As noted in several stories in this and other papers and an editorial in these pages, yet another chapter of the ever-compelling saga of Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater ( WHAT), is unfolding. Six of the theater’s best young actors and writers have severed their ties with the mother ship (and even riskier, with that catchy acronym).
Not only that, the new Harbor Stage Company, as the dissidents are calling themselves, has managed to usurp the lease of WHAT’s birthplace, the womblike, 90 seat space on the harbor where WHAT originated in the 1980s, and stake a claim to whatever magic is in that original building.
This loss of the harbor venue may, as WHAT’s new CEO, Bruce Bierhans, says, be a blessing in disguise, allowing them to concentrate on exploiting the many advantages of the state -of -the- art Julie Harris Stage. The theater already provides an amazing variety of high-level entertainment that the Harbor Stage would not have been equipped to handle, not only plays requiring complicated staging, but movies on a big screen, filmed plays and operas, and dance performance. It is promising more of the same.
Moreover, it makes such entertainment available year-round. The Harbor Stage is limited in its ability to serve the year-round community by lack of heat for much of the off-season.
What’s worrisome, paradoxically, is all the emphasis since the departure last September of Jeff Zinn, WHAT’s longtime artistic director, on serving the community. Uncharacteristically, the theater has begun to style itself as a s ort of community livingroom by holding election night parties, meetings, school programs, community meetings.
It sounds good–after all, what can be wrong w ith wanting to serve the community? But if anything the theater sounds a bit too eager to please.
Although it may seem ungrateful to say it, it’s not as if Wellfleet really needs more entertainment. At times it’s as if the theater sees Wellfleet as a nest of entertainment-starved baby birds and their mission to feed us. But with Preservation Hall and Payomet. (not to mention numerous other theaters within an easy drive) all clamoring for our attention, there’s something on almost every night competing for the local entertainment buck.
Theater is of course all about entertaining. But the sort of entertainment WHAT became famous for requires a certain attitude that is the opposite of trying to please.
What the famous theater needs, it seems to me, is less of the earnest entrepreneurial zeal, and more artistic ambition. One way of putting it: it needs to get cocky again, to return to the in- your- face original impulse. (I.e.:We’re doing this because it’s so much fun to tweak expectations of local community theater, especially the expectations of straighter, upscale suburban summer audiences. This is not your parents’ community theater. )
At this point it appears that the upstart group has the edge in such attitude and artistic ambition. Brenda Withers’ The Ding-Dongs last season was reminiscent of the ambitious fun of Gip Hoppe, the founding member of WHAT who may have done more than anyone else to take the theater beyond the local.
The Harbor Stage Company is defining itself as an actors’ theater, as in the WHAT name. The problem is, as Withers points out, that after Zinn’s departure “we stopped feeling like an artist was at the helm of the organization.”
WHAT’S decision a few days ago to hire Dan Lombardo, the theater’s dramaturg since 2005, to fill Zinn’s spot as artistic director seems the right move to get the creative horse back in front of the theater’s cart.
WHAT has a good model in its own “WHAT for Kids,” which takes place in a humble tent behind the Julie Stage. Written by Stephen Russell and otherwise pretty much his one man show (with a little help from his friends) its wonderfully realized ambition is to have fun while at the same time to transcend children’s theater as we know it.
It is both a critique of and a testimony to the original WHAT that it has spawned this creative, competitive offshoot. It remains to be seen how the child-parent struggle plays out.
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