A teenage Arthur Conan Doyle stumbles into his first real-life mystery in Baker Street Beginnings, a new play from South Florida playwright Gina Montét that opened September 5 at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and runs through September 20. Set in 1870s London, the show imagines the future Sherlock Holmes creator falling under the wing of the real Victorian surgeon whose observational skills would eventually inspire the world's most famous fictional detective.
The production marks the first show staged in Theatre Lab's newly named Marleen Forkas Studio One Theatre, according to WLRN. It is the second play the company has commissioned from Montét, who lives in Cutler Bay, and it was developed for Theatre Lab's Heckscher Theatre for Families series before being read at the company's Owl New Play Festival in April 2026. Matt Stabile, Theatre Lab's producing artistic director, directs the show and told WLRN the festival reading was a big hit, with the script undergoing relatively few changes before rehearsals began.
The play combines historical and fictional characters, featuring Dr. Joseph Bell as the mentor who takes the young, aspiring doctor Arthur Conan Doyle under his wing. That mentorship has real historical grounding: Bell, a Scottish surgeon and professor at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, employed observational deduction techniques that inspired Doyle, who served as his clerk at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary starting in 1877 and watched Bell deduce strangers' occupations and backgrounds from small physical clues, according to the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia. Doyle would go on to create Sherlock Holmes, per WLRN's reporting.
A Game-Board City Full of Puzzles
Montét's script follows a mystery involving intrigue, danger and deception, using London itself as a game-board-like setting for the action. Six actors portray roughly 15 characters, and the production includes period costumes, special effects and a movable set, along with audience puzzles, apothecary experiments and humor built into the show. Montét told WLRN that writing a mystery was a tall order since she had never attempted the genre before.
Families arriving early can take part in detective science activities that begin one hour before public performances, the station reports. Performances run Saturdays at 7 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m., with adult tickets priced at $25 and one free child admission included with each adult ticket; additional children's tickets cost $5. Theatre Lab lists 561-297-6124 for information.
From Coconut Grove to a New Studio Stage
Montét's path to this world premiere runs through decades of South Florida stagecraft. She moved from Iowa to Miami in 1991, studied theater and film at the University of Miami, and graduated in 1994, after which she has lived in Miami-Dade County. She began her playwriting career at the historic Coconut Grove Playhouse, where she wrote and directed for eight seasons, including the 1998 educational musical Adventures With Louie the Lizard: The Quest for Little Fire, created for the Playhouse's school-touring program.
That venue shuttered abruptly in April 2006 during its 50th anniversary season, after accumulating a $4 million financial deficit and facing uninsured liability issues, according to Abandoned Florida. The state seized the property in 2012 before transferring management rights to Miami-Dade County in 2014, and just this past July, the Miami City Commission approved zoning exceptions for a $58.4 million redevelopment that will build a new 310-seat venue while restoring the original 1927 facade, per the South Florida Business Journal.
In 2000, Montét joined Fantasy Theatre Factory in Miami, where she began a long creative partnership with Matt Stabile, who acted in her play Dangerous Instruments and has said he has been a fan of her writing for decades, per WLRN. The company, founded in 1977, was formerly an exclusively touring operation before it began managing Miami-Dade's Sandrell Rivers Theater in 2016, a facility named for Chief Sandrell Rivers, a former Miami-Dade Parks administrator who expanded arts programming in historically underserved Black communities, as Hoodline previously reported. Montét and Stabile later founded the Mangrove Creative Collective together.
A Family Business and a Familiar Formula
Montét, who has three children, says theater should serve children, parents and grandparents together — a philosophy reflected in her household as much as her scripts. Her husband, Eric Nelson, works as a lighting designer, and their son, Kairick Nelson-Montet, works as an audio/video technician at Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre. Montét has said she is very Miami-Dade, a place that has shaped both her career and her family's work in the arts.
Theatre Lab, established in 2015 as the professional resident company of Florida Atlantic University, operates out of the 99-seat Heckscher Stage and has produced 25 premiere productions while hosting nearly 100 developmental readings, sixteen of which fed directly into mainstage shows. The company previously commissioned Montét's Heebie Jeebies: Tales From the Midnight Campfire, adapted from a play she originally wrote for her students and later reworked for six professional actors. That show premiered in September 2025 and became Theatre Lab's top-selling family production. Theatre Lab also presented readings of Montét's other work before commissioning Baker Street Beginnings and Heebie Jeebies together in April 2025.
Montét's other recent scripts have leaned on the same regional development pipeline. Her 2022 Theatre Lab premiere, Overactive Letdown, a dark comedy addressing postpartum mental health, was developed through the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs' Playwright Development Program and Florida International University's The Greenhouse residency, according to the South Florida Theatre League. In 2024, she was selected again for The Greenhouse to workshop her play Mansfield Prep, per FIU's Department of Theatre, which describes the program as a one-week intensive residency pairing playwrights with professional directors, dramaturgs and actors.
Beyond the Box Office
Theatre Lab's Heckscher Theatre for Families productions tie into the company's Future PAGES Project, an educational outreach initiative offering free creative writing workshops and live theater field trips to more than 1,000 South Florida students each year, targeting elementary through high school students across Palm Beach and surrounding counties, according to Florida Atlantic University. Baker Street Beginnings follows a tradition of ambitious family commissions at the Heckscher Stage, including the 2021 world premiere of Rachel Teagle's The Impracticality of Modern-Day Mastodons, which required a custom 9-by-12-foot puppet built by former Lion King Broadway puppet master Jim Hammond and forced that production to temporarily relocate to FAU's larger University Theatre space.
Baker Street Beginnings is presented in the Marleen Forkas Studio One Theatre inside Performing Arts Building PA-51, Room 103, on FAU's campus at 777 Glades Road in Boca Raton, running through September 20.
