Boomtown Theatre
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Boomtown Theatre is a multimedia performance theatre/ restaurant in Jacksonville, Florida which houses a number of experimental performance groups and whose mission statement is to help foster new types of performance art while simultaneously creating a self subsidizing cultural venue.
Boomtown Theatre was created by William Stephen Dare and John Allen Harrett in September of 2002 as a means of revitalizing the declining neighborhood of Springfield just north of Jacksonville's downtown under the administration of progressive Republican Mayor John Delaney. In addition to creating innovative audience interactive theatre formats, Boomtown has sponsored and developed many new productions, each created by Jacksonville writers and artists.
Several of these have gone on to other cities and larger audiences:
- The View From Tall by Caitlyn Parrish, which went on to win the Stephen Sondheim-backed Young American Playwrights Competition of 2004 and was subsequently produced to favorable reviews at The Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City.
- Essential Personnel by Al Letson, who went on to produce the show at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York.
- Majigeen by Jennifer Chase, a musical account of the life of Anna Kingsley, an enslaved Senegalese princess turned slaveholding plantation owner in Spanish Florida.
Boomtown is also the Florida anchor of the national spoken word movement and features the largest performances of Spoken Word in the state of Florida, regularly hosting slams and feature artists from the national scene.
Perhaps the most innovative performance concept created at Boomtown is the weekly performance of its notorious Vampire Improv, an improvised theatrical serial show featuring stock characters in recurring roles that continue from week to week. Vampire Improv is unique in allowing audience members to volunteer for roles just prior to showtime. Now in its third year of production, Vampire Improv is the longest running show of its kind in the US.
Boomtown's latest concept is the Thursday night group "Pulp Fiction Theater," in which a half-dozen actors (five of them are ages 18 to 23) act out three playlets based on stories from the 1930's-'40s "pulp fiction" genre. "PFT" will open on Jan. 18, 2007.
