A USF professor’s play depicting Tampa’s historic lunch counter sit-in from the Civil Rights Movement has been revived and will open this Thursday.

English professor Mark Leib wrote “When the Righteous Triumph,” a Stageworks Theatre play that debuted in 2023. Its success prompted former Florida House Representative Jim Davis to fundraise for the encore coming to the Straz Center for Performing Arts this week, Leib said. 

Across three weekends in 2023, about 1,000 people attended the performances, Leib said. 

Leib, a Florida native, moved to New England and began his career as a playwright and critic in 1978. He moved back to Florida and started teaching screenwriting for USF in 1991.

Since then, he has been teaching a variety of creative writing courses at USF, including screenwriting, playwriting, fiction and modern drama. 

Leib’s two-act play highlights the sit-ins at Tampa’s F.W. Woolworth’s lunch counter from 1960, led in part by then-20-year-old Clarence Fort, the youth council leader for the NAACP.

The play takes on a variety of characters, including Ku Klux Klan members, who add a layer of “power and fear” to the opposition of the sit-ins, Leib said.

Roberta, a protester, is played by USF alumna Kelli Vonshay, who described her character as a  “southern firecracker” — a confident, energetic and defiant force in the play.

“It’s really important for other races to really see this,” Vonshay said. “We’re still fighting for equality, for justice and still facing racism.”

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Christopher Jackson, an award-winning director and the director of the play, worked with Leib and the cast to organize the set and scenes in the first production. He said many Tampa natives didn’t know about the sit-ins before they watched the play. 

“We like to pretend that segregation was so long ago, out of sight, out of mind and it’s not, it’s systemic,” Jackson said.

Leib said his inspiration for the play was hooked on his desire to write “something for social justice.” 

The idea of writing about the sit-ins came while researching Tampa’s history and reading the book “From Saloons to Steak Houses: A History of Tampa” by Andy Huse, a USF Special Collections librarian, Leib said.

“It was important to me to have a play that talked about something of great significance, something of political weight and moment, something that made it clear what we’ve gone through in Tampa over the years,” Leib said.

Leib spoke with Karla Hartley, Stageworks Theatre’s producing artistic director, in 2021 when he idealized “When the Righteous Triumph.”

They agreed to commission the play for production in 2023, giving Leib a year to write a finished draft and another for workshopping the script. Leib said Hartley assigned the production to Jackson and formed a casting team for the play.

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A few of the people in the audience were politicians or descendants of real characters within the story. In former Rep. Jim Davis’s case, he was both.

Davis, the grandson of Cody Fowler, was struck by the original production of the play and contacted Leib about independently fundraising for a revival of the play in 2025. 

Fowler, one of the characters in the play, is played by James “Jim” Wicker. Fowler was “one of the few” white attorneys who represented African-American clients in court, Leib said.

Wicker said his character is a “forward thinker,” and the cast is “rejuvenating.”

“For me, I think the most important thing is that the kind of struggle for human rights that this play is about requires determination and moral courage,” Wicker said.

Fowler Avenue, which traces the border of USF and is a main road for student travel, was named after Fowler’s mother, Maud. 

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Leib said Davis raised at least $500,000 “over a few months,” including monetary donations from USF faculty and alumni. Davis also arranged for local schools to send students to see the play this week.

USF provided Leib and his play with announcements and flyers advertising the play across Canvas and the Tampa campus, Leib said. Tickets are $50 per person, but USF students will be granted a 50% discount by calling Stageworks Theatre’s box office.

The upcoming production of “When the Righteous Triumph” will be shown to nearly 40 schools from Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, Leib said.

Jackson said he feels the performances also cater to students and he is “excited” to see the students bused in for the shows.

“A lot of these performances are for students,” Jackson said. “It gives a very truthful look at the history of Tampa and a very interesting story to the integration process in Florida and Tampa specifically.”