Arts Garage’s latest education director juggles multiple roles.
At the time of this writing, Matt Stabile’s Facebook cover photo was a Pablo Picasso quote, written in a juvenile scrawl on black marker: “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once you grow up.”
This isn’t just a belief of Stabile’s. Fostering the artistry of children and young adults has been his profession, on and off, since at least 2004, when the Theatre Studies graduate of Dallas’ Southern Methodist University moved back to his native South Florida to join Fantasy Theatre Factory, a venerable children’s troupe in Miami. He taught Educational Outreach Workshops there and loved them so much he brought similar programs to area middle schools, then spent seven years on the faculty at G-Star School of the Arts—leading and even creating much of its Acting Department curricula.
Then came the Kravis Center, where his work as Artistic Coordinator for its summer ArtsCamp earned him the venue’s Outstanding Teacher of 2013 award.
All of this experience has culminated in Stabile’s best opportunity yet to shape tomorrow’s theater professionals. Last fall, Arts Garage appointed Stabile its new education director. The 36-year-old Delray Beach resident had already been running Arts Garage’s “Yes Labs”—community workshops that take theater students’ stories from gestation to stage—for 18 months, so when the venue sought a replacement for outgoing education director Drew Tucker, Stabile was an obvious choice.
“He understands the performing arts world and can impart those lessons, while also helping all students develop a solid arts foundation that will remain with them no matter what career they choose,” says Alyona Ushe, Arts Garage’s president and CEO.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to not teach,” adds Stabile. “I think it’s vitally important, and being a teacher for as long as I was, I saw firsthand the difference it made. I think there’s a responsibility for artists to pass their craft along.”
Stabile leads an indefatigable life. At the time of our interview, he was nearing the home stretch of his first workshops at Arts Garage and its sister venue, Bailey Contemporary Arts in Pompano Beach, in which students gained instruction in voice, theater, acting, instrumental performance and visual arts. The classes had been running weekly since Oct. 20.
All the while, Stabile was fulfilling a slate of professional acting jobs. Last November, he played a recovering drug addict in the anarchic ensemble comedy “Detroit” for Miami’s Zoetic Stage. The day after it closed, he was back in Boca Raton rehearsing for a revival of “The Timekeepers,” the Holocaust drama that swept the 2014 Carbonell Awards. Playing frighteningly against type, he reprised his role as a humorless kapo, or prison functionary, hired to supervise a labor camp.
“You take jobs sometimes because they’re jobs, and every once in a while you’re lucky enough to be in something that matters,” he says, recalling the initial production of “The Timekeepers,” in Fort Lauderdale in the summer of 2013. “And this was one of those stories that immediately felt like it mattered.”
It also opened new doors for Stabile as a full-time actor, during a brief stint in which he didn’t have a day job in education. He’s achieved his success in part by following the mantra he had tattooed onto his left arm: “Hamlet 1, iii, 78,” a reference to the famous Shakespeare line, “This above all, to thine own self be true.”
Handsome and charming but with an ability to play brooding and misanthropic characters, Stabile has landed roles as varied as a romantically flustered commercial director in Parade Productions’ “The Last Schwartz” in Boca, and a wayward young man tortured by memories of child abuse, in Zoetic Stage’s “The Great God Pan” in Miami. This March, he joins the cast of “Uncertain Terms” at Arts Garage (see preview on page 40).
“One of the things that I brought to the educational program [at Arts Garage] was that I want our teachers to be working professionals,” he says. “That way the kids see the examples right in front of them.”
Which isn’t to say every student he teaches will be the next Matt Stabile, let alone the next Laurence Olivier.
“There are a lot of groups out there that are star factories,” he says. “As in, ‘We are going to put these kids onstage, put them in a show, and make them stars.’ We don’t work that way. Our classes are modeled after the work I’ve done with Kravis Center over the years, where it’s really about engaging that kid into the process. I try to tell kids, if you really love this, love all of it. Find a lot of stuff you’re good at. Can you work backstage? Can you teach? Can you do lighting? Can you stage-manage?
“We’re not interested in the big, showy production and churning out Honey Boo-boos,” he continues. “There are hundreds of thousands of people making their money in the arts. Love the whole field, and then you’ll find ways to live a life.”
