Tampa native finds herself on stage

Conformity can feel like a hair shirt. It's an uncomfortable fashion that reminds the wearer how to behave. Tampa native Tricia Rose Burt wore this metaphorical top for years until she took an art class and discovered she'd been living the wrong life.

"I made choices with what I thought was the right information - and [what was] best for me, and working for a lot of other people - but I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working for me. Then I realized it was because I was supposed to do something very different," said Burt, who now lives in rural New Hampshire.

After enrolling at Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts, she experienced an epiphany that obliterated the rules she'd learned to live by. She ditched an unhappy marriage and a safe career in PR and embraced the unconventional: She became (gasp) an artist .

Burt shares this journey of self-discovery in her one-woman show, "I Will Be Good," which opens Wednesday at the David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts.

The artist grew up in Tampa and behaved the way every proper little girl was expected to. She even documented the rules governing her life in a fifth grade school assignment: "I will not fight with my brother and sister," "I will not bother my parents" and "I will not criticize other people." Years later, Burt found the paper in her mother's house and reinterpreted the list to mean, "I will be good, I will be quiet, I will be nice."

"I knew I'd use this document somewhere in my life. Fifteen years later I started writing the show and I went back to that piece of paper. It encapsulated trying to be a very good girl. 'I Will Be Good' is about not conforming and being comfortable with that," Burt said.

On stage, Burt displays several pieces of her art while verbalizing the experiences and insights that reformed her world. The funny, wise performance is an artfully blended show-and-tell of hard lessons, serendipity and personal bliss.

"For the longest time, I was trying to figure out what those connections were between visual and performance art. I changed mediums because I was trying to tell a story in obsessive pencil drawings. But you can't tell a three-dimensional story in two dimensions. There's an aesthetic and efficiency behind both arts, transforming into something entirely different. I think that's the parallel," said Burt.

Local organizations will receive 5 percent of ticket sales when patrons key in one of the following promotional codes online: H. B. Plant High School: Panthers; Junior League of Tampa: junior; St. Mary's Episcopal Church and School: stmarys; and Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church: Tapestry.