- June 10, 2026
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Sarasota is a friendly place, but sometimes a little snobbery creeps in when it comes to our neighbor 18 miles south. Venice is smaller and doesn’t have all of Sarasota’s world-class cultural institutions.
There is one area, however, where Venice towers over Sarasota — community theater. That’s particularly true when the Venice Theatre hosts the American Association of American Community Theatre’s WorldFest, which it has since 2010, pandemics and hurricanes notwithstanding.
WorldFest runs June 15-20 and includes 11 plays from around the globe as well as parties and workshops.
Asked why Venice Theatre hosts WorldFest, Venice Theatre Executive Director Kristofer Geddie says, “No one else has the capacity to handle it.”
Of approximately 6,000 community theaters in the U.S., Venice Theatre is recognized as the second largest, as measured by its operating budget. (Omaha Community Playhouse claims first place.) Not to be confused with regional theaters that pay actors, community theaters fill their stages with volunteers who perform for applause and recognition, but not money.
Founded in 1950, Venice Theatre has more than 1,300 volunteers. Not bad for a city of about 30,000.
The last time Venice Theatre rolled out the red carpet for WorldFest was in June 2022. A few months later, Hurricane Ian destroyed Venice Theatre’s mainstage Jervey Theatre and its fly tower. Those who don’t visit Venice very often may be surprised to see the tower intact again as they cross the Colonel George Kumpe Bridge onto Venice Island.
The inside of the 432-seat Jervey Theatre won’t open until 2027, but the outside is a thrilling site, especially if you saw it after Ian ripped through town in September 2022. After the Jervey was knocked out of commission, the Venice Theatre continued to perform in its black box Pinkerton Theatre, which seats 90. It transformed its education building, the Raymond Center, into a temporary theater with a capacity of 130, while it raised money for construction.
The cost of restoring the Jervey and bringing it up to code turned out to be $25 million, which was raised through government grants and private donations, with a few bumps in the road. In May, the Sarasota County Commission allocated the Venice Theatre $2 million to help return the Raymond Center to its original role as an education center.
Even though the Jervey Theatre isn’t open yet, WorldFest represents a “soft opening” of sorts. The staff and volunteers at Venice Theatre are ready to celebrate not just a global theater festival, but the end of the dark days when funding for the restoration hung in the balance. Rebuilding after the storm was a lot harder than anyone expected.
But in the wake of the storm, Geddie and WorldFest coordinator Alyssa Goudy have become ace problem solvers. When they were curating this year’s WorldFest, they were mindful of the difficulties that some foreign performers have recently experienced in obtaining visas. “Some of our troupes are representing foreign cultures and speak languages besides English but they are already in the U.S.,” Goudy says.
A good example is Cazateatro Bilingual Theatre Group from Memphis. The only bilingual (Spanish-English) theater troupe in the mid-South, Cazateatro was founded in 2010 with a mission of celebrating Latino culture and uniting diverse cultures. Its entry in WorldFest is “I Was There: Memories of Those Who Had No Choice.”
If Goudy looks familiar, it's because her involvement in local theater dates back to her college days. She's a veteran of the now-defunct Golden Apple Theatre in Sarasota and will forever live in the hearts of theater fans for her role as Tracy Turnblad in Venice Theatre's 2013 production of "Hairspray."
One of the hottest WorldFest tickets is for Britain’s Scrambled Egg Theatre Company, which is presenting “Exposure,” a show that is reminiscent of Alfred’s Hitchcock’s classic films of the 1950s and 1960s.
Don’t assume that a theater troupe speaks English because it hails from the land where that language originated. Scrambled Egg is known to perform in what Goudy calls “gibberish.”
What if you can’t understand the language being spoken in a play? After all, the troupes at WorldFest represent countries such as Ghana, Israel, Italy, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland and Ukraine.
Not to worry, says Geddie. “The language of theater is universal. A lot is communicated through action and emotion,” he says. “When I watch a video of a play being submitted for WorldFest, I turn the sound off.”
A military brat who tried his luck as an actor in New York after earning a bachelor’s degree in musical theater, Geddie performed on Norwegian Cruise Lines for nearly a decade. That experience helped him hone his improv skills, on stage and off.
Geddie first came to Venice Theatre to play Coalhouse Walker in “Ragtime” in 2010 and was hired the following year as the theater’s first director of diversity.
In 2023, Venice Theatre’s board promoted Geddie to executive director. He succeeded Murray Chase, who had held that position since 1995. Before getting the top job, Geddie served as the community theater’s general manager for six years, during which time he earned a master’s in arts administration from Goucher College in Maryland.
Chase planned to retire, but agreed to stay to oversee the restoration of the Jervey Theatre. He is currently interim artistic director, following the exit of Benny Sato Ambush in May 2025. Ambush had joined Venice Theatre as artistic director on a temporary basis in January 2021 and ended up staying four years instead of one.
It was WorldFest that originally brought Ambush to town. He came as an adjudicator for the festival in 2010 and again in 2014. He liked what he saw enough to return full-time seven years later. That’s the thing about WorldFest. You never know who’s going to show up and decide that Venice, Florida, is their next home.
The excitement in the air in the days leading up to WorldFest is reason alone to make the trip from Sarasota for the festival, which promises to be a veritable United Nations of theater. At the end, one of the troupes will go home with the coveted Audience Award.
Among those plays vying for that honor is “Common Air," which features actors from two countries currently at war. Olga was born in Moscow and Iryna was born in Ukraine, but they both currently live in the U.S. Through movement and improvisational music, the two women come to an understanding.
A play from Israel follows an AI character who joins a women’s support office and upends routines and relationships. Presented by the Yoram Loewenstein Acting School, the dark comedy is called “Haviva, You’re Fired.”
The provocative show, “Playing God,” comes from Slovakia’s dNO Company. Inspired by a real-life mass murder at a church in that country, it puts judges and juries under the microscope.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, theater was often used as a form of political dissent, assisted by disguised stories that would escape the notice of censors.
With authoritarian regimes cracking down on their opponents in various countries around the world, is theater once again becoming a fulcrum for political dissent?
“Theater is always political,” Geddie says. “That’s the nature of the beast.”
