MIAMI HERALD

FIVE QUESTIONS

Playing on a new stage

Stephanie Norman is the co-founder and producing artistic director of City Theatre. Its 12th annual Summer Shorts Festival starts next month.

Q. What distinguishes City Theatre?
A. City Theatre is a theater company going into its 12th season. We are a company that only does new work, and we collaborate with the largest ensemble of artists in our region. We do that by producing the Summer Shorts, our signature product -- short plays from three minutes to 15 minutes long.
In doing new work, we can bring the greatest number of artists, actors and directors to work with us. It's fast and furious and a lot of fun.
Summer Shorts has two programs -- Program A and Program B. On Saturdays and Sundays, patrons can see double features.

Q. Summer Shorts will be in a new venue this year. Why?
A. It's going to be at the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts. For the last 11 years we're been using the Ring Theatre at the University of Miami. This year, there's a wonderful opportunity to hang up our shorts, if you will, at the Carnival Center. We'll have bright banners with shorts lining Biscayne Boulevard.
The festival starts June 7 in the Studio Theater. It'll run for six weeks -- the longest run in that theater for any troupe so far -- before going to the Amaturo Theater in Broward. We're breaking some new ground. Plus the Ring Theater is closing this summer for renovation. When you are pushed out of the nest, you have to flap your wings. The Carnival Center is a great place to land.
Q. City Theatre has partnered with the nation's premier theater festival. How do you work together?
A. The Actors Theatre of Louisville produces the Humana Festival, the largest and most prestigious theater festival in the country. We have always used it as a role model. It's the gold standard. Two years ago the Humana Festival wanted to form an exclusive partnership with a theater to develop new short plays, and they selected our company from a national pool of candidates.

Q. What are the plays like?
A. They are a wonderful representation of the best writing in American theater.
We collectively received and read 1,200 plays from everywhere, from writers for TV and film in New York and Los Angeles to people we discovered here in our backyard. We will be doing 15 plays. It's theater for the remote-control generation because of our short attention spans.
One important part of what we do is mentor young playwrights in the community. Marco Ramirez was a Hialeah boy from Coral Reef High School. He graduated last year from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He happened to win the Heideman Award, the highest honor for a short play. We are producing his play, which comes directly from the Humana Festival. I am not Batman is a wonderful, gritty, funny and moving play about a man who pretends that he is Batman and goes out to save the world.

Q. How did you come to found City Theatre?
A. I was an actress who was with Second City in Chicago. When I moved here, I met two wonderful and talented women wanting to do something completely new and unique -- and Summer Shorts was born. It was terrifying getting it off the ground. We mounted 18 plays in two weeks, I don't know how. And two out of three of us were pregnant when we did it.
Editorial Board member Nancy Ancrum prepared this report.