Q & A with Artistic Director Hal Brooks
Sharr White’s play Pictures from Home is poised to make a splash on Broadway in February 2023. The play, about a photographer who captures his aging parents on camera, stars Tony Award winning actors Nathan Lane and Danny Burstein, is directed by Tony Award winner Bartlett Sher, and is premiering at Studio 54, one of Broadway’s most storied venues.
On its path to Broadway, Sharr’s play got a boost. In 2019, New York-based director Hal Brooks selected Pictures from Home as one of the plays to be developed at the Cape Cod Theatre Project, a non-for-profit summer theatre dedicated to developing new American plays. Brooks, a noted director of new plays and an instructor at Yale, has been CCTP’s artistic director since 2012 when founder Andrew Polk stepped down. Located in Falmouth, Massachusetts, CCTP presents staged readings of four new American plays during the month of July. During a show’s designated week, the playwright rehearses, revises, and presents the play before a live audience three times. Plays often change radically during the week of rehearsal and performance. Audiences have the unique opportunity to witness a play’s evolution in real time, and they are invited to participate in nightly talkbacks.
While some of these shows never make it to Broadway, or even to a fully-staged production, that is not CCTP’s objective. “The goal isn’t nor should it be to have a play come up to the Cape and go to Broadway,” says Brooks. “I don’t think that’s what we should be shooting for. Is the play that we’ve chosen developing along its right path? This play may be a great play and never have a production. But what’s important to me is that the writer continues to develop as a playwright, and that the play grows in an organic process for process’s sake.”
The last few years have been especially successful for CCTP. Some recent plays that have had notable success after development at CCTP, including Lucas Hnath’s Hillary and Clinton which starred Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow on Broadway, Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning (a Pulitzer Finalist) and Bess Wohl’s Off-Broadway play Continuity. Heidi Schreck – whose Broadway hit What the Constitution Means to Me was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize – completed her work soon after she was an artist in residence at CCTP.
Is there a magic formula for getting a show from Falmouth to Broadway? Brooks doesn’t think so. “You never know how it’s going to land with an audience, and you never know what’s going to resonate,” says Brooks. “It’s very mystical in a lot of ways.” Brooks does, however, have a specific way he likes to structure his season. “I choose a play, and then I choose its thematic opposite. I have a north pole and a south pole, and then I choose east and west. There’s a matrix of sorts: I choose a play by a known playwright, by an emerging playwright, and by an unknown playwright, etcetera…and plays that are ready to go to Broadway, and those that are unfinished. I also seek out diverse voices. I like to have a range that’s challenging, dynamic, exciting and hopefully also entertaining. ”
Without the opportunities Brooks has given to writers like Sharr White and the countless other playwrights who have come through CCTP, these productions may have never made it to New York. Important, inspiring and challenging voices may slip through the cracks. But because of Brooks’ advocacy, the public and the theater community have gotten a chance to hear these playwrights’ stories. His decision to support these artists has made American theatre seasons richer and more engaging than ever before. And as CCTP heads into its twenty-ninth season this summer, theatregoers in both Falmouth and New York can be grateful for having such a dedicated artistic director as the head of this important American theatre.
