At Square Peg Productions,
the Alternative Play’s the Thing
New Miami Theatre Company Performs in Wynwood Gallery Space

By Mary Damiano

	The cast of Three Angels Dancing on a Needle

There’s a new theatre company in town, out to breathe a different kind of life into South Florida Theatre.

The company’s debut production, Three Angels Dancing on a Needle, is now playing at Deluxe Arts, a gallery and performance space in Wynwood.  The production runs through October 22.

Three Angels Dancing on a Needle is described as a comedy about pure love, pure lust and all the impure thoughts in between, as three characters play out absurd fantasies of sex and revenge as they look for happiness in all the wrong places. The play was written by Assurbanipal Babilla, an Iranian playwright and artist who has been in exile since 1979. Before his exile, Babilla had exhibited a collection of erotic nude self-portraits in Iran. One can just imagine how that went over in a country ruled by the Ayatollah Khomeni.

Michael Yawney, one of the core members of Square Peg, is directing Three Angels Dancing on a Needle. Yawney first saw one of Babilla’s plays in 1981. Seven years later he worked with Babilla, who was quite famous in his native country before his exile. Yawney first saw of production of Three Angels Dancing on a Needle in 1989.  The play fits two of Square Peg’s criteria for their first production: it hadn’t been seen locally and it would introduce audiences to a new voice.

“We wanted something that would open up new ground, something that was unlike anything else that would be available to audiences,” says Yawney. “Bani is a playwright with a cult following and we really wanted to do a piece that needed to be done.”

Yawney defines alternative theatre simply: “There are lots of things that movies and television do really well,” he says. “In today’s age, theatre has to look for what it does best separate from that.  We’re looking for ways of expressions that are purely theatrical.

“When you see a Square Peg production, I don’t want you ever to say, ‘Oh, I could see how this could be a film or a video,’” Yawney says.  “I want something that only works for theatre.

	Merry Jo Pitasi, Odell Rivas and Miriam Kulick in Three Angels Dancing on a Needle, the first play from Square Peg Productions

“So often where theatre goes wrong is that it tries to imitate other mediums or do things that they do better. A nice realistic play in a nice realistic set—TV’s always going to do that better.  What makes theatre unique is that a group of people are in an audience, sitting in the same room, breathing the same air.  The kind of communication that’s available to us is a living medium.”

Yawney has been directing since the early 1980s. He has been in South Florida since 2000, and in addition to his theatrical pursuits, teaches acting at New World School for the Arts in Miami.

Square Peg was born when Yawney and actress Miriam Kulick were chatting about trips they’d just taken and the theatre they’d seen. They lamented that the kind of theatre they saw in other parts of the country was not being performed with any regularity in South Florida, and decided to create a company that would address alternative work.

“We set out to create the kind of theatre that’s not available elsewhere,” Yawney says. “As much as we love the other theatres here, there’s no need to duplicate what they do.  We want to serve a niche that’s not being served.”

Yawney believes that there is an audience for alternative work.  While he describes much of South Florida theatre as “stylistically mainstream”, he sees other disciplines stepping outside the box.

“What’s interesting is when you go to other kinds of performance, when you look to dance, when you look to performance art in South Florida, it’s actually very radical, so there is an audience for this kind of performance,” Yawney says.

Square Peg is setting itself apart from other theatres right from the get go. Rather than performing in a traditional theatre, Three Angels will be performed at Deluxe Arts, a gallery space in the Wynwood arts district. Yawney says that when he has approached gallery owners in the past about doing theatre in their spaces, they didn’t have a concept of how it would work. Yawney, on the other hand, has a lot of experience in doing theatre in unusual places, and says that his first decade of his directing career was spent staging productions in galleries and other non-traditional venues.

“I love white boxes as opposed to black boxes,” he says.  “In galleries the walls are white and the white fills the room.  Black boxes to me always look separated from life. Nobody paints their walls black.”

Square Peg will provide a new facet of creativity to the burgeoning scene in the design and arts district. Another theatre organization that has had success performing in a gallery space in the area is Creative Arts Enterprises, which has presented its annual Lavender Footlights Festival, several nights of staged readings of gay and lesbian themed plays, at the DotFiftyOne Gallery for the past two years. 

“There is stuff happening, but what we’re trying to do is extend the run a little bit and call attention to ourselves as well as other things that are happening,” says Yawney.  “Already we’re finding people who weren’t really aware of the gallery district.”

	Michael Yawney

Three Angels Dancing on a Needle features a cast of three performers, Miriam Kulick, Merry Jo Pitasi and Odell Rivas.  The trio will also perform a short piece called Nerves, an original movement/theatre piece by playwright Charles Mee that compresses a lifetime of bad dates into 15 minutes.

While Yawney says that Square Peg has a list of plays they’d like to do, future plans depend on the audience’s response.  Yawney sees Square Peg productions as a collaboration between the company and the audience, and will be watching for what the audience responds to in this first production.

Yawney does believe that Square Peg can invigorate the way the audience views theatre by their unorthodox methods.

“Anytime you put something into a new context, it wakes it up,” Yawney says.  “You can go see something in a theatre and you’re very comfortable in your seat and you can forget what you’re seeing. But if you take visual art and put it into a bus terminal, it wakes it up sometimes. So if you take theatre performance and put it into a space that is not what we think of as a theatre, it wakes that up too.”