Cape Cod Theatre Project Announces 30th Season of Plays

The Cape Cod Theatre Project has announced its 30th Season of New Plays, running weekend nights in July from July 5 through July 28 at Falmouth Academy's Simon Center for the Arts.

For its 30th Season of Staged Readings of New Plays, CCTP will feature workshops of plays by Erin Breznitzky (June 5-July 7), Mathilde Dratwa (July 11-July 13), Alex Lin (July 18-20 and Dipika Guha (July 25-27).

Benefit Performance with Lunden and Gibson

The Cape Cod Theatre Project's 30th Season kicks off with a Benefit Performance of Love Letters, by A.R. Gurney. On Saturday, June 29 at 7:00 PM, the one-night only benefit reunites the stars of Good Morning America, Joan Lunden and Charles Gibson. "Love Letters is a gift to our audience members, who will love this poignant and heartfelt staple of the American Theater," says Board Chair Claudia Nimar. Gibson is a longtime CCTP audience member and was excited to invite his long-time work partner to join in this unique one-night-only event.

Both Lunden and Gibson greeted America daily for nearly twenty years as trusted hosts of Good Morning America. Lunden is a journalist, host, motivational speaker and author. A health and senior advocate, Joan is the host of the PBS television series, Second Opinion with Joan Lunden and the Washington Post Podcast series, Caring for Tomorrow. Lunden's newest book, Why Did I Come into This Room: A Candid Conversation About Aging quickly became a New York Times Best Seller.

Charles Gibson, who vacations on the Cape and frequently attends CCTP, is a renowned broadcast television anchor, journalist, and podcaster. A host of ABC's Good Morning America and World News Tonight, Gibson and his daughter created a podcast called The Bookcase, appeared in Netflix's House of Cards and was awarded a National Journalism Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also the recipient of the Fred Friendly First Amendment Award.

Tickets to the June 29th benefit performance may be obtained by purchasing an All Access Pass, now on sale for $150, which grants the holder admission to all performances this summer, including Love Letters. Tickets to the benefit performance of Love Letters only are now on sale for $50. Go to capecodtheatreproject.org to purchase.

New Play Development Presentations from July 5th through July 27th

"Thirty years of new plays is quite an accomplishment," says Artistic Director Hal Brooks. "I am thrilled to present these dynamic, relevant and entertaining plays. Here are four exciting new voices that approach the issues of the world we live in with fervor and passion. Our audience has been with us now for 30 summers of developing new plays, and I know they will be thrilled to hear these varied and passionate voices."

The first new play of the season will be Erin Breznitsky's play, Satellites, presented Friday July 5, Saturday July 6 and Sunday July 7, directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt. Katherine & Mike are each on a mission to save the world. She's a scientist studying climate change; he's an astronaut exploring the unknown. When Mike's shuttle vanishes in outer space, Katherine forges ahead alone. Until Mike reappears, without explanation, seven years later. Satellites is about the mysteries of human connection, our fear of separation, and the struggle of knowing who we are to each other.

Erin Breznitsky is a Brooklyn-based playwright whose work has been seen in NYC and abroad. Erin has been a finalist for Shakespeare's New Contemporaries, a semi-finalist for the O'Neill Theatre Center National Playwright's Conference and the Princess Grace Playwriting Award, and a winner of the Premiere Stages Play Festival. Her full-length plays have received workshop productions at FringeNYC, Rogue & Peasant Players, and English Theatre of Rome, Italy. Erin is the recipient of the Lipkin Prize for Playwriting and a full scholarship to La MaMa's International Playwrights Retreat in Spoleto, Italy. She holds an MFA in Theatre from Sarah Lawrence College and is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild. Adrienne Campbell-Holt (Colt Coeur) returns to CCTP (Bearded Ladies) to direct.

Thursday July 11th through Saturday July 13th, CCTP will present Mathilde Dratwa's Dirty Laundry, directed by Artistic Director Hal Brooks. Following the unexpected loss of her mother and the shocking discovery of her father's infidelity, an adult daughter juggles grief and anger. Her father, on the other hand, tries his best to verbalize his complicated feelings about love, loss, lust... and household chores. Meanwhile, another woman ponders: is she still "the other woman" when the original woman is gone? An uproariously opinionated chorus provides the galloping cadence to this comedy-drama that puts everything on the table to explore the extremes of human emotion.

Mathilde Dratwa's plays include Milk and Gall (Theatre503), A Play about David Mamet Writing a Play about Harvey Weinstein, Esther Perel Ruined My Life, and Dirty Laundry (Audible; Henley Rose Award). Her work has been presented by the Ground Floor / Berkeley Rep, the Ojai Playwrights Conference, Roundabout Theatre Company, Rattlestick, Berkshire Theatre Group, American Players Theater, LAByrinth Theater Company and in London at the Young Vic. Mathilde is an inaugural Powers Playwriting Fellow at The Old Globe, a Core Writer at the Playwrights' Center, and was recently a member of the Orchard Project's Greenhouse, a Dramatist Guild Foundation Playwriting Fellow and a member of New York Foundation for the Arts' Immigrant Artist Program. She has developed film/TV content for Netflix, FX, Endeavor and Sony/TriStar.

Playwright Alex Lin brings her play barren to CCTP July 18th - 20th, directed by Iris McCloughan. Yifei is an OB/GYN. Yifei wants a baby. Yifei is barren. What crueler irony is there for a baby doctor who can't have a baby? One that tasks her with ensuring a safe, happy, and healthy delivery for her formerly estranged younger sister, Max. barren is dark comedy about two sisters navigating two entirely different fates in finding, creating, and embracing family.

Alex Lin is from New Jersey. Her plays developed at Second Stage, Roundabout, New York Theater Workship, Manhattan Theater Club, Two River Theatre, the O'Neill, South Coast Rep, Playwrights Realm, Central Square Theatre, and Theater Mu. Guest lectures at CMU, Rutgers, and Union College. As an actor: Actors Theatre of Louisville (The Wolves), New Victory (In the Land of Mauve & Gold), HVSF (Julius Caesar), Ma-Yi (The House of Billy Paul, Somebody is Looking Back At Me), Jewish Plays Project (Zionista Rising), and Commonwealth Shakespeare (Henry VI Part III, Richard III). Her play, Chinese Republicans, was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Lin just finished her first-year playwright in the Juilliard School's Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program. Iris McCloughan (Sad Boys in Harpy Land at Playwrights Horizons) will direct.

The final new play of the season is Dipika Guha's Asilomar, presented July 25th - July 27th. In 1975, a group of scientists gathers at a conference in Asilomar, California to discuss the safety and regulation of a cutting-edge new technology: genetic engineering. Decades later, gifted scientist Dr. Annie Roy devotes herself to this field of study, facing breakneck competition towards the discovery of CRISPR technology, with nuclear implications for the human species. Commissioned by MTC through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Asilomar is about the culture of competition in science, the ethics that accompany scientific discovery, and the implications of gene editing technology in our quest for advancement.

Dipika Guha was born in India and raised in the UK and Russia. Her plays include Yoga Play (South Coast Rep, SF Playhouse, Playmakers Rep and others), The Art of Gaman (Theatre 503, London) and Unreliable (Kansas City Rep). She was the inaugural recipient of the Shakespeare's Sister Award, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, and the Venturous Fellowship for her play Passing. She is currently under commission from South Coast Rep and Berkeley Rep and is adapting a novel for TV for A24. For TV, she's written on "The Marvelous Mrs Maisel," and currently "Quarter Life" by Riz Ahmed. Dipika is a proud member of New Dramatists, an alumnus of the WP Lab, Ars Nova's Play Group, Soho Rep W/D Lab, Geffen Writers Room, Playwrights Foundation, Ma Yi Writers Lab, and Playwrights Center. Dipika received her BA in English Literature at University College London, was a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University, and was awarded her MFA from the Yale School of Drama under Paula Vogel.

Finally, CCTP will welcome two playwrights for a week of residency, as one of this season's Noel Coward Foundation-supported artists in residence. Previous artists-in-residence include Tony Nominee Heidi Schreck (What the Constitution Means to Me), Pulitzer Winner Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview and Illinoise), Pulitzer Winner Sanaz Toossi (English), Pulitzer Finalist Sarah DeLappe (The Wolves), Sarah Einspanier, Sharr White (Pictures from Home), Halley Feiffer, Academy Award© Nominee Lucy Alibar (Beasts of the Southern Wild), Hillary Bettis, Sarah Burgess, Mona Mansour, Stella Fawn Ragsdale, Peter Kim George, Lily Camp, Rehana Lew Mirza and Abe Koogler.

All Access Passes

All Access Passes, granting admission to every performance of all four MainStage plays, plus the reunion of Joan Lunden and Charles Gibson benefit reading are now available for $150 per person. In addition, All Access Pass Holders will also receive four free passes good to bring newcomers to the Cape Cod Theatre Project, good for all plays - and have the flexibility to attend any performance. Tickets to the Benefit Performance on June 29th of Love Letters are available now by purchasing the All Access Pass for $150 per person or by purchasing a $50 individual ticket good for the benefit only. Single tickets to all other staged readings will be available in June. For tickets and more information visit www.capecodtheatreproject.org.

About the Cape Cod Theatre Project

The Cape Cod Theatre Project began as an experiment between two actors in 1995. Andrew Polk and Jim Bracchitta sensed that Cape Cod offered the perfect sanctuary for developing new work, combining an idyllic atmosphere with a community that enjoys and engages with the arts. Led by Artistic Director Hal Brooks since 2012, CCTP continues to support established and emerging voices in the American theater.

Each July, four playwrights are invited to develop new plays, utilizing a full week of rehearsals with a director and actors that culminates in a series of staged readings and talkbacks. CCTP also offers a weekly, free, behind-the-scenes StageTalk discussion with the playwright and director. Plays fostered with Cape Cod Theatre Project have achieved great success: 84 of the 109 plays developed have been produced on Broadway, Off-Broadway, at regional theaters, and internationally. Several have also been nominated for Pulitzers, Oscars, Tonys, Obies and more. CCTP alum Will Arbery saw his Heroes of the Fourth Turning become a Pulitzer Finalist and win several Obie Awards; 2017 Writer-in-Residence Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me was also a Pulitzer Finalist, a Tony Nominee, and is on Amazon Prime; Eboni Booth, (Pulitzer Winner for Primary Trust) came to the Cape with her play Nonfiction; Lucas Hnath's Hillary and Clinton, developed here in 2015, had a Broadway production starring Laurie Metcalfe and John Lithgow, and Sharr White's Pictures from Home had a 2023 Broadway production starring Nathan Lane.

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