LAB Theater Project takes the stage for season 11

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.

Opening January 30th, grown-up musical comedy “The Trail to Oregon!” 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.

“Lots of people remember playing the game, and the musical is very true to the game,” says LAB Theater founder and Executive Producer Owen Robertson. “The audience names the characters. The audience chooses who’s dying from dysentery. It’s very fun. It’s very in the spirit of the game. It’s tremendously silly and fun.”

StarKid Productions, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-founded, Los Angeles-based musical theater company specializing in parodies, debuted “The Trail to Oregon!” in 2014. It’s gone on to become a cult classic. The local production is a collaboration between LAB Theater and Tampa’s 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.

After the nostalgic expedition down memory lane, the 2026 season returns to LAB Theater’s core focus, producing new works by emerging playwrights and developing local theater talent. 

Playwright Steven Patrick’s “X ≠ X,” which runs from April 16th through May 3rd, “explores what defines reality and how we perceive reality,” Robertson says. 

“When an eccentric history professor writes the paradoxical equation ‘X ≠ X’on a classroom chalkboard, the result is an unexpected academic and philosophical firestorm,” a summary says. “As 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 — or forever shifting — and whether who we are can ever truly remain the same.”

Running July 2nd through 19th, award-winning playwright Wendy Graf’s “The Cross & The Saber” tells the story of “a near-future America where church and state have dangerously merged” and a “progressive pastor is imprisoned for refusing to politicize his pulpit.” 

“That’s a play directly addressing freedom of speech, Christian nationalism, and AI all wrapped together,” Robertson says. “It’s very relevant today, and that’s part of the reason we’ve chosen to put it up on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It’s a really, really cool story. We’re not a political-minded theater company. My first challenge for any new work is to tell me a good story. That’s the fundamental requirement that has to be met. If it happens to have a political message, that’s fine, as long as it fits within the confines of a good story. I won’t do work where playwrights are on their soapbox.”

“As We Like It,” by playwright Oded Gross, runs September 17th through October 4th. 

“In the forests of Nazi-occupied Poland, a young Jewish woman shields herself from unbearable reality by staging ‘As You Like It’ for her family in hiding,” a description says. “As imagination and survival intertwine, As We Like It becomes a haunting meditation on storytelling as refuge — and the fragile line between noble illusion and dangerous denial.”

“When you first start into the play, it’s set in a forest, and you think you’re watching this family rehearse the Shakespeare play ‘As You Like It,’” Robertson says. “As it turns out, it’s actually a Polish family rehearsing ‘As You Like It’ for their daughter’s mental health while they’re hiding from the Nazis in World War II Poland. It’s 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’re no longer welcome.” 

The 2026 season wraps with local playwright Ansel Taylor’s “Pushing Daisies,” which runs from December 3rd through 20th. 

“On 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 — all while everything threatens to fall apart,” a description says. “Pushing Daisies is a witty, heartfelt play about love, burnout, and finding connection in the middle of absolute disaster.”

“That play came out of the playwriting workshop that we do every summer, Project Greenlight,” Robertson says. “It’s 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’re taking it from inception to production. It’s a really tight script. It’s a great story. It’s funny. It’s a peek into the chaos of a flower shop and Murphy’s law — if it can go wrong, it does.”

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.

“I think what we’ve done in the first 10 years has been extraordinary,” Robertson says. “To be a new company that does only new work, and grow from a handful of submissions when we started to now, when we’re getting between four and five hundred submissions a year, is extraordinary, especially because we’re not rolling in capital. We’re a very shoestring budget company. We do the best we can with what we’ve 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.”

LAB Theater Project is located on the western edge of Ybor City at 812 E. Henderson Ave.

For more information, go to LAB Theater Project