The celebrated actress Gretchen Mol bought a house here in the Tristate region three years ago, shortly before the beginning of the pandemic, at a time when there was still theater/film/television work to be done in New York City.
Driving back and forth between City and Country, she recalls, she would pass the big red barn in Sharon, Conn., that is home to the Sharon Playhouse.
“I used to drive by it and think, ‘Someday …’,” she said.
It would be easy to think that Mol is kidding, but in fact she is not. A native of Connecticut, she had done community theater when she was growing up and understood both the importance and the fun of it.
But shortly after she arrived here, COVID-19 arrived as well, and often as she drove through Sharon she would see an empty parking lot at the theater.
More than just musicals
The pandemic did not completely shut down Sharon Playhouse, thanks to extraordinary efforts from its two leaders, Robert Levinstein and Alan M-L Wager, who left the theater at the beginning of this year.
The two indefatigable impresarios continued to organize outdoor events that audiences could watch from their cars and from lawn chairs in the parking lot.
And before they left, they made an important investment in continuing the playhouse’s legacy of education in theater arts. They hired Salisbury, Conn., native Michael Kevin Baldwin as the Sharon Playhouse director of education; he is now also the associate artistic director, working with Interim Artistic Director Justin Boccitto.
Pre-pandemic, Baldwin had been out in the wider world, teaching and performing. He is clearly delighted to be back in the Northwest Corner, working at Sharon Playhouse. As director of education he instituted a Performing Arts Residency at Indian Mountain School in Lakeville, Conn.— which is where he met Gretchen Mol.
In spite of her beauty and fame (many will know her as the tragic Gillian Darmody in the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire”), Mol is extremely humble and Just Folks. She connected nicely with Baldwin (as most people do) and even ended up taking theater and dance classes at the playhouse.
Meanwhile, in Brooklyn
Next to enter the scene is Andrus Nichols, who is a native of New York City but had lived here in the Tristate region for many years before moving back to the city and cofounding a theater company called Bedlam and then another company called The Coop. The Coop is where these disparate strands begin to come together.
A cofounder of the Coop with Nichols was playwright/actress Kate Hamill, who has gained some fame and a great deal of respect for her modern adaptations of classic novels for the stage. Just before the pandemic, she introduced a 21st-century version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.”
Nichols did a first reading of the play at the Red Bull Theater in 2020.
Of Hamill’s version of the story of Hester Prynne, Nichols said, “Kate loves complicated women, and all of her adaptations are inherently feminist. She digs into the struggle that women have historically navigated to protect their own identities and truths under the weight of immense societal pressure and expectation about the way they are to behave.
“ In the case of ‘Scarlet Letter,’ Kate was also clearly interested in American ‘original sin,’ in guilt, shame and the dangers of repression.”
The upside of community
In a sense, “The Scarlet Letter” is about what happens when there are too few people living in too close quarters in a small town as they begin imposing their wills on each other. And yet the genesis of a new production at Sharon Playhouse this month is very much about the beauty of what can happen in a small town when everyone works together.
Nichols has returned to the Northwest Corner and is now living in Sharon and teaching classes at Sharon Playhouse, in addition to continuing to do television and film work in New York.
Baldwin, who has known her for many years through the Tri-state region theater network, invited her to join the Sharon Playhouse Artistic Committee.
Conversations about what Sharon Playhouse could be, in addition to a beloved center for fun musical theater, led to the idea of doing some staged readings of interesting new work.
Nichols suggested “The Scarlet Letter.” Baldwin contacted Gretchen Mol, who is truly excited to be part of the production — even though she is now working in Los Angeles on a Showtime television version of the 1980s trendsetting film, “American Gigolo.”
She returns home on weekends, and will be Hester Prynne in the staged reading at The Bok at Sharon Playhouse on Saturday, April 16, 7 p.m.
Mol then invited her friend Tim Blake Nelson to join the fun. Nelson is a character actor who has enlivened many films by Joel and Ethan Coen, including the recent “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.”
Baldwin and Nichols recruited two other new Northwest Corner residents to fill out the cast: Sarah Steinmetz and Pun Bandhu.
It perhaps goes without saying that the 100 tickets available for the reading sold out almost immediately. But the success of this first foray into expanding what Sharon Playhouse can offer to the community will definitely inspire future experimental offerings.
Tickets are now available for the 2022 Sharon Playhouse season. Sign up for emails to learn about future special projects at www.sharonplayhouse.org.
