There’s a moment in Still, the new play opening March 20 at Rolling Bay Hall, when the audience is taken into a hotel room. Two people. Thirty years of unsaid things. And a political divide that has already cracked families, friendships, marriages across Kitsap County and everywhere else. “It doesn’t get much more intimate than that in theatre,” Jeffrey Brown says. “And I think some of that would be lost in a larger venue.”
He means Rolling Bay — the snug, black-box space in the valley, physically close enough to the stage that there’s nowhere to hide, for the audience or the actors. But he could just as easily be talking about everything his new company, Sharp Tack Productions, is trying to do: get close. Get real. Make theater that touches something people are already carrying.
Sharp Tack was founded in the fall of 2025 by Brown, actor Ruth Bookwalter, and Terace Yeatts — three veterans of the Kitsap theater community who saw a gap in an already-rich scene. Not a gap in ambition or talent, but in what was being made. “We’re not competing,” Brown says. “We’re hoping to contribute to enriching the pool.”
The name they chose is doing a lot of work. Sharp tack is a sailing term — a change in direction. But a tack is also something that holds something up, pins it there for examination. Or something that pierces. “The work we choose should have the potential to change the direction of an audience’s point of view,” Brown says. “Or hold up a mirror to reflect or comment on society. Or pierce through the noise to provide clarity or insight in often cacophonous times.”
The guiding question Brown and his co-founders ask before committing to a play is deceptively simple: Why here? Why now?
Still, by playwright Lia Romeo, answered both. The play follows Mark and Helen, former lovers reuniting for a drink thirty years after their breakup — and they find themselves on opposite sides of a political divide that has reshaped everything around them. “This situation has touched so many of us,” Brown says. “How the fissures and pressures in our society and politics today can explode into our most intimate personal relationships — partners, parents, children — often changing them forever.”
The play also spoke to Brown’s own instincts as a writer. His short play A Nip in the Autumn Air placed a married couple over pre-dinner drinks, their life together rising to the surface in rumor, truth, and unresolved grievance. The DNA is recognizable. “I’ve always been intrigued by the presentation of self in the world versus the internal world we all live in,” he says. “Masks, secrets, revelations, the lies we tell ourselves and others. In ‘Still,’ the revelations rock the relationship to its core.”
Brown has been writing, directing, and acting in Kitsap theater for nearly a decade. In Still, he’s doing only one of those things — performing opposite Bookwalter, under the direction of Sabrina Fiander. It turns out that being on the receiving end of someone else’s script has its own kind of education.
“As I was working on learning lines, I was also admiring what Romeo did with character development, pacing, dialogue, story-telling, and dramatic arc,” he says. “I learned a lot about playwriting by being an actor in this play.”
Fiander shaped the production with what Brown describes as a rare quality: genuine empathy with the actor. “A respect for the rehearsal process, and an openness to experimentation. Her guidance has made Ruth and I better, deeper, and more genuine in our interpretations of our characters.”
Preparing for a play built on intimacy meant building trust before the script ever demanded it. Brown and Bookwalter spent hours developing backstories, arriving to the room already knowing, in some sense, who they were to each other. “We felt committed to ‘go there,’” Brown says, “because it’s really the crux of the story.”
Bainbridge has given Brown community and proximity to talent. But he’s clear-eyed about what it is and isn’t. “It can have a monolithic, cloistered feel,” he says, “so my imagination is fed by experiences I have had throughout my life, people I have met along the way, and my social concerns.” He doesn’t need the island to be his subject. It’s enough that it’s his home.
“Theater is a live art form,” he says. “Its immediacy is what gives it its power. In an age where technology seems to be replacing humans, theater remains an experience that cannot be outsourced.”
He hopes people leave Still with empathy — for each other and for themselves. And maybe, he adds, “a bit of poignancy about the fragility of our most treasured relationships.”
Still opens March 20 at Rolling Bay Hall, 10598 NE Valley Road, Bainbridge Island, and runs through April 5. Tickets are $20 ($18 seniors) at sidequeststage.com.
