The Cape Cod Theatre Project Announces 2023 Season of New Plays

The Cape Cod Theatre Project (CCTP) announces its 2023 Season of New Plays, running Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights at 7:30 PM ET from June 29th-July 22nd at Falmouth Academy's Simon Center for the Arts. For the second consecutive year, CCTP will highlight female voices, with workshops of staged readings by Steph Del Rosso (June 29-July 1), May Treuhaft-Ali (July 6-July 8), Fernanda Coppel (July 13-15) and Mary Elizabeth Hamilton (July 20-22).

Cape Cod Theatre Project is focused on facilitating the playwright's developmental process. For four weeks from the end of June through the end of July, a new play is presented each week receiving three staged readings and featuring professional actors from Broadway, film, and television. Further development of the play is the goal, and performances include a post-show talkback in which audience's thoughtful feedback for the playwright, director and actors is solicited and encouraged.

The Cape Cod Theatre Project's 29th Season kicks off with a welcome event for All Access Pass Holders on June 22 at 6:30 pm at The Falmouth Yacht Club featuring CCTP alum, playwright and screenwriter Sharr White, whose play Pictures from Home, which starred Nathan Lane on Broadway, was developed at CCTP. Audience members will have a chance to mix, mingle, and ask questions in a brief Q&A hosted by CCTP Artistic Director Hal Brooks. Additionally, there will be a mid-season benefit reading of What Do We Do with The Dead by Stephen Belber on July 16 at 7:30 PM ET.

"I am so excited about our four mainstage plays this year," says Artistic Director Hal Brooks. "Once again, we are thrilled to highlight female voices. Each one of these plays is in its own way dynamic, relevant, entertaining, and addresses the world we live in head on with passion. I know our audience will enjoy getting to know these exciting playwrights and interacting with them after each presentation. And so great to bring up Sharr White, whose play, Pictures from Home lit up the Broadway stage. Stephen Belber's hilarious tale is sure to enthrall our audience mid-month."

The first play of the season will be Steph Del Rosso's play, Precarious, presented June 29th - July 1st, directed by Jaki Bradley. Violet is newly 70, newly retired, and growing increasingly anxious about environmental collapse when she shows up at her daughter Tillie's Brooklyn apartment with an unwelcome surprise. But Tillie has secrets of her own, and as a heatwave hits, conflicts begin to simmer and threaten to explode. A dark comedy about mothers and daughters, generational divides, and climate change.

Del Rosso's (she/her) work has been produced or developed at Second Stage Theater, The Public, La Jolla Playhouse, The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, The Kennedy Center, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, JACK, and others. She is a Core Writer at the Playwrights' Center, a New Georges Audrey Resident, a former Theater Master's Visionary Playwright, and an alum of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and Clubbed Thumb's Early-Career Writers' Group. She is a winner of the Steinberg Playwright Award and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. MFA: UC-San Diego. www.stephdelrosso.com.

Jaki Bradley is a director for theater, TV and film. Recent theater projects include The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin (IRT), How to Load a Musket (LTR) White Noise (Berkeley Rep); Radio Island and Good Men Wanted (NYSAF); House Plant and 1969: The Second Man (NYTW: Next Door); Mama Metallica (Denver Center); and Playing Hot (Ars Nova). www.jakibradley.com

On July 6th - 8th, May Treuhaft-Ali will present Quick Service, directed by Cristina Angeles. In an empanada shop in Chicago, four employees try to make it through the dinner rush: Angela's trying to get home to her baby, Petey's trying to get laid tonight, Vash is trying to graduate and get out, and Greg is trying to manage them all - while still pursuing his standup career. But as they try to make it through a particularly harrowing double shift, their dreams and desires get bent out of shape. A sinister force rises from below, ex-coworkers enact their revenge, and the oven has a mind of its own.

Treuhaft-Ali is a playwright, director, and dramaturg. Her play ABCD had its world premiere at Barrington Stage Company in July 2022, and her play Escapegoat had a workshop production at Boston Court Pasadena later that year. She is the 22-23 Van Lier Fellow at Rattlestick Theater and a member of Ars Nova's Play Group. Her plays have been developed at Clubbed Thumb, The Playwrights Realm, The Movement Theatre Company, and MCC Theater. She is under commission at Barrington Stage Company and South Coast Repertory. She also served as Associate Director on the world premiere of SHHHH by Clare Barron at Atlantic Theater Company. May is the Literary and Community Engagement Assistant at Playwrights Horizons.

Cristina Angeles is an Afrolatina director, writer, and theater maker who develops new plays, musicals, and socially conscious adaptations of classics that place women of color at the forefront. She has been awarded the Drama League Directing Fellowship, the Roundabout Directing Fellowship, and has associate directed on and off Broadway. www.cristinaangeles.com

Playwright Fernanda Coppel brings her play AYA to CCTP July 13th - 15th, directed by Carolyn Cantor. Luis Diaz is in the midst of a divorce and a deep dark depression. Instead of doing the hard work to heal, he travels to Peru for a week long ayahuasca workshop - ayahuasca being a hallucinatory drug taken not for pleasure, but as an indigenous mystically healing tea that helps repair the darkest pain imaginable. There he meets Gloria, a no-holds-barred mystic, when an unexpected visitor arrives.

Fernanda Coppel is a Mexican/American playwright and screenwriter. Her play King Liz received its world premiere at Second Stage Theatre in 2015 and was produced at The Geffen Playhouse last summer. King Liz was published by Concord Theatricals and has recently been optioned by ABC Signature studio and 42 for television. Her professional New York debut, Chimichangas and Zoloft premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2012 and is published by Samuel French. Fernanda's work has won the 2012 HOLA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting, the 2012 Helen Merrill Award. She's an alum of: The Juilliard School, NYU (MFA), and UC Santa Cruz (BA). Fernanda's also written for TV shows such as: Shonda Rhimes produced HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER, Jason Katim's RISE, USA network's adaptation of QUEEN OF THE SOUTH, among others. In feature film, Fernanda's co-wrote NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE which was produced by Netflix and Andy Serkis' UK based Imaginarium Productions and premiered on Netflix in fall 2021.

Carolyn Cantor is thrilled to be back at CCTP for the fourth time. NY credits include Sell/Buy/Date, Regrets and Pumpgirl (Manhattan Theatre Club); Indian Summer, Fly By Night, Great God Pan, After the Revolution, Essential Self Defense (Playwrights Horizons); Arlington (Vineyard); In a Dark Dark House (MCC Theater); Something You Did (Primary Stages); The Talls (Second Stage); Core Values (Ars Nova); Orange Flower Water and Stone Cold Dead Serious (Edge Theater), and EVE-olution (Cherry Lane).

The final play of the season is Mary Elizabeth Hamilton's It's Still F**king Tuesday, presented July 20th - July 22nd, directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar. When she learns that her son has been diagnosed with an unnamed but life threatening disease, Mary, a recovering opioid addict, begs her housekeeper to stay the night and stop her from falling off the wagon. As the two women make dating profiles, try on clothes, smoke, drink and delve into whiskey-induced examinations of their pasts, they find they have more in common than they realized. Will Cathy be able to keep Mary from the abyss, or will Mary pull her housekeeper down along with her? Inspired by O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, It's Still F**king Tuesday is a dark comedy/drama about ghosts, motherhood and addiction.

Mary Elizabeth Hamilton is a Brooklyn based playwright, TV writer and mom. She holds her MFA from The University of Iowa and an Artistic Diploma from Juilliard. Mary was a Jerome Fellow at The Lark and has participated in Youngblood, The O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Ars Nova, I-73, New Georges' The Jam, and Play Penn. Her play 16 Winters won ASC's New Contemporaries Award and her Sloan commission, Smart, was produced at Ensemble Studio Theater and optioned by AMC. Mary was a Story Editor on WHY WOMEN KILL, wrote the podcast POWER TRIP starring Tatiana Maslany, and is a resident playwright with New Dramatists.

Aneesha Kudtarkar (she/her) is a New York-based theatre director. She is a trained Indian Classical dancer who calls upon her background in dance to create compositionally-driven pieces of theatre that centralize historically excluded voices. Her recent directorial projects include The Who and The What (Juilliard), Queen (Long Wharf Theatre, NAATCO), The Cherry Orchard (The New School), The Who and The What (TheaterWorks Hartford), Men on Boats (Southern Methodist University), [Veil Widow Conspiracy] (NAATCO), LOCUSTS, Trouble in Mind (Yale School of Drama), The Purple Flower (Yale Cabaret). Aneesha is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama MFA Program. www.AneeshaDirects.com

Benefit Reading

On Sunday, July 16th at 7:30 PM, the Cape Cod Theatre Project will hold a one-night only reading of Stephen Belber's new play, What Do We Do with The Dead - A Two-Person Soliloquy at Falmouth Academy's Simon Center for the Arts. Stephen Belber is a successful playwright, filmmaker and artist. Everyone seems to know this except Stephen Belber, whose friend Jenny is there as a live, onstage dramaturg of his life, while Stephen searches for something to hold onto amidst his follies, his failures, and his seemingly many dying friends. Belber is an American playwright, screenwriter and film director. His plays have been produced on Broadway and in over 50 countries. He directed the film adaptation of his Broadway play, MATCH, starring Patrick Stewart, (playing the Tony-nominated role created by Frank Langella). He also wrote and directed the film MANAGEMENT, starring Jennifer Aniston, Steve Zahn and Woody Harrelson, and wrote the HBO film O.G., starring Jeffrey Wright. His stage play Tape was turned into a film by Richard Linklater, starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, and was recently remade as a film in Hong Kong, to be released next year. Belber's latest film, WHAT WE DO NEXT (writer/director), recently opened in theaters nationwide, starring Corey Stoll and Karen Pittman. Belber was an actor and associate writer on The Laramie Project, (which later became an HBO film, for which he received an Emmy nomination), as well as a co-writer of and actor in The Laramie Project, Ten Years Later.

Finally, CCTP will welcome Peter Kim George as one of this season's Noel Coward Foundation-supported artists in residence. California born and New York based, Peter Kim George is a Korean diaspora playwright. He did his PhD at Brown University on the 19th century novel before writing for the stage. Plays include To Red Tendons (Ojai Playwrights Conference Dr. Kerry English Artist Award) and Men Accumulate (Bay Area Playwrights Festival finalist, Princess Grace Award semi-finalist, NormalAve NAPseries). Alumni of Ensemble Studio Theatre's Youngblood. B.A.: University of California Berkeley.

All Access Passes

All Access Passes, granting admission to every performance of all four MainStage plays, plus Stephen Belber's What Do We Do with The Dead benefit reading and an invitation to the welcome event with Sharr White, are now available for $125 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. Individual performance tickets 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 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: 81 of the 105 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. Most recently, 2018 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 currently on Amazon Prime; and 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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