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LAB\u2019s 2025 production of playwright Paula Fell\u2019s \u201cTrust Me.\u201d (Anne Griswold via LAB) <\/p>\nLAB\u2019s 2025 production of playwright Paula Fell\u2019s \u201cTrust Me.\u201d (Anne Griswold via LAB) <\/p>\n
LAB Theater Project begins its 11th season with a nostalgic callback to a time when middle schoolers toiled away on Apple II desktops in the school media center in desperate, doomed attempts to evade certain death from dysentery or avoid the inevitable choice between eating their oxen and starving.<\/p>\n
Opening January 30th, grown-up musical comedy \u201cThe Trail to Oregon!\u201d is an homage and send-up of the legendary 1980s educational video game The Oregon Trail, which taught a generation of school kids about life in the 19th century through an often ill-fated journey into the West on an ox-drawn wagon.<\/p>\n
\u201cLots of people remember playing the game, and the musical is very true to the game,\u201d says LAB Theater founder and Executive Producer Owen Robertson. \u201cThe audience names the characters. The audience chooses who\u2019s dying from dysentery. It\u2019s very fun. It\u2019s very in the spirit of the game. It\u2019s tremendously silly and fun.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe Trail to Oregon!\u201d opens January 30th. (LAB)<\/p>\n
StarKid Productions, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-founded, Los Angeles-based musical theater company specializing in parodies, debuted \u201cThe Trail to Oregon!\u201d in 2014. It\u2019s gone on to become a cult classic. The local production is a collaboration between LAB Theater and Tampa\u2019s Crazy Random Happenstance (CRH), a troupe of young actors, dancers, and shadowcasters. Performances are scheduled on weekends from January 30th through February 15th, with shows starting at 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. matinees on Saturdays and Sundays.<\/p>\n
After the nostalgic expedition down memory lane, the 2026 season returns to LAB Theater\u2019s core focus, producing new works by emerging playwrights and developing local theater talent.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Playwright Steven Patrick\u2019s \u201cX \u2260 X,\u201d which runs from April 16th through May 3rd, \u201cexplores what defines reality and how we perceive reality,\u201d Robertson says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen an eccentric history professor writes the paradoxical equation \u2018X \u2260 X\u2019on a classroom chalkboard, the result is an unexpected academic and philosophical firestorm,\u201d a summary says. \u201cAs students, donors, and the media obsess over its meaning, the Dean of the college is forced to confront faith, science, grief, and the fragile nature of reality itself. Blending satire with metaphysical inquiry, explores whether truth is fixed \u2014 or forever shifting \u2014 and whether who we are can ever truly remain the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
Running July 2nd through 19th, award-winning playwright Wendy Graf\u2019s \u201cThe Cross & The Saber\u201d tells the story of \u201ca near-future America where church and state have dangerously merged\u201d and a \u201cprogressive pastor is imprisoned for refusing to politicize his pulpit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a play directly addressing freedom of speech, Christian nationalism, and AI all wrapped together,\u201d Robertson says. \u201cIt\u2019s very relevant today, and that\u2019s part of the reason we\u2019ve chosen to put it up on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It\u2019s a really, really cool story. We\u2019re not a political-minded theater company. My first challenge for any new work is to tell me a good story. That\u2019s the fundamental requirement that has to be met. If it happens to have a political message, that\u2019s fine, as long as it fits within the confines of a good story. I won\u2019t do work where playwrights are on their soapbox.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAs We Like It,\u201d by playwright Oded Gross, runs September 17th through October 4th.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the forests of Nazi-occupied Poland, a young Jewish woman shields herself from unbearable reality by staging \u2018As You Like It\u2019 for her family in hiding,\u201d a description says. \u201cAs imagination and survival intertwine, As We Like It becomes a haunting meditation on storytelling as refuge \u2014 and the fragile line between noble illusion and dangerous denial.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you first start into the play, it\u2019s set in a forest, and you think you\u2019re watching this family rehearse the Shakespeare play \u2018As You Like It,\u2019\u201d Robertson says. \u201cAs it turns out, it\u2019s actually a Polish family rehearsing \u2018As You Like It\u2019 for their daughter\u2019s mental health while they\u2019re hiding from the Nazis in World War II Poland. It\u2019s a really, really slick play addressing mental health, what it is to suffer trauma, to flee, and to try and survive in a place where you\u2019re no longer welcome.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 2026 season wraps with local playwright Ansel Taylor\u2019s \u201cPushing Daisies,\u201d which runs from December 3rd through 20th.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the busiest day of the year for a florist, Daisy Blackwell must hold together her crumbling flower shop, her fractured past, and an unexpected reunion \u2014 all while everything threatens to fall apart,\u201d a description says. \u201cPushing Daisies is a witty, heartfelt play about love, burnout, and finding connection in the middle of absolute disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat play came out of the playwriting workshop that we do every summer, Project Greenlight,\u201d Robertson says. \u201cIt\u2019s a 12-week workshop where we take new playwrights and go through and develop their play from inception to draft. Ansel brought in this play and worked on the script, and it was good enough that we put it into our submission process and chose to produce it. So we\u2019re taking it from inception to production. It\u2019s a really tight script. It\u2019s a great story. It\u2019s funny. It\u2019s a peek into the chaos of a flower shop and Murphy\u2019s law \u2014 if it can go wrong, it does.\u201d<\/p>\n
Robertson launched LAB Theater Project in 2016 as a nonprofit perofessional theater company where emerging playwrights could test out new work in front of an audience. As LAB begins its second decade, he looks back on the first.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think what we\u2019ve done in the first 10 years has been extraordinary,\u201d Robertson says. \u201cTo be a new company that does only new work, and grow from a handful of submissions when we started to now, when we\u2019re getting between four and five hundred submissions a year, is extraordinary, especially because we\u2019re not rolling in capital. We\u2019re a very shoestring budget company. We do the best we can with what we\u2019ve got, and we work very hard to give our playwrights a fully-produced production and to bring up our local talent, not just playwrights, but emerging theater artists. We get an awful lot of new actors who come in and many who make their professional debut on our stage.\u201d<\/p>\n
LAB Theater Project is located on the western edge of Ybor City at 812 E. Henderson Ave.<\/p>\n