Three Hours Too Late, Right on Time: Sarasota Gets First Crack at Ahoy-Hoy

Alexander Graham Bell had a preferred way to answer the telephone, and it was not "hello." It was "ahoy-hoy," which sounds less like a greeting and more like a man hailing a passing schooner. The country went with "hello" anyway. Getting there first does not always mean you get your way.

If you want a sharper example, consider Elisha Gray. On the same day in 1876 that Bell filed his telephone patent, Gray, a working inventor from Chicago, walked into the same patent office with his own telephone paperwork. In playwright Jenny Stafford's telling, he arrived about three hours after Bell. Bell got the patent, the legacy and the face in your middle-school textbook. Gray got a Wikipedia page and, a century and a half later, a comedy.

That comedy is Ahoy-Hoy, and it starts its national life here. Urbanite Theatre opens its 2026–27 Main Stage season with Stafford's play, previewing Oct. 29 and running Oct. 30 through Nov. 29. It's the first stop in a Rolling World Premiere through the National New Play Network, a national alliance of theaters that champion new plays. Buffalo, Ann Arbor and New Jersey come next.

Sarasota isn't just hosting this play first. Sarasota is part of the reason it exists.

Stafford didn't set out to write a slapstick history of the telephone. In 2019 she started taking American Sign Language classes and learned about Deaf culture, including Bell's reputation in that community.

"I learned that Alexander Graham Bell is quite a villain in the deaf community," Stafford told Arts Passport. "He spent a lot of his life trying to eradicate sign language." Both his mother and his wife were deaf, which makes the story heavier, not lighter.

For years she tried to write a serious play about Bell, and it kept resisting her. During the research, she was watching a documentary about him when the narrator mentioned in passing that another man had filed for the same invention on the same day, a few hours later. Then the documentary moved on.

Stafford did not.

"I was like, wait, why?" she said. "Who was that guy? What was he doing?" That question spiraled into the play. She wrote the first draft in about two and a half weeks.

She puts the finished product at roughly "90% true," and she says the real history did most of the heavy lifting. "As a comedy writer, it was total gold," she said. "I couldn't have invented half of this. It's what really happened. And now I just get to put it through the lens of humor and the stage."

Onstage, the rivalry becomes a footrace. Amber McNew plays Gray. Casey Murphy plays Bell. Ben Williamson plays Cornelius, Gray's assistant, who is willing to commit at least one light burglary for the cause, and Ariel Blue plays Wilbur, the patent clerk waiting at the finish line. You already know who wins. The comedy is in watching Gray not get there.

This is where it matters for local audiences. Ahoy-Hoy was first read aloud in public at Urbanite's Modern Works Festival in 2025, where audiences named it Audience Favorite. Stafford remembers that night very differently from how the award makes it sound.

"That was the first time I ever heard it in front of an audience," she said. "And I was ready to vomit in my purse in the back of the theater. I was like, I don't know if this works. I don't know if it's funny."

It was funny. Sarasota voted it the festival's Audience Favorite, and the script spent the next year on the road, from Florida Rep's PlayLab in Fort Myers to Chautauqua Theater Company's New Play Workshop in western New York. For a comedy, Stafford said, that kind of mileage is everything.

"It's really hard to work on a comedy by yourself," she said, "because you just don't know what lands until it's in front of a group of people."

Along the way she learned the play works with women playing the men, which she wasn't sure about, "because so much of it's about, like, fragile male egos." It turns out fragile male egos are funny no matter who plays them. Researchers may want to look into that.

Back in Sarasota, Summer Dawn Wallace, Urbanite's producing artistic director, had already offered Stafford a full production. Then she raised the stakes. "She was like, I think we can get this into a rolling world premiere," Stafford said. The two spent the year sending the script out and working the phones until three more theaters said yes.

Put plainly, this is what happens when a city's audiences show up for unfinished plays. You get the finished one first.

Here's an industry problem most audiences never see. Getting a new play its first production is hard but possible. Getting it a second one is brutal, because many theaters only want world premieres, and a play that has already had one loses its shine.

"So it's like you get one production and then your play dies," Stafford said.

The National New Play Network's fix is to have several theaters agree to produce the same new play in a single window, with every production counting as part of the world premiere. Ahoy-Hoy will play at Urbanite, then Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo, Theatre Nova in Ann Arbor and New Jersey Repertory Company. Each will have its own cast, set and design concept.

"It's not like we pick this one up and move all of those people," Stafford said. "It'll have completely different people, completely different sets, completely different design concepts."

The other three are still in planning; Stafford recently sat in on Theatre Nova's callbacks. That makes Urbanite's version the original, the one everyone else will be working from or reacting against, and it was built in Sarasota.

Look at who's onstage and backstage and you'll see that this premiere was built mostly from Sarasota's own talent pool. Director Céline Rosenthal spent six seasons as associate artistic director at Asolo Rep. Murphy lives here and has done four Modern Works Festivals, including the original Ahoy-Hoy reading. Blue is a regular at Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, and McNew and Williamson both came up through the FSU/Asolo Conservatory. When the play moves on to Buffalo and Ann Arbor, those people stay here. This version belongs to Sarasota.

"Céline, who's directing it, just really understands the pocket of this comedy," Stafford said. The team, she said, took the bonkers thing she wrote and made it three-dimensional.

For the record, Stafford knows a thing or two about bonkers. She wrote additional lyrics for Paramour, Cirque du Soleil's 2017 Broadway musical, and her songs went on to show up on Dancing with the Stars, in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and on Germany's Next Top Model, where Heidi Klum descended from the sky to one of them, sung in German.

"I certainly did not" see that coming, she said, "but I was delighted when it happened."

About a third of the way into writing, Stafford realized her "just funny" play was about something.

"The thing that inventors want and the things that artists want have big overlap in the Venn diagram," she said: wanting to make something new, to join the line of creators who came before and to make something that outlasts you. She grew up loving Christopher Durang, Wendy Wasserstein and Sarah Ruhl, and she admits she wonders whether anyone will grow up loving her plays that way.

"What does it mean to leave a legacy? What does it mean to be forgotten? What does it mean to be remembered?" she said. "How much of our time do we spend worrying about the things we're going to leave when we're not here anymore?"

Mostly, she wants you to laugh and forget whatever is stressing you out. But if you leave with "a little bit of a nugget" about how you want to spend your time here on Earth, she'll take that too.

There's one more twist. Urbanite has scheduled an ASL-integrated performance during the run, which means a play inspired by Bell's war on sign language will be performed in sign language. Asked whether she hoped Bell's spirit might attend that one, Stafford didn't hesitate.

"I hope he feels it deep in his spirit wherever he is."

Ahoy-hoy, Alexander.

Ahoy-Hoy by Jenny Stafford, directed by Céline Rosenthal
Where: Urbanite Theatre, Sarasota
Preview: Thursday, Oct. 29
Runs: Oct. 30 – Nov. 29, 2026
Times: Wednesday–Saturday at 7:30 p.m.; Sundays and Wednesdays at 2 p.m. Added performances Saturday, Oct. 31 at 2 p.m.; Tuesday, Nov. 24 at 7:30 p.m.; and Saturday, Nov. 28 at 2 p.m. No performances Nov. 26–27 (Thanksgiving).
Tickets: $52 regular · $42 preview · $32 under 40 · $5 students (valid ID required for under-40 and student pricing)
Info: urbanitetheatre.com/ahoy-hoy

Cast: Casey Murphy (Alexander Graham Bell), Amber McNew (Elisha Gray), Ben Williamson (Cornelius), Ariel Blue (Wilbur).