Every city has an origin story. Most of them have been told a hundred times. Venice, Florida’s story has never been told on stage. Until now.
Building Paradise is a full-length historical drama about the three extraordinary forces that collided to create the city of Venice — Dr. Fred Albee, the orthopedic surgeon who bought thirty miles of Gulf Coast wilderness in 1925; John Nolen, the most celebrated city planner in America who designed the city that would exist in fifty years; and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, whose leaders secretly used the Venice development to cover a four-million-dollar deficit.
I spent over two years researching the documented history. What I found was not a simple founding story — it was a collision of idealism, ambition, and betrayal that reads like a thriller.
And at the center of it all, buried underneath everything they built, is Bertha Honoré Palmer — the Chicago heiress who purchased 80,000 acres of Gulf Coast land in 1910, platted the original Venice, named the roads, insisted on the railroad extension that made a city possible, and died in 1918 without ever seeing it.
Her father’s words echo through the play: “Land does not lie.”
Building Paradise is targeting a world premiere for the 2026 Venice Centennial through Sarasota Stage Works. If you’re a theater company, producer, or artistic director interested in this script, visit tommyerb.com/building-paradise or contact me directly at [email protected].
The curtain’s going up on a story that’s been waiting a hundred years to be told.
— Tom Erb