Theatre Lab Moves Next Season To A Real Theater Space At FAU

By Bill Hirschman

When Theatre Lab moved into its space at Florida Atlantic University in 2015, the backstage of their new home for the next decade was a former red mango frozen yogurt shop in a dormitory.

Next season, it will leave the “intimate” space they remodeled and move to a true theater a few hundred yards away, complete with real rehearsal space and the luxury of actual dressing rooms that actually have private bathrooms and showers.

The Marlene Forkis Studio One Theater to be shared with its current occupant, the FAU Department of Theater and Dance, will be a much-welcomed facility while the company continues to pursue a permanent home in the future on the campus.

Among the changes, the current house that seats 88 to 99 people will be traded for the 155-seat facility actually built to be a theater.  The larger floor plan also means larger sets and larger casts.

Currently, the company has usual done plays with small casts, occasionally as many as six or seven actors. This season it has done one with two actresses.

“I think shows with five to seven actors are going to start being much more common in our space,” said Producing Artistic Director Matt Stabile. “So it’s really opened up the possible list of plays that I can select from as I choose a season. I’ve come across plenty of plays in our first nine years, and (said) God, I love this, but we can’t pull this off in our space.”

While Theatre Lab is grateful to have the original space, they weren’t allowed to make permanent changes to the structure.

“So everything that’s in there, we Frankensteined together around the room,” Stabile said, “You know how there’s the holes in the walls so that the frozen yoga machines can be in the walls? We covered those with a false wall on the one side, and on the other side, the holes are still there, so we made them into dressing tables…. In our backstage area, there’s still the counter where the yogurt would be sold over.”

Not kidding, Stabile said of the new space, “So there is a (lighting) grid in there that’s all well up above your audience. So you can do things like ‘down light’ that we can’t actually do in our existing space. And all kinds of stuff that come along with just being in an actual theater space.”

Other changes including a slight alteration of its schedule: The company will still do a four-show main season starting with its family-oriented production. The New Play Festival may have added titles.

But sharing the space with the theater department means less flexibility in changing dates mid-season. Usually, the first show or two were mounted before Thanksgiving. Next season, the first show will open after Thanksgiving.

The physically larger space means larger sets and other issues that will increase its annual budget an estimated $30,000,

This move coincides with the university’s expansion that includes building two new dormitories nearby.

“Theatre Lab always understood that this was a temporary situation and that, as we grew along with the university, the time would eventually come to move operations to a more suitable facility,” said Louis Tyrrell, founding director of Theatre Lab. “With the expansion of the east side of campus, including the construction of a new dormitory set to house more than 600 students, the need to accommodate student life – an absolute priority of any university – combined with Theatre Lab’s own visions for the future, means the time for that change has come.

“This is an incredibly exciting step in our organization’s growth. Theatre Lab will continue to provide a new play experience second-to-none alongside our robust educational outreach programming as we deepen our engagement with and provide even more opportunities for students to work with the professional resident company on campus.”

The upcoming move and the vision of its own space two to three years from now has been encouraged by its fanbase that has been asking “Why are you still in this space? Why are you still suffering these limitations?,” Stabile said. “And I said very clearly to people who were listening, I don’t believe we’ll be able to make it to the 15-year mark in that existing space.”

Over the past decade, Theatre Lab has focused solely on new plays, some never before seen. Some it has helped developed: more than 30 full productions and more than 100 developmental readings.