Young artists look for ways to revive Coconut Grove’s art scene while the political stalemate continues over the fate of the Coconut Grove Playhouse.
Empty storefronts in Coconut Grove might look like failure to a landlord. But to a playwright like William Hector, they look like a specific kind of opportunity: tiny theaters.
While the Coconut Grove Playhouse remains shuttered, its future uncertain, Hector, 31, has been working with local artists to find venues for live performances hiding in plain sight.
The Grove, once known as a hotbed for artistic endeavor, has lost some of its edge in recent years due to rising rents, the long decline of the playhouse, and a lack of small, dedicated spaces that could serve as an incubator for the arts.
Hector, for one, hopes to reverse that trend by turning alternative spaces into creative outlets for local talent. He has been in discussions with writers, directors and local actors about setting up limited-run shows in unused spaces like storefronts.
His idea is simple, he says. A landlord sitting on a shuttered boutique or restaurant could donate the space for a weeklong run of an original play. For businesses, it would draw foot traffic. For the community, it would mean pop-up events to help revitalize the Grove’s spirit as a creative enclave — and a canvas for local artists.
“You’re building an audience, building community,” Hector said.
Hector was raised on live theater in the Grove. Before he graduated from the University of Miami in 2015 with a degree in playwrighting, he attended an annual summer acting camp at the now-shuttered playhouse. He remembers the day the playhouse closed for good and his acting camp abruptly had to find a new home. That was 18 years ago.
He hasn’t forgotten. And he hasn’t given up on bringing the performing arts back to the neighborhood he still calls home. “Shows are not being done in the Grove, but the energy is there,” he said.
Building back the Grove as an art destination won’t be easy, observers say.
“It’s tough but not impossible,” Alberto Ibargüen, the recently retired president of the Knight Foundation, wrote in an email. “Tough because you’re not likely to attract galleries with Coconut Grove rents as high as they are. And not likely because the city has blocked development of the one super gem (Coconut Grove) it had, which was the Coconut Grove Playhouse.”
After actively opposing Miami-Dade County’s plan for resurrecting the playhouse as a smaller theater, the City of Miami ended its legal battle in 2022. Grove residents who support a full restoration are still fighting, leaving the landmark theater in limbo.
Ibarguen said it’s time to lean into creative ideas like Hector’s:
Performances in the open-air at the renovated CocoWalk, author interviews in conjunction with Books & Books in other Grove spaces, low-cost artist housing to draw creatives, and requiring developers to contribute money to public art as part of the permitting process.
“I’m sure there are plenty of other things to do. You need a chamber of commerce type group working with the city administration, looking for the public good,” he wrote. “Folks who have moved into higher- and higher-priced housing in the Grove would, I think, help make these activities financially sustainable.”
For that, residents and visitors need to think of the Grove as a place where art happens. And that’s where Hector’s idea for performance art in unexpected places comes in.
Call it guerrilla theater.
Last fall, The Kampong hosted the sell-out interactive play “G7: 2070,” imagining a future where the U.S., China, Europe, Ethiopia, Russia, Uruguay and The Walt Disney Nation meet to address a world-wide climate crisis. Guests moved about the old Fairchild home as the play unfolded, among the actors.
With a Knight Foundation grant, Hector wrote the play, and it was directed by Victoria Collado, who also directed the hit interactive play “The Amparo Experience,” about the family that founded Havana Club rum and had to flee Cuba. That play was held in a restored villa in downtown Miami.
Collado can see doing the same thing in Coconut Grove. A Miami native, she grew up near Bird Road and Southwest 37th Avenue, going to Mr. Moes and the old CocoWalk as a UM student. She returned after six years writing and directing in New York City to help tell Miami stories.
“There are all these nooks and crannies in the Grove. There’s so much opportunity,” Collado said.
She’s not just being hopeful. Collado recently directed “Stephen’s: A Love Story,” an interactive play set inside one of the oldest, continuously running delis in the country, in Hialeah.
The story follows a couple of Hialeah kids — a Jewish boy and a shiksa girl — who fall in love even as the ghosts in their families trying to keep them apart. The show was a pilot for a full run coming next year when Hialeah — a city with Jewish and Cuban roots — turns 100.
Matt Kuscher, the chef-owner of the Kush by Stephen’s Deli and LoKal in the Grove, operated the restaurant as a sort of elevated dinner theater during the run of the show. Collado could see the same thing happening in the Grove.
“What are we doing in these spaces that can be convertible?” Collado said. “What can we do in these spaces to study what attracts people?”
She said events like these can “train people” to expect to find art in the Grove. And Hector said that would build an ecosystem to help support a venue like the playhouse, whenever it reopens.
“It’s like a hub and spoke,” Hector said. “You need to build a community to support each other…. When the playhouse is up and running, you could have a whole theater district.”
That means tapping into alternative spaces across the Grove, like West Grove churches that have, for years, hosted community musical, dance and dramatic performances.
For the last two years, the Coconut Grove Ecumenical Network has put on its recreation of Martin Luther’ King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and March on Washington inside the renovated St. Mary’s First Missionary Baptist Church on Frow Avenue.
Coral Gables attorney Mike Eidson purchased the church in disrepair and restored it at a cost of more than $1.2 million into a multipurpose art space as part of his non-profit arts group, Sanctuary of the Arts.
The group uses St. Mary’s as a rehearsal space for its larger shows at First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Coral Gables, which the Sanctuary renovated into a dance, music and theater space. That space hosts more than 130 shows a year and an ensemble of dancers.
Now St. Mary’s church hosts “about 200 uses” a year, including UM orchestra practices, children’s theater groups and community meetings, Eidson said.
He makes it available to art groups for “a few hundred dollars” a day. He said the same could happen at dozens of other overlooked spaces, like Elizabeth Virrick Park’s former boxing gym.
“With St. Mary’s, we can do something for the Grove artistically,” Eidson said.
Florida International University’s Wolfsonian Public Humanities Laboratory will use St. Mary’s as headquarters for a project to research and document the Goombay Festival and the Coconut Grove Bahamian community it celebrates.
FIU will hold community meetings at St. Mary’s, teach locals how to photograph their community, and host an exhibit in the coming months, said Rebecca Friedman, the principal researcher on the project. The results will be housed in the Library of Congress.
“It’s not easy to find locations in the Grove that are truly community spaces for art and culture. It’s been a struggle,” Friedman said during a phone call.
“This is part of the project, to elevate those spaces and make them known,” added Aaarti Mehta-Kroll, who created the project as part of her doctorate.
The playhouse can’t do it alone, Hector said. For the Grove to once-again embody its identity as an arts community will take creativity.
“This kind of localized theater,” Hector said, “the Grove is ripe for it.”
