Playwrights devote considerable thought to the names they give their plays, but sometimes a spark of inspiration just happens. Playwright Michael Tucker says that’s how “A Tailor Near Me” got its name.
“I had a friend who had a very advanced cancer and was going to be dying very shortly,” Tucker explained. “In the middle of the night, I was up and I was worried and I snuck to my closet, and I tried on the only suit that I own, and indeed, I couldn't button the pants. It had been a long time. I don't wear suits a lot. So, the next day, I looked for a tailor online, and the first thing that came up was ‘a tailor near me,’ you know, that 'near me' thing that they do online on Google.”
Another experience provided the context for Tucker’s character study.
“I had had a bespoke suit made for myself in Italy,” Tucker said. “It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. It was four fittings over three or four weeks. It was an intricate, beautiful thing, and so one of the things that happens in the play is that the audience gets to see a tailor bespoke suit made in front of their eyes.”
Against that backdrop, Tucker’s tailor and his customer dredge up their own life experiences in a far-flung discussion of universal themes that alters both men’s lives.
“One of the major themes of the play is fathers and sons,” said Tucker. “Both of them reveal things about their fathers that sort of have sculpted their personalities, both negatively and positively. Another issue in the play is men and women. The tailor and the customer, Sam, are married, well married, but they have very different views about what that means and how they behave.”
What ensues is a story of self-discovery, friendship, and the magic of a perfectly tailored suit. “A Tailor Near Me” is onstage in the Keating Theatre in Sarasota through Feb. 22.
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Michael Tucker is a veteran stage and screen actor best known for his eight years as Stuart Markowitz on “L.A. Law,” for which he earned three Emmy and two Golden Globe nominations. His career spans Broadway, film, and television, with notable credits including “Radio Days,” “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Diner,” “Tin Men,” “An Unmarried Woman” and “A Night Full of Rain.” He frequently collaborates with his wife, Jill Eikenberry, on stage and screen, and together they produced the PBS documentary “Emile Norman – By His Own Design.”
The Florida Studio Theatre production of “A Tailor Near Me” represents its southeastern premiere.
The show originally debuted at the New Jersey Repertory Company.
“For the one in New Jersey, I was very hands-on,” Tucker said. “I chose the director. I was very involved in casting the actors. I got people I knew to get involved. And I was at every rehearsal, and it was a very difficult experience of letting the play go to the actors. In this case, I had nothing to do with the production of the play. Florida Studio Theater chose the director, and they chose the actors and the designers and everything. I much prefer doing a play like this than having so much control and then having to give up that control.”
Tucker never actually intended to become a playwright. He’d set his sights on being a novelist.
“I was really fascinated with the idea of being a writer, but I didn't want to write for movies, and I didn't want to write for theaters,” Tucker recalled.
So, he wrote two memoirs, a cookbook and a novel.
“When I started my second novel, I thought I'd make it in the first person. [My protagonist] starts ranting, getting things off his chest, including some things about his wife, so I thought, well, I better, hear from her. I put the wife's name down. I put a line under it, and I looked at it and I said, hey, it's a play. And that became my first play. Writing that line underneath the wife's name, that became the transition. It looked like a script, and it was a good transition.”
Now he’s written seven plays, including “A Tailor Near Me.” The others are “The “M” Spot,” “Fern Hill,” “The Nice Man Cometh,” “Cancelled,” “Mandy” and “Killerman.”
“For seven or eight years, all I wrote were plays, pretty much one a year, and while that's been great, at the moment, I'm back to writing personal essays, sort of often humorous stories about what's been happening to me.”
While Tucker acknowledges that writing is a very personal experience, he concedes that viewing a play is just as personal.
“Talking to the people in the audience afterwards in the lobby, you realize that if it's a 200-seat house, you have 200 different opinions,” Tucker observed. “They don't see the play the same way as the person who sits next to them. Watching a play is a very personal experience because you flash on your own life and what may be funny to one person is tragic to another person.”
“A Tailor Near Me” is performed in the Keating Theatre at Florida Studio Theatre. David Cantor and Paul Nicholas star in the show.
For tickets, telephone 941-366-9000 or visit https://www.floridastudiotheatre.org/events-and-tickets/2025-26-winter-mainstage-series/a-tailor-near-me/subscribe-to-winter-mainstage-2.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
