Actors Run the Show at Harbor Stage Company in Wellfleet

WELLFLEET – While the theater doors do not open until late June, the magic starts in January at the Harbor Stage Company.

That’s when the four multi-talented people—two married couples—who run the nonprofit theater start discussing what plays they want to perform for the upcoming summer season.

All four are actors. One is also a playwright. One has written adaptations of classic plays. Three of them are also directors.

The Harbor Stage Company performs in a theater just steps from Mayo Beach in Wellfleet.
CAPE COD WAVE PHOTO

The theater itself, located in a non-descript box of a building set just steps from Mayo Beach in Wellfleet, is known for hosting some of Cape Cod’s most compelling productions in the summer months, staging comedies and dramas, world premieres and classics performed by professional actors.

But what makes this little theater the talk of the town and what happens on stage and back stage and in the box office is mostly due to four people, Brenda Withers, 38, a playwright and actress; her husband Jonathan Fielding, 39, an actor and director; Stacy Fischer, 40, an actress; and her husband Robert Kropf, 48, an actor and writer, who serves as Artistic Director of the Harbor Stage Company.

Original co-founders of the Harbor Stage Company in 2012 included a third couple, Amanda Collins and Lewis Wheeler, who both left the troupe in 2014.

A Shared Aesthetic

The four who stayed, Withers, Fielding, Fischer and Kropf, ended up running the theater after starring in shows in the harbor-front building for several summers.

“We had been working together for years but there were a few of us that discovered we were likeminded in sensibility about theater and what we wanted to do,” Kropf said.

But it wasn’t only a likemindedness that drew the group together.

“There was a desire to start something that would shake things up a little,” he said.