Players Centre hires new artistic director
The Players Centre for Performing Arts is turning to a former local actor who grew up in Sarasota and performed on its stages to become its new artistic director.
The company has announced that Steven H. Butler will become artistic director in February of Sarasota’s oldest performing arts organization. He is based in Gainesville where he is the founder and artistic director of Actors’ Warehouse, a community theater that opened in 2011. Butler is stepping down as Executive Director of the Florida Theatre Conference and will continue to serve on the board of directors of the American Association of Community Theatre.
Butler will succeed Lee Gundersheimer, who was fired in August, about eight months after he was hired to succeed Jeffery Kin, who departed after a 15-year tenure. CEO William Skaggs said at the time that the relationship “simply did not end up being the overall fit that we expected.”
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He will be the first African-American artistic director in the theater’s history.
Scott Keys, a local director, writer and composer who ran the theater program at Booker High School’s Visual and Performing Arts program for many years, spent several months as an interim artistic director.
“With his experience, we are thrilled that Steven was interested in coming back to Sarasota and to the Players,” Skaggs said.
He added that Butler’s experience on the state and national level with the two organizations “bring us additional value as we work to continue as the theater we’ve been and see, in this new century, what theater we will become. I appreciate the additional lenses that he brings.”
Butler grew up in Sarasota and graduated from Sarasota High School and earned his Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences from Florida International University in Miami. In 2011, he founded Actors’ Warehouse in Gainesville where he serves as executive and artistic director. He has led the company from its founding in a storefront site to a historic church and through the pandemic.
In 2019 he was named executive director of the Florida Theatre Conference, a statewide non-profit organization that sponsors a variety of programs for professional, community and educational theater companies, including competitions, workshops and organizing student auditions for colleges.
At the Players in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he performed in such musicals as “Irma La Douce,” “Carousel” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” and he played the Emcee in a production of “Cabaret.” His directing credits at Actors’ Warehouse include “Steel Magnolias,” “Black Nativity and “Satchmo at the Waldorf.”
Butler said working through the pandemic, he “came to the awareness that it was time for something else and to move on.” One of his goals for The Players is to how “best to start doing theater differently. We’re not alone. There are a lot of theaters in this country, both professional and non-professional, that have to rethink the way they do theater.”
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He said as the first Black artistic director of The Players Centre, he hopes his “coming on board is in alignment with what The Players is all about. It’s about community and if we’re going to call ourselves a community theater, then we should be concerned with reaching every corner of our community and having the staff as well as the creative team on stage and behind the scenes be reflective of our community.”
He is the second Black artistic director in the region, following the hiring of Benny Sato-Ambush at Venice Theatre last year.
He will join the company on Feb. 27 and will help to plan the company’s 94th season.
His hiring comes at a time of change for the Players, which is seeking a more permanent home after long-held plans for a new theater complex in Lakewood Ranch were halted. The Players had sold its longtime home on U.S. 41 in 2016 and planned to use proceeds for the new facility.
In the meantime, it transformed a former Banana Republic store at the Crossings at Siesta Key shopping mall into an intimate, in-the-round and temporary performance venue. The theater company was seeking a long-term lease with the city of Sarasota for use of the historic Municipal Auditorium, on which it planned to spend millions to create a flexible theater facility. But there was a competing plan from leaders of the Bay Park Conservancy, who are creating a major public park around the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall.
In October, city commissioners encouraged The Players to consider using the smaller Payne Park Auditorium. Skaggs said the company is exploring possibilities about the venue.
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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: New artistic director at Players Centre has long ties to Sarasota
