Who Gets to Tell the Story?

by Avery Anderson

This season in St. Pete, something unusual is happening.

Three new theatrical production companies have launched in a single year: Dead Canary Theatre. Story Keepers. And now, HerStoriesTold Productions.

That’s either a renaissance.

Or a referendum.

This week, HerStoriesTold brings The Niceties by Eleanor Burgess, directed by Andresia Moseley, to Studio@620 (Feb. 12–15). On paper, it’s a two-person drama set in a university office: a progressive white professor and her Black student meeting about a paper.

In practice, it’s a live wire.

What begins as polite academic mentorship detonates into a confrontation about race, power, history, and who gets to define the American narrative. The play doesn’t ask whether history is complicated. It asks who benefits when it’s simplified.

And in 2026 Florida — where conversations about curriculum, race, and “comfort” in classrooms are not theoretical — that question lands differently.

Tiffany Faykus, founder and Chief Storyteller of HerStoriesTold, first encountered the play in New York.

“Leanora and I had the pleasure of performing this play as a staged reading in NYC last fall,” she said. “I was so moved by this piece and its timely, important message that I knew I wanted to bring it to St. Petersburg.”

She’s explicit about why here.

“St. Pete is a place where art and activism often intersect. The community here is engaged, diverse, and intellectually curious, and I wanted to offer a piece that doesn’t shy away from difficult conversations—but invites us into them with honesty and humanity.”

The production is directed by Andresia Moseley and co-stars Faykus as Janine Bosko alongside Leanora Octavia Tapper as Zoe Reed. Tapper, a Harlem-born graduate of SUNY Purchase’s Acting Conservatory.

But zoom out for a moment.

When three new companies emerge in one season, it’s worth asking why.

Sometimes new companies form because a scene is thriving — artists see energy and want in. Sometimes they form because artists feel there isn’t space for the stories they need to tell. Often, it’s both.

This season alone, St. Pete has seen the launch of Dead Canary Theatre, Story Keepers — which I helped found — and now HerStoriesTold Productions stepping onto the landscape.

That proximity matters.

Because from the inside, the impulse doesn’t feel rebellious. It feels practical. Artists look around and ask: Where can this story live? If the answer isn’t obvious, they build the room themselves.

St. Pete’s larger institutions produce strong work. But they also operate inside structures — subscription bases, donor expectations, board governance, financial realities — that can make risk feel expensive. Smaller companies, by contrast, can turn faster. They can stage the two-hander in the room that makes everyone slightly uncomfortable. They can program the play that sparks a post-show argument instead of a polite applause break.

That doesn’t mean every new company fills a clearly defined “gap.” Not every launch is a revolution. But collectively, they signal something.

Artists here are no longer waiting.

They’re building.

Dead Canary is carving out its own aesthetic lane of bringing theatre to the middle of the county. Story Keepers is experimenting with proximity and site-specific new work. Now HerStoriesTold steps in with a mission to elevate stories that spark dialogue and challenge assumptions.

If you zoom out far enough, it looks less like fragmentation and more like a recalibration. A community testing how many ways it can hold story at once.

The real question isn’t whether we should celebrate new companies.

It’s whether we’re ready for what they’re insisting on.

And The Niceties feels like part of that shift. It doesn’t offer easy answers. It doesn’t resolve into consensus. It forces its audience to sit in tension — to examine how civility can sometimes function as a lid on deeper power struggles.

In a state where the politics of education dominate headlines, watching two women argue over historical truth in a small black box theater is not a neutral act. It’s civic.

Maybe this surge of new companies isn’t fragmentation. Maybe it’s a community stress-testing its own capacity for conversation.

The question isn’t whether St. Pete has enough theatre.

The question is whether we’re ready for the stories artists are insisting on telling — even when they’re uncomfortable.

If You Go

The Niceties
📍 Studio@620
🗓 February 12–13 at 7:30 PM
🗓 February 14–15 at 3:00 PM
🎟 Presented by HerStoriesTold Productions