You’ll always remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard about JFK’s assassination. The attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. Or Florida Stage declaring bankruptcy, closing its doors and ceasing operations forever.

OK, that third one is not as momentous as the other two, but it came as almost as big a surprise. At least I was caught flat-footed by the news, delivered by e-mail Monday afternoon, that the 24-year-old Palm Beach County cultural fixture had abruptly ended its run with the final performance of Carter W. Lewis’s The Cha-Cha of the Camel Spider the day before.

After all, just a week earlier I had interviewed by phone Tina Fabrique and Rob Ruggiero, the star and director of the biographical revue Ella, which was scheduled to begin performances as Florida Stage’s summer show this coming Thursday. So how could Florida Stage suddenly be no more?

I knew there was subscriber dissatisfaction about the company’s move to the Kravis Center, but not that subscription levels had shrunk from a high of 7,000 to fewer than 2,000 for the 2011-2012 season that will not happen now.

It was a little over a year ago that producing director Louis Tyrrell and managing director Nan Barnett expressed such optimism for the company’s future as it moved from an unassuming strip mall in Manalapan to the Kravis in West Palm Beach, thereby saving $200,000 in annual rent. Sure, there was the cost of the move and the cost of new seating -- which wasn’t really all that comfortable -- but surely Tyrrell and Barnett were too smart to make such a major decision without doing their marketing homework about the move’s acceptance with its audience.

Besides, this was Florida Stage, “the nation’s largest professional theater dedicated to producing exclusively new and emerging American plays.” The theater which grew from its first humble home, a tiny playhouse on the campus of Palm Beach Stage College, to earning a national reputation for championing such playwrights as Nilo Cruz, Deborah Zoe Laufer, Carter W. Lewis and Jeffrey Hatcher, to name just a few. And featuring on its stage world or regional premieres by such major American writers as Israel Horovitz, William Mastrosimone, Steven Dietz, Athol Fugard and Lee Blessing.

It is not just that Florida Stage will no longer be rendering these works with its signature care and clarity, but is hard to imagine the remaining theater companies in the immediate area picking up the slack by producing many of these contemporary voices.

Florida Stage was such a model for regional theaters who devote themselves to adventuresome new work that the theater critics for the daily newspapers in South Florida often nominated Florida Stage for a Tony Award. And there were reasons to believe that we were inching closer to gaining that recognition for the company.

I will concede that I have a bias towards new plays, towards being challenged and surprised each time I went to Florida Stage. And for many years, the company had amassed a loyal following of like-minded theatergoers. To stay for a post-show talkback and to hear the fervor with which they dissected the ideas and dramaturgy they had just experienced, it is hard to imagine that its subscribers had dwindled so far so quickly.

I have been attending and reviewing Florida Stage since I arrived in Palm Beach County 17-and-a-half years ago. Scrolling through the group’s production history on its website, it is easy to recall some of the vivid viewing experiences I have had with the company.

Like Tammy Ryan’s The Music Lesson, the tale of a war-ravaged Bosnian émigré piano teacher, in a pitch-perfect production that almost made it to off-Broadway. Three varied plays by Thomas Gibbons (Bee-Luther-Hatchee, Collected Stories, A House With No Walls) which posed such interesting questions about race in America today.

Michael Hollinger’s Red Herring, which found a way to generate comedy from the dark days of McCarthyism without trivializing them. God’s Man in Texas, by David Rambo, a look at the big business of mega-churches and matters of faith. Athol Fugard’s Exits and Entrances, a valentine to the alchemy that is theater from the towering dramatist of South Africa. And Steven Dietz’s Yankee Tavern, an eerie yarn that spins on 9-11 conspiracy theories.

Of course there are many more, since Florida Stage produced some 150 plays in its 24 years. And if this past February’s 1^st Stage new works festival was a reliable indication, the 25^th anniversary season -- the season that will not be happening -- would have added a few productions to the most memorable list.

Once the shock of Monday’s announcement wears off, there will be the sifting through the details of Florida Stage’s demise for lessons to learn, just as there was for the Burt Reynolds Institute for Theatre Training, The Jupiter Theatre, Royal Palm Dinner Theatre, Royal Poinciana Playhouse, all of which went dark during the past two decades.

On Florida Stage’s website, there are a number of Frequently Asked Questions which the theater posed to itself as a way to get information out to its patrons. Perhaps the most salient is “With the closing of Florida Stage, why should I support other arts organizations?”

The proffered answer addresses the importance of art and the value of culture, which are probably givens to anyone surfing the site. The implied but unspoken reason, of course, is to prevent further diminishment of the arts scene here, an unthinkable but very real possibility.

Next week, Florida Stage was supposed to launch its 25^th anniversary season, beginning with the return of the musical biography Ella and continuing with a slate of world and regional premieres.

But the operative words are “was supposed to,” for the West Palm Beach company devoted exclusively to new work filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection and ceased operations with the scheduled end of the run of The Cha-Cha of a Camel Spider on Sunday.

In a statement, the theater cited “several critical financial challenges” facing the organization, including a marked downturn in subscription sales for the 2011-2012 season, “negligible” ticket sales for Ella and a lack of response to intensive fundraising efforts. These all contributed to accumulated debt of $1.5 million, insufficient funds to continue operating and a decision by the board of trustees to close the theater.

Not mentioned among the factors in the bankruptcy decision was Florida Stage’s move last summer from its former home in Manalapan to the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse. Although that move resulted in a saving of $200,000 in rent and utilities, substantial numbers of subscribers were unhappy with the new venue. The subscriber base shrank at the Kravis for this past season to less than 2,000, compared to more than 7,000 at the company’s high point.

In making the announcement, producing director Louis Tyrrell praised the theater’s patrons, calling them “the reason we were able to birth so many new plays that have gone on to thrill and astonish audiences around the country. For having to draw our curtain, we are heartbroken.”

Let’s start with the stipulation that I really do not care for one-person shows, which are almost invariably undramatic recitations of facts, delivered to unseen characters in a series of phone calls, often with no theatrical context.

There are a few exceptions -- Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain, Vincent Price’s Oscar Wilde -- but Ed Asner’s Franklin Roosevelt is not among them.

FDR is a creaky, dry-as-dust history lesson, exactly the sort of lazy writing that gives these monodramas a bad name, and nothing about Asner’s performance redeems the evening.

On tour across the country as a reminder of the positive achievements of a liberal president who bullied his way through depressing economic times and a world war -- Are you listening, Barack? -- the show plays at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton through Sunday afternoon. Unless you really feel the need to see seven-time Emmy winner Asner live onstage, though, you will not be missing much if you take a pass on FDR.

It was written more than 30 years ago by the late Dore Schary, whose best-known play, Sunrise at Campobello, examined Roosevelt’s struggles with polio prior to his four-term presidency with much more dramatic vigor. This follow-up work, however, is little more than a name-dropper of cabinet members, sketchy accounts of his presidential election campaigns and tales of his exploits leading the nation out of The Great Depression and through World War II.

If you are interested in learning about these topics in depth, stay home and read a book.

Other than his own liberal fervor, Asner is hardly anyone’s image of Roosevelt. At 81, he is nearly two decades older than FDR was when he died. Asner takes a crack at Roosevelt’s patrician accent, but the results wobble between British, the American South and pure Lou Grant. Although he has been on the road with the show for the past year, Asner stumbled over some of his lines at Wednesday evening’s performance and his energy flagged on occasion during the hour-and-three-quarter intermissionless performance.

According to Caldwell artistic director Clive Cholerton, tickets have sold well for the week of performances, so maybe the booking has helped the theater’s bottom line. It has done nothing to help the Boca company’s reputation.

FDR, starring Ed Asner. Caldwell Theatre Company, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, June 5. Tickets: $40-$75. Call: (561) 241-7432.

He has played a slave ship captain in Roots, Pope John XXIII, adventurer Carl Fredericksen in Pixar’s Up and, of course, Lou Grant, the role that earned him five of his seven Emmy Awards. But for Ed Asner, 81, the opportunity to become Franklin Delano Roosevelt for a couple of hours each night was too good to resist.

Around the Kansas City household where young Ed grew up, Roosevelt was thought of as “God, the father,” he says by phone, before flying in to South Florida for a week of performances of Dore Schary’s FDR at Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre.

To Asner, Roosevelt was “revered certainly. Never for a moment questioned his authenticity, his goodness.” Elected to the presidency four times, FDR became an enduring liberal icon, a mantle that Asner has carried on in his outspoken opinions, his actions and the roles he has chosen to play.

As to his current performance, the former Screen Actors Guild president says, “I certainly never believed that I would be mistaken for Roosevelt, but the more I did it, the more I convinced myself.”

Asner has been acclaimed for his impersonation of Roosevelt, but that was never his goal. He accepted the role, first of all, because “Well, I had nothing to do at the time,” and secondly to deliver the play’s liberal message. “I go around in hopes that people will not only take heart, but take action,” says Asner. “And implement, supplement, the things that Roosevelt did.”

And of that message of Roosevelt’s bold, forceful style made its way to the White House, that would please Asner a great deal. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to keep going on the road. In the hopes of preaching to the choir -- which I do most of the time -- that the choir will somehow find a way to get the thought of the message, the joy of the message, to expedite the return of those policies. In preaching to the audience, I hope that they’re affected enough that they begin affecting the White House.”

Yet Asner has his doubts whether Roosevelt, confined to a wheelchair with polio, could be elected today. “Probably not, the press being what it is,” he says. “They’d call him much too crippled to handle the job.”

Certainly Asner feels he could have learned a few things from FDR worth applying to his work in presiding over SAG in the early 1980s. “I hadn’t studied him sufficiently at that time. I could have used it,’ he says. “The charm that he used. I never used the charm sufficiently to win over my enemies. And I sure had them.”

And no, Asner never seriously considered running for public office. “Not at all. I always thought that, yeah, I could get out there and preach enough and maybe win the job, but I felt they’d get cheated,” he explains. Cheated? “That I wouldn’t be thorough enough, that I wouldn’t compromise enough, that no matter how much studying I might do, it would never be enough to satisfy me.”

So he insists he is content touring the country, influencing the electorate with his performance skills. “And it rejuvenates me,” Asner says. Besides, “I’m not good for anything else.”

He gives a Lou Grant grunt at the suggestion that at his age he could be staying home and relaxing. “Oh, relaxing. If you sleep a full eight hours when you get in bed at night, what do you need to relax for?”

Well into his sixth decade as a professional actor, Asner feels he is at the top of his game. “I’m a better actor now than I’ve ever been, and if I chose to lie on my fat ass and do nothing, I would be morally wrong to deny a script the powers that I have at hand.”

So far, he had done about a hundred performances of FDR in 50 cities over the past year and a half. After Boca, he will continue to criss-cross the country with the one-man show, well into 2012. But do not look for him to take the show to New York. “I’m not eager to plunge into New York unless everything is absolutely perfect,” he says. “Because New York has favorites and I doubt whether I’m one of them.”

Boca Raton, however, is probably ready for Asner and vice versa. As to the play, FDR, he says, “they will be entertained and they will discover knowledge of the past that they either didn’t know or forgot.”

FDR, starring Ed Asner. Caldwell Theatre Company, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Wednesday, June 1- Sunday, June 5. Tickets: $40-$75. Call: (561) 241-7432.

Bill Maher can be -- and undoubtedly has been -- called many things, including the accurate (and printable) tags of talk show host, social critic, actor, author, and documentary filmmaker.

But the 54-year-old Maher started out as a stand-up comic while attending Cornell University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English that’s come in handy since 1978. The New York City-born, New Jersey-raised satirist used it to deliver a scathingly brilliant 90-minute routine Saturday night to a capacity crowd at the Kravis Center’s Dreyfoos Hall.

Dressed casually in slacks and a T-shirt, Maher entered to the theme music from his seasonal Friday HBO series Real Time With Bill Maher, on which he wears a suit and tie. The early portion of this appearance provided his only tentative moments, as he leaned on lines he’d already delivered on Real Time episodes while getting a sense of how far he could go without sending hordes to the exits.

Yet this was a younger-than-usual Kravis crowd, and Maher seemed to relax 15 minutes in as he lit into one of his favorite topics, religion.

“I’ve been through the South recently, and there’s a church literally on every corner,” he said. “Tonight, the devil has come to South Florida.”

The crowd roared its approval. Maher is the son of an Irish Catholic father and a Jewish mother, so both faiths eventually took their lumps throughout the evening. His 2008 film Religulous became the seventh-highest grossing documentary ever by spoofing all religions with equal aplomb.

“Evangelical Christians believe in torture more than any other group,” Maher said. “There's only one group that doesn't really believe in Christian values -- the Christians.”

He also referred to the Bible as “that old book of Jewish fairy tales,” and called the pope “a big, popular Catholic celebrity who should be a float in the Macy’s [Thanksgiving] Day parade.”

Politics provided an even more central theme for the night, primarily President Obama and his Republican challengers. The left-leaning Maher, a self-described libertarian, gave the president both praise and criticism.

“Obama finally got legitimized by Middle America,” he said. “There's nothing like shooting someone in the face to do that. I bet Gaddafi is [soiling] his pants now. I’ve put him ahead of Charlie Sheen in my celebrity dead pool.

“But Obama seems like the nicest guy in the world; always apologizing for things. C’mon. You’re the Jackie Robinson of American politics, and 40 percent of the country wouldn’t vote for you if you saved them from drowning, so be the first black president! Grow your hair out. Rush Limbaugh always looks like he’s gonna have a heart attack, so give him one!”

The president’s predecessor, one of Maher's favorite targets, also came up on occasion.

“The Republicans are upset because George Bush didn’t get enough credit for killing Bin Laden,” Maher said. “But that's because he didn’t! Obama got Bin Laden; Bush got Wesley Snipes. When Obama invited Bush to Ground Zero after Bin Laden’s death, Bush turned him down, and I don’t blame him. That would’ve been like inviting Sarah Palin to a spelling bee.

“People like to say, ‘Remember how you felt after the 9/11 attacks.’ Yeah, remember when we started making stupid decisions like invading the wrong country, and getting me fired.”

That reference was to Maher’s ABC show Politically Incorrect, which was canceled due to “low ratings” after living up to its name in 2001. Six days after 9/11, Maher criticized the United States government for not preventing the attacks, and referenced the dedication of the hijackers who successfully killed themselves along with thousands of U.S. citizens.

“I hope some of this is offensive!” Maher railed at one point. He then raged against Palin (“Stupid people used to at least realize they might be stupid before America got Palin-ized”), Michele Bachmann (“For people who find Palin too intellectual”), Arizona’s immigration laws (“They now have a law that you can’t fry beans more than once”), Donald Trump (“That curiosity from the ’80s”), and Newt Gingrich (“The moral compass of an infection”).

Another prospectively offensive reference involved Obama and Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner.

“Even after seeing his birth certificate, some Republicans still say that Obama just seems foreign,” Maher said. “Well, John Boehner seems feminine to me! Mention the American Dream and his lip starts quivering like a gay guy watching ‘Rent.’ ”

Some of Maher’s leftover ire was saved for the Tea Party movement.

“The tea-baggers hate being called racist,” he said. “The other thing they hate is black people. They're cranky, independent bed-wetters who named themselves after a gay sex act. And I know there are some union issues right here, so I want to know: Why isn’t the Tea Party on the side of the unions?”

Maher was invoking the current dispute between the stagehands union and the Kravis Center, which resulted in 100 or so picketers protesting in front of the performing arts center Saturday. Union activists had tried unsuccessfully to get Maher to either cancel the show or perform elsewhere.

A few of the evening’s lighter moments also included local references.

“You have to vote for your own economic interests,” Maher said. “That's why Republicans want to repeal the estate tax. But there's a reason it’s called an estate tax -- because it's for people who have estates! You know: Palm Beach types. But of course you need some help around the estate, right? Well, my father had some help around the house in New Jersey in the ’60s -- me!”

“And you guys sure have bigger cockroaches here in Florida. But you call them palmetto bugs, right? That sounds better; more like a drink you’d order in a bar. Cockroaches must have great publicists here.”

Like his comic hero, the late George Carlin (especially in the latter half of his career), Maher knows how to draw laughs out of otherwise taboo subjects through his cynical writing and often perfectly timed delivery.

Despite a slow start, this performance was arguably funnier than any of Maher’s nine HBO stand-up specials, four books, his string of TV and B-movie appearances, or even the bulk of his intermittently great Real Time episodes.

Give the devil his due.