Harbor Stage season offers risk-taking and goofy comedy + 6 more plays at Cape Cod theaters

Another sign of summer is that Harbor Stage Company in Wellfleet is opening Thursday, June 16, and this year for a full indoor season of challenging and funny plays (with COVID-19 precautions in place). Read more about its choices of a Sam Shepard classic, a “goofy” original comedy, and a thought-provoking look at restorative justice in the story below.

For this weekend's entertainment, there are five shows playing at theaters around the Cape. Your choices are “Straight White Men,” the family-centric look at social perspectives at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater; the cowboy musical comedy “Tumacho” at Cape Rep Theatre in Brewster; “Silver Threads: A Musical Tribute to Linda Ronstadt” at Cotuit Center for the Arts; the 1950s-set musical “Grease” at Cape Playhouse in Dennis; and the classic look at women and friendship, “Steel Magnolias,” at Chatham Drama Guild.

We’ve got reviews of them all at www.capecodtimes.com/entertainment, so check out what show you'd like to see.

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One other choice: The Sandwich Arts Alliance will continue its three-part theater series on noted artists with John Weltman performing Jay Presson Allen’s one-man play “Tru,” based on the words and works of writer and socialite Truman Capote (“In Cold Blood,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”). The play is set in 1975, just after Esquire magazine published advance chapters of his tell-all shocker and friends aren't happy about it. Shows are at 7 p.m. June 10-11 and 2 p.m. June 12 at Sandwich Town Hall, 130 Main St. There will be a talkback with Weltman and director Carol McManus after each show. Tickets: $20; at the door, www.sandwichartsalliance.org, or the alliance center, 124 Route 6A, Sandwich.

Harbor Stage season takes on issues, but often with humor

With Harbor Stage Company celebrating its 10th anniversary, its founders have been working to overcome challenges — starting with the pandemic and the lack of housing on the Outer Cape — to try to “get back to some sort of sense of normalcy.”

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The result is a full season (though with fewer performances) of its usual three plays indoors at the company’s Wellfleet Harbor home, featuring shows that co-founder Jonathan Fielding says “we're excited to do and excited to bring to our audience.”

All three shows are ones that the actors who run the company have wanted to present for a while, he says, and the time finally seemed to be right for each.

The season begins June 16-July 9 with a classic: Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child.” Next up, July 14-Aug. 6, is a world premiere of an original play: “The Ballad of Bobby Botswain,” a “goof” of a comedy co-written by and co-starring Fielding. The season finishes with Bryony Lavery’s “Frozen” (very different from the Disney musical, he notes), a haunting and thought-provoking 2004 Broadway play about crises and forgiveness that Fielding says feels fresh because of its key theme of restorative justice.

Details on all: http://www.harborstage.org/.

The season includes COVID-19 precautions of required masking and vaccination, like at many theaters, and upgrades to the building’s ventilation system. The response to the Harbor plans from subscribers and others has been encouraging, says Fielding, who says it seems people are ready to get back to the theater under the right conditions.

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With that support in hand, Harbor Stage will first offer “Buried Child,” described as “an uncompromising dive into the secrets of a fractured family … (that) uses dark humor to dissect the myth of a twisted American dream.”

Shepard’s “language is beautiful and poetic and dark, and yet he's got a wonderful sense of humor,” Fielding says in a phone interview. “It deals with real issues, but also has really beautiful language and I think the audience responds to that. … We've always said we have a real intellectual audience at the Harbor and this plays right into that. We just also are passionate about this kind of work and love to explore it.”

The housing crisis affects theaters

Fielding describes “Buried Child” as the season’s “big-cast play,” with seven actors.

To accomplish that size, the group cast several area performers they’ve worked with before, including Dennis Cunningham, which Fielding says feels “like a community get-together for us again after the pandemic, even though everybody is wearing masks in rehearsal and trying to be safe.”

The casting is also a practical choice: The lack of Cape housing that has made it difficult to bring in workers for all kinds of jobs also affects the summer theater world.

“We are hanging on as far as housing is concerned,” Fielding says. “Every summer, we pick our shows because of our housing situation. It's a big factor in how everything moves forward with us, sadly.”

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This year, the company is using "a hodgepodge" of five different locations for housing people, including favors from friends and paying full price for rentals, which strains its limited budget. “We continue to look for a housing solution and we haven’t found it yet,” he says, noting they are open to help and ideas. “We're definitely a little desperate to find a way to solve our housing problems.”

So while the other two plays in the season are also scripts that company members have long wanted to stage, it's ideal that they have three-actor casts. Fielding’s own play next month will switch up the mood to goofy comedy but still have an underlying theme of health care woes.

“Hopefully the audience will just come and have a good time,” he says. “It's not going to beat you over the head with any sort of message but it does have some value in that it would be a conversation starter."

Health care and restorative justice

He and co-writer/co-star Jason Lambert — friends since graduate school who have shared a stage before, including in Wellfleet — first talked about writing the play before the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010. But Fielding says the issue of unequal access to health care has become just as topical in the wake of the pandemic.

The plot: Two very different strangers meet at a Texas bar, and decide to go find a third person they both know, someone “who is a sort of mysterious mystic who is an extraordinary person."

While Fielding says it's daunting for him and Lambert to finally produce and act in this play, he’s been buoyed by the positive response to workshop readings, including at Harbor Stage. “I think our audience likes risk-taking, they like new plays, and they're along for the ride as much as they would with some sort of classic piece.”

“Frozen” will feature characters that Fielding says it takes brave actors to explore: a mother grieving over her missing 10-year-old, a pedophile serial killer and a clinical psychologist seeking to talk to the murderer. The three unite in a rare theatrical look at the idea of “restorative justice,” which brings together perpetrator, victim and sometimes a member of the community.

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Fielding saw “Frozen” on Broadway and says “it just stuck with me. … It’s a really powerful play, and it’s upsetting and it’s also quite beautiful and there is some humor in it. So it’s not just heavy-handed, but I think audiences will be really moved by the play and grateful for the experience. … It’s a great play about forgiveness and trying to move on with your life and healing.”

And for fans who are looking for even more Harbor Stage projects, there is the planned imminent release of “Dindin,” a movie version of company co-founder Brenda Withers’ play that was performed on stage last summer. The movie was filmed before that when the theater was closed and the movie is in the finishing stages. Fielding says the company plans a screening this summer at a local theater and hopes to get the movie in festivals.

“So people should be on the lookout for that,” he says, “ and for when we can get it on a streaming platform.”

Contact Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll at kdriscoll@capecodonline.com. Follow on Twitter: @KathiSDCCT.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Harbor Stage season: risk-taking, goofy comedy, 6 more Cape Cod plays