It’s become a tradition at the Vero Beach Theatre Guild to start the season with a British farce. This year, the comedy is 1980s vintage: “Run for your Wife” by Ray Cooney, about a married taxi driver who takes a wrong turn when he has a fling – and agrees to marry her, too.
In the Guild’s version of the play, which opens next Thursday, director Art Pingree has relocated the action to New York City, his old stomping grounds; he and his wife were professional actors for many years and just relocated permanently to Vero in March
“I’ve put one wife on East 79th and the other one on West 79th,” Pingree says. “The transverse through Central Park is a four-and-a-half minute cab ride, five with traffic.” Apparently he added a line to that effect.
That sort of precise timing goes awry when the cab driver tries to help a mugging victim and ends up in the emergency room himself. Two different addresses get everyone confused, including the two sets of cops trying to figure it all out.
Pingree says he’s “like a traffic cop,” keeping everyone moving in the right direction through the set’s four entrances. “It’s in and out, in and out, in and out,” he says. Bigamy at its best, I would say.
If it’s anything like last season’s fall farce, “Whose Wives are They Anyway?” which Pingree also directed, it’s going to have the audience howling. And with luck, there’ll be one or two who decide to get involved in the community theater. That’s where the real fun happens, according to Pingree.
“I call it the playground,” he says.
The play stars Doy Demsick as the taxi driver. It runs through Sept. 20.
The Laura Riding Jackson Foundation, Vero’s literature advocacy group named for the poet who once lived here, is sponsoring the Cambridge American Stage Tour’s visit to Vero this week. It includes not only free performances of “The Taming of the Shrew” (Thursday at 7 p.m. at St. Edward’s School and Saturday afternoon at 1 p.m. at Sebastian River High School); the actors also give a free teen writers workshop Saturday morning from 9 to 11:30 a.m. at Sebastian High’s performing arts center. Registration can be done online – even at the last minute, organizers say – at www.lrjf.org or by sending an email to teenwriters@lrjf.org.
I sat in on one of these writing workshops and was moved by how inspired the Vero and Sebastian kids were by the young British actors. It seemed invaluable not only for the lessons in writing and creating but in a sharing of interests between cultures as well. The Laura Riding Jackson Foundation stages some of the most impressive events in the county, and they mysteriously seem to be under the radar of many who would otherwise be interested. CAST is one not to miss.
Friday night is the monthly Gallery Stroll in downtown Vero, with a number of galleries opening just for the occasion, though they’ve been largely shuttered for the summer. Among those is Tiger Lily, one of the founding galleries of the district and the only one that includes working studios in its public spaces. Cristina Abizaid, who joined the co-op last year, will be showing some new large mosaics using shells and sea glass found on Vero’s shore. The Beirut-born Abizaid credits a drawing class at Georgetown University with loosening up her detail-oriented style (the professor, a priest, gave her a cigarette butt to paint with). Her current mosaics include rustic monochromes of female figures, with spiraling wave-weathered conchs forming skirts or hair. Abizaid, who when she moved to Vero five years ago, gathered pieces of shells on the beach every morning for two years, sees the mosaics as being “about our own brokenness as humans, and how no matter how beat up we are from life, we are still human and still beautiful.”
Another Tiger Lily artist, Travis Blanton, has done some new sculptures, witty as always. They depict women with their pets in varying degrees of emotional connectedness – from the eye-rolling annoyance of a woman with a cat parked on her head, to the Zen-like calm of a Japanese woman serenely cradling a rabbit.
The gallery stroll goes on from 5 to 8 p.m. If you stray to Old Dixie, at 7 p.m., Project Space 1785 is screening a short film series curated by Jared Thomas.
It’s Parents Night Out tonight at the South Florida Science Museum in West Palm. For about the price of a sitter, kids 4 to 12 are invited to spend from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. learning about science, eating pizza and watching a show at the planetarium. If it’s too late to put a date night together, the museum has Parents Night Out again Oct. 2, Nov. 6 and Dec. 4, all Friday nights. The cost is $30 per child, and $15 for each extra child. The science museum is in a complex that includes the Palm Beach Zoo, an aquarium and the planetarium. The zoo, by the way, offers overnights in the fall and spring for families with kids 6 and over.
