After a recent rehearsal of "Cherry Docs," director Kate Alexander looked at her two actors and felt sorry for them.
"I told them they looked like rag doll puppets," she said. "They were drenched with sweat" after running several times through a particularly emotional and physically wrenching scene.
In "Cherry Docs," which opens Friday as the second of three shows in Florida Studio Theatre's Stage III series, Drew Hirshfield plays Danny Dunkelman, a Jewish legal aid attorney assigned to defend Mike Downey (played by Tom Patterson), a white supremacist charged with murder.
One of the most-produced Canadian plays since its premiere about 21 years ago is even more relevant today because of the American national debate surrounding racism, Alexander said.
Patterson, who shaved his thick head of hair the day after his final performance as a teenager in the Stage III production of "Hand to God," said the play asks the audience to actually look more closely at someone most people would rather avoid.
Alexander said she has been describing "Cherry Docs" as an "investigation into the roots of hatred" that also asks a lot of questions.
To prepare for their production, Alexander and her actors visited the Sarasota County jail to better understand conditions and situations that could lead to increased hatred.
Hirshfield, who also appeared in "Hand to God," said his character is assigned the case but given little information about who Mike Downey is or what he's done.
Patterson said he began doing research into his character months ago and worries that "the Brooklyn public library is going to think I'm a neo Nazi" based on the books and other material he checked out.
Alexander said she has been waiting about a decade for Florida Studio Theatre Producing Artistic Director Richard Hopkins to schedule the play.
"It's been a long journey of waiting to work on this and watching the way our culture has moved to normalizing hate," she said.