VERO BEACH — The gathering of Vero Beach Theatre Guild supporters were flush with pride as Mark Wygonik, the organization’s new president, grandly invited them to tour the community theater’s new women’s restroom last week.
“No more lines around the block at intermission,” announced Wygonik at the reception dubbed “Hullabaloo for the Loo.”
For the men, sorry. They’ve got the same old john, Wygonik said. “But we did plant new bushes out back.” Wygonik never flinched at the pedestrian subject. He was, after all, here with “friends and family,” the guests of cast and crew invited to see every new play before the public does, on the night before opening night. Besides, restrooms were the theme of the evening. The play he is currently staging, “Hotbed Hotel,” is a classic farce featuring a very busy bathroom with a chronically running toilet in an aging Key West hotel, all part of a set designed by Wygonik.
It is the latest of some two dozen plays he has directed here. At 54, Wygonik is just a year younger than the Theatre Guild itself, now celebrating its 55th season.
Growing up in Vero Beach, Wygonik wasn’t involved in theater as a child or later at Vero Beach High School. Instead, his focus was on art.
“The theater group was too cliquey,“ he said. “I was theatrical, but I was in the math club. I had a linear sensibility.”
With enthusiastic support from his parents to pursue a career in the arts, Wygonik left Vero for the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. He studied graphic design, and got a job in advertising in Stuart. Then, came a job offer as art director for a magazine, a monthly based in Turks and Caicos that would eventually become Islands magazine.
Over the next four years, he and a broad assortment of friends there – a guy who had studied dance with Alvin Ailey, a British couple, an American girl from the Peace Corps – organized the Chequerboard Players, a small community troupe that staged revues around the island’s hotels.
He’s been thinking a lot about those years lately, with his current play set in Key West, and involving a British major who reminds him of Grand Turk’s government workers – Turks and Caicos is a British protectorate.
”Michael Parker (the playwright, who is British) really did his homework,” Wygonik said. “It’s pretty much a British bedroom farce with mistaken identity, slamming doors, pretty women and the usual stock characters, but with an American physicality.” That physicality was clearly a challenge to direct. Fortunately, along with art and drama, Wygonik has something of a dance background himself.
After leaving the Caribbean, he came home to Vero to work for a small ad agency here, and on the side, he danced with Chris Dale Sexton’s Vero company. The dancers ranged from veteran dancer Stacey Miller to county Commissioner Bob Solari. Along with musical theater-style performances they did “liturgical dancing,” a big hit in local church services, Wygonik says. Chris Sexton inadvertently led him to a realm of dance well beyond Vero. Sexton introduced Wygonik to a young Vero High graduate in need of a mentor with a bent toward the arts.
Chris Foster, a talented actor, dancer, and eventually a model for Levi’s jeans and Skechers shoes, became “like a son” to Wygonik. As Foster’s success led him to New York and Las Vegas, he and Wygonik started a production company, staging dance shows in the vein of the Canadian dance company, Cirque du Soleil.
Wygonik and Foster’s “Jambalaya,” a show of gymnastics, aerial dance and jazz in extravagant costumes, played around in South Florida, including performances at corporate affairs and high-end parties and ended up in 2007 with a run at the Crystal Palace Casino in the Bahamas.
As for Wygonik’s own big break on the stage, it was in 1985, when on a whim he tried out for a part in a guild production of “Brigadoon.” Singing in the chorus, he participated in some of the guild’s last moments at Riverside Theatre, the guild’s home for the 12 years prior.
Meanwhile another long-term association was spawned from Wygonik’s paintings and mixed media with found objects. In 1989, Wygonik met Virginia Knapp, who with her late husband Tom, were a prominent philanthropic couple on the island. Knapp, an abstract painter, was in a show with Wygonik at Harvey Kornicks’ Red Lion Gallery.
“I really admired her work and she liked my work and we hit it off from an artistic standpoint.” When Knapp opened her own gallery, Eye of the Lizard, in Pelican Plaza on the island, she hired Wygonik to manage it.
His personal and working relationship with Knapp continues today; Wygonik is Knapp’s personal assistant. Several of his paintings – a large portrait of Marilyn Monroe and another of Knapp herself – hang prominently in Knapp’s home. Often dressing with flare as if each egged the other on, the two are a fixture at openings at Gallery 14, where Knapp is a partner.
“Just because I lived in Vero doesn’t mean my mind is stuck in Vero,” said Wygonik. “With technology these days, the world is at our fingertips. But I get to stay here where there’s no traffic. I have a business partner who likes to travel, so I’m fortunate.”
As Wygonik beams with anticipation prior to the curtain rising on his new show, the appeal of community theater suddenly becomes apparent. Watching the characters make their entrances, the audience chuckled with recognition at their neighbors, family members and co-workers utterly transformed by their wacky costumes.
Careening through Wygonik’s charming set, the actors scrambled in and out of beds, bathrooms, closets and other guests’ rooms. The play climaxes – so to speak — in a giant pile-on of aging men in boxer shorts and sex-pots in big brassieres, as the audience wailed with laughter at the all-too-familiar faces.
“The community needs to be welcomed here not just to see our shows but to participate in putting the shows on,” said Wygonik in his new role as guild president. “It’s a warm, inviting, friendly, fun place to be.
“Hotbed Hotel” runs through this weekend.
For information, visit www.verobeachtheatreguild.com, or call 772- 562-8300.
