Orlando's arts institutions are increasingly emphasizing the diversity of Central Florida's cultural community, offering creative outlets for members of historically marginalized communities. But despite those outreach efforts, the fact remains that the vast majority of mainstream artistic opportunities are oriented toward English-speakers, which leaves out a significant swath of our area's Latinx population. In a bid to redress that imbalance, downtown's Fringe ArtSpace teamed up last weekend with the Latina-led nonprofit Open Scene to present the third annual Festival Latinoamericano de Artes Escénicas (Latin American Festival of Performing Arts) — or FLAE — featuring three days devoted to Spanish-language theater and Latin American artists.

Open Scene was founded in 2019 by Venezuelan journalist Thamara Bejarano, debuting with a performance art piece on Church Street at the Creative City Project's Immerse festival, where they also presented the intriguing "Exquisite Corpse" virtual reality experience three years later. During the pandemic period in between, Open Scene streamed readings of Lorca and Ibsen en español, but it was their Fringe 2022 production of Claudia Vargas Vega's Raquel, a searing drama about anti-trans violence, that really caught my attention. In addition, Open Scene has held several playwriting contests (their latest, "Escena Abierta," closes June 30) and created three installments of "Voices," a series of dramatic documentaries and socially conscious shows.

For this year's FLAE, Open Scene returned to Church Street and brought to ArtSpace Miami's Havanafama for a kabuki-inspired interpretation of La Casa de Bernarda Alba and Texas' Teatro Dallas with Gustavo Ott's tragicomedy Passport. I stopped by on Saturday for the festival's grand finale, a "Noche de Zarzuela" revue of the 17th-century Hispanic operatic subgenre by Central Florida Vocal Arts' Opera del Sol.

The evening began with an hour of live guitar music in the ArtSpace lobby, which was temporarily transformed into a visual art gallery, prior to the main presentation starring soprano Mariangel Cestari, mezzo-soprano Stefanie Diaz, tenor John Teixeira and baritone Jose-Manuel Lopez, under the direction of Bert Rodriguez. These internationally experienced vocalists were supported by a superb chamber quartet fronted by dynamic viola player Daniel Cortes, along with a twirling trio of human chrysanthemums from Raymi Dance.

My last experience with Open Scene, their 2023 Fringe drama La Cantante Vuelve, was undermined by unintelligible high-tech translation devices, so I was thankful they weren't needed to thoroughly enjoy the Zarzuela; after all, opera has been appreciated across linguistic lines for centuries before supertitles arrived. Bejarano says her company will continue experimenting with "state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technology" that will allow them to offer all their content with subtitles and audio in more than 25 languages.

However, it was evident from the audience's enthusiastic reception that this colorful, emotionally charged concert didn't need a school of bionic Babel fish to make an artistic impact.

"The reaction to this week's festival from both patrons and artists has been overwhelmingly positive," says Open Scene production director Mariela Saad. "The fact that the public was captivated by every performance is a testament to the quality and appeal of our offer. The great feedback received further reinforces the success of the event. These reactions make us feel extremely pleased and excited about the future. They validate our efforts in building an Open Scene Community that fosters a shared passion for the arts, culture and their universality."

If you didn't make it to this year's FLAE, you'll have plenty of future opportunities to see Open Scene in action at Fringe ArtSpace, because they are one of three organizations chosen to join the Collective, Orlando Fringe's recently relaunched incubator program. Along with Meka King's Sonflower Joy Music and Without Fear Theatre, Open Space will participate in an 18-month mentoring program, and receive up to $20,000 (plus over $35,000 in in-kind services) to produce multiple shows in Fringe ArtSpace's season starting next spring. This new program is sponsored by the Downtown Development Board, and spearheaded by Fringe's newly promoted Creative Learning Producer, Genevieve Bernard [aka, full disclosure, my wife].

"Our hopes for our time with the Collective incubator are filled with excitement and anticipation," says Saad. "We see this opportunity as a valuable platform for collaboration and growth. Through it, we aim to foster meaningful partnerships, exchange ideas and explore new possibilities together. This collaborative environment will provide us with resources, support and networking opportunities that can help us bring new and innovative projects to our audience. Our goal is to accelerate our growth, expand our reach and continue bringing exciting experiences to the community we serve. We are grateful for this opportunity and optimistic about the positive impact it will have on our organization and all the parties involved."

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photo courtesy of the producer

Caroline Hull, Indigo Leigh, and Daniel Luis Molina star in "A Streetcar Named Desire" at Timucua Arts Foundation.

Thanks to Florida’s current governor, creative artists and members of vulnerable minorities (often the same thing) have been exiting our state en masse via planes, trains, automobiles ... and even streetcars. You can add producer/director Jeremy Seghers to that list; after nearly 20 years contributing to Orlando’s cultural scene, he is (in the immortal words of MuppetVision 3D) moving to Pittsburgh, but not before shaking up Central Florida’s stages one last time with this weekend’s groundbreaking production of A Streetcar Named Desire at Timucua. I recently sat down for a “moving moment” with Jeremy to reflect on his wide-ranging legacy and hear how his swan song sheds new light on Tennessee Williams’ classic.

A native of Jacksonville, Seghers studied at Savannah College of Art and Design and lived briefly in Chicago before returning to Florida in the mid-aughts. Wanting to stay close to family, but seeking more culture than Jacksonville could provide, Jeremy was lured to Orlando by the Fringe Festival, first serving as an unpaid assistant to then-producer Beth Marshall; to pay the bills, he worked at Barnes & Noble alongside much-missed OW columnist Billy Manes. 

By 2007, he was producing his own Fringe shows, including an ill-fated puppetry fable with Heather Henson, a searing stage adaptation of Mysterious Skin, and the Adventures of Normal People in 3D, a free performance where nothing happened for an hour, and patrons were forced to pay if they wanted to leave early.

“We had the guy who took the fire extinguisher off the wall and sprayed it around,” recalls Seghers of the infamous social experiment. “That was the show that Beth [Marshall] was in, along with [performance artist] Brian Feldman, who had fallen asleep on the ground in sort of a Dracula position. And so he had this outline of white powder all around him, and we had to wake him up and say, ‘you're laying in this toxic dust.’ So that was fun.”

Following a sojourn in New York, Seghers returned with a remarkable run of innovative site-specific experiences, including A Clockwork Orange on I-Drive, Dracula inside a taxidermy shop, and Equus in an actual barn (without working air conditioning).

“It was kind of like ‘necessity is the mother of invention,’ really, because I came back, I didn't have a venue, and I didn’t want to waste any more time,” Seghers says.

In the years since then, Seghers has become sought-after as a freelance director, working across the region from the Villages to Winter Garden; most recently, he mounted Misery at Osceola Arts and the epic two-part Angels in America at Valencia College. 

For his final local production, Seghers revived a concept he had previously pitched at Osceola Arts, inspired by his friend and collaborator Indigo Leigh, the openly transgender actress and designer who plays the fragile heroine, Blanche DuBois.

“When I was doing pre-production for Angels, I think that kind of sparked something, because there are there are so many connections [and] parallels between Kushner and Williams,” says Seghers. “It's been widely noted that Blanche and Tennessee Williams are the same. … He wrote a character with queer camp sensibilities; she has a flair for the dramatic, she is an outsider, and Tennessee was an outsider, [so] it's not that far of a leap to make — having Blanche as a queer character, and as a trans character — because there is so much about her past that she wants to avoid talking about, that's dark [and] in some way scandalous.”

Although Leigh and Seghers are using this Streetcar to emphasize Williams’ interrogation of gender norms — with Blanche’s sister, Stella (Caroline Hull), and boorish brother-in-law, Stanley (Daniel Luis Molina), as Exhibits A and B of toxic heteronormativity — they’ve done so while sticking to the original script, without “adding anything to it; we’re not changing the text at all, [and] not taking anything away from it either.”

What Seghers is adding is an immersive element that fully utilizes Timucua’s multilevel venue (“it's gonna happen all over, so people are going to have to turn around to see stuff”), as well as a commitment to assembling a diverse cast that “looked like a New Orleans that I knew.”

When asked his reasons for leaving town, Seghers cites both “the political stuff that's happening right now in Florida,” and also the tribal competitiveness of Orlando’s cliquish theater community.

“If we don't unify against the real enemy of artists, which is fascism, [then] there's not going to be anything left,” Jeremy says in farewell. “I hope that a new generation of theater makers will work with their friends to start something and keep it going, [and] then welcome new people in who can bring things that are different from them, not the same. Inclusion is not exclusion, and people need to know the difference. … Have a vision. Have your own perspective about things [because] there's so much talent here, and there's so much potential with that talent.”