendship, and the stories we tell to survive”

That’s the polite version.

In rehearsal this week, the cast kept circling something deeper: male friendship—the kind that predates therapy language and Instagram vulnerability posts. The kind built on routine, obligation, and what you don’t say out loud.

Stephen Riordan, who plays Morgan, put it simply:

“This play is really about two two main themes. It's about friendship and it's about memories.”

On the surface, he said, it looks like one thing. But “the more you listen, the more you kind of understand what's happening, it becomes something totally different.”

That slow unraveling feels right at home at Off-Central, a company that has built its reputation on intimacy who like to do some of the work themselves.

Lucas Ethington, making his stage debut as Miles, framed the story through a contemporary lens:

“I think it's very beautiful to be telling a story that is really showing healthy or men friendships and just a healthy masculine kind of vibe throughout the play. I think that is something that is kind of needed right now.”

In a cultural moment obsessed with dissecting masculinity—sometimes rightly, sometimes loudly—The Drawer Boy offers something quieter: men who love each other without spectacle. Men who keep secrets because that’s what their generation was trained to do.

Director Ami Sallee sees the script less as a message and more as a puzzle box.

“It is a well-written script, but it's like a treasure hunt. Nothing laid perfectly out. There is no simple answer across the board.”

The play peels back story after story—white lies, bedtime tales, half-truths polished by repetition—until the audience starts to sense that something underneath doesn’t quite ring true.

Mike Menszycki, returning to the St. Pete stage as Angus, described it this way:

“Big part of this play is is storytelling… there’s all these stories within the show. It just layers these stories on top of stories.”

That layering matters. Because as the questions pile up, so does the tension between protection and honesty. Between preserving someone you love and confronting what really happened.

This isn’t a heavy-handed evening. The cast promises music, flashes of 1970s energy, and yes, shorty shorts.

“It’s got it all really,” Menszycki said. “It’s going to make your heart move around.”

Sallee doesn’t want you leaving with a neat moral tied in a bow. She wants you arguing.

“I want act three to be at the coffee shop or wherever after the show and they are collectively picking apart the stories and putting it all together.”

In a 43-seat black box in the Grand Central District, you don’t get to hide from that kind of unraveling. You’re close enough to see the flicker before someone decides whether to tell the truth. Close enough to feel the weight of what’s been carried for decades.

The Drawer Boy runs March 5–15 at The Off-Central, 2260 1st Ave. N., St. Petersburg