Sarasota stages foster upcoming actor

Actor David Foster is an example of what happens when a talented child grows up on the stages of Sarasota and then decides to pursue acting.

He has performed in national tours and received positive reviews as a director, but for the next month, he will perform in the city where he got his start.

He can be seen in Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe’s three-man play, “The Whipping Man,” through Feb. 2. He’s playing a Jewish Confederate soldier who returns home following the Civil War to learn it was destroyed and his family fled, and the only two remaining people who can help him are his former slaves who are now free. Foster calls it a “secrets play,” meaning the plot is well constructed with secrets revealed as the play goes on — it constantly surprises.

Although Foster is from Sarasota, he showed big ambition when it came to his career.

First, he didn’t go to just any college to study acting — he studied it at Juilliard. He isn’t one of those actors who has to work at a restaurant on the side. And he isn’t a “New York-based” actor who really live in Queens — he lives in Manhattan. He didn’t struggle for work upon graduation, either. Instead, he immediately joined a national tour of “West Side Story” for two years. He’s also met success as a director.
Last summer, he and a producer took over Shelter Island Theatre Co. in Long Island, N.Y., and he directed “Much Ado About Nothing,” which garnered enough positive reviews that Foster will direct a spring production and three more this summer.

But, he still thinks that some of the best shows in which he performed were here in Sarasota, when he was a child.

It all started in 1993, when a participatory children’s show at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall pulled him on stage to perform. He enjoyed the experience so much his mother, Kim Raymond, enrolled him in Florida Studio Theatre’s youth acting program. When area professional theaters needed a child actor, such as in The Golden Apple Dinner Theatre’s 1999 production of “Camelot” and Asolo Repertory Theatre’s production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” — they cast Foster. Soon after, he was performing at Manatee Players, Sarasota Players and in the Island Shakespeare Festival on Anna Maria Island.

Foster worked with Howard Millman throughout his youth. Millman is the former producing artistic director at Asolo Rep and is also directing “The Whipping Man.” He contacted Foster about the latest role.
“It’s so wonderful to be woring with Howard again now that I’m an adult,” Foster says with a small chuckle.
“When you’re a kid, adults are just adults.”

When he was a kid, Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe wasn’t an equity house. Instead, it didn’t have a theater space. The theater at 10th Street, which it now owns, was a fencing academy then. The company has grown a lot in the time that Foster has been away.

“I think ‘The Whipping Man’ will be really great for this company, without sounding too presumptuous,” Foster says.

He thinks audiences will be impressed with the quality, the direction and the set.

“Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe constantly has to raise the bar on itself to grow the audience and have a footprint in the community theatrically, and this is the next step in its path,” he says.

IF YOU GO
‘The Whipping Man’ by Matthew Lopez
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; 2 p.m. Sundays. Runs through Feb. 2.
Where: Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe Theater, 1646 10th St.
Cost: Tickets are $29.50.
Info: Call 366-1505 or visit wbttroupe.org.