Helltown Players Featured in Provincetown Arts Magazine!
Helltown Players is thrilled to be featured in 40th Anniversary Issue of Provincetown Arts magazine. Thanks Rob Phelps for such a terrific feature! Take a look at the story. (Reprinted with the permission of the author.)
Helltown Players: A Theatre Company Devoted to Cape Cod Thespians
by Rob Phelps
WITH A MASTER'S DEGREE in playwriting from Brown University under his belt and encouraging words from his thesis advisor, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel, Jim Dalglish thought "the world would open up and my plays would be produced as quickly as I could finish them.” Then postgraduate reality kicked in.
"In order to have your play produced, dozens of theater professionals have to think it's the most extraordinary play in the world and be willing to dedicate a portion of their lives to seeing it produced," he says. "When you think about how many playwrights there are in the world and how few theaters actually produce new work, that becomes even more daunting." Theaters always have their own agendas, creative visions, and budgets to consider.
It's much more reliable to put on another production of the tried and true. While some theater companies offer staged readings of new works, which can work wonders for plays in development, "so many new plays dead-end with a script-in-hand reading series, which are cheap to produce and only take two or three hours out of a theater's programming schedule," Dalglish says. "But for a play to be truly experienced, it needs to be produced, with actors, designers, and sets.*
And so, two years ago, Dalglish, along with eight other playwrights based in Provincetown and other towns on the Lower Cape, created Helltown Players (helltownplayers.org)—a new theater company solely devoted to producing the work of Cape Cod playwrights, actors, directors, designers, and technicians at Cape Cod performing venues.
Within two years, Helltown Players has produced fifteen new plays.
As the company's founding artistic director, Dalglish drew on his experience as marketing director for the Provincetown Theater, managing director of Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, and partner with Boston Public Works Theater Company, where he joined an intrepid group of playwrights who each produced one full-length play at the Boston Center for the Arts.
"My inspiration for Helltown was the Provincetown Players of a century ago," says Dalglish. "Like my Helltown colleagues— who I refer to as Hellions – that [earlier] band of talented artists, writers, actors, and directors didn't sit around and wait for theaters to produce their work. They took matters into their own hands and developed their own plays, forming the backbone of what became known as the American dramatic tradition." Playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Jig Cook, Mary Heaton Vorse, and John Reed performed their daring new plays in sail lofts, on docks, and in cramped living rooms of Provincetown. They breathed new life into theater. "We Hellions are just as scrappy as those visionary artists.*
The Hellions are constantly searching for and finding new venues, traditional theaters as well as museums and nightclubs. They're busy forming relationships with theaters across Cape Cod. With the streamlined, economical, and portable production model that Dalglish envisioned, their goal is to provide quality programing for venues when they're dark or when they're between shows. "Within a day or two, we can move in one of our productions or festivals and have it ready for showtime. We hope more venues on Cape Cod will see the value of what we do and will partner with us." They also hunt all over the Cape for rehearsal space in libraries, senior centers, workshops, and living rooms, "wherever we can find enough square feet," he says. Since many
Cape actors and directors are working professionals, schedules need to be accommodated, a challenge many professional or Equity productions don't face. "That means mornings, evenings, afternoons, weekends, whenever and wherever we can get the directors and actors in the same room." They rely heavily on Zoom meetings for character work and table readings.
The most challenging Helltown productions to organize so far have been their short play festivals, Little Devils in 2024 and More Little Devils in 2025. "Pulling off a collection of six shows with multiple directors, dozens ofactors, and individual production needs isa lot of work," says Dalglish. "We relied on shared Google docs, calendars, and spreadsheets to keep everyone in the loop." What's more, they moved the shows between multiple theaters, including the Provincetown Theater, the Academy of Performing Arts in Orleans, Cape Rep in Brewster, and Pilgrim House in Provincetown.
But despite all those moving parts in the Little Devils shows, the trickiest challenge Dalglish faced to date, he says, was in a one-woman show. The Playground, written and directed by Dalglish, starred Anna Botsford in the leading role but also included twelve other actors playing "on stage" with Botsford through video projections and recorded voices. "To save expenses," Dalglish says, "I turned my guest bedroom into a video and recording studio. We also were able to find places on Cape Cod we would film to represent locations found in New York City," where the play was set and where audiences were transported to audience and critical raves.
The Cape Cod Times called it "the most intense one hundred minutes of your life." Said Donna Wresinski, executive artistic director of Eventide Theatre Company in Dennis, "In the hands of the extremely talented Anna Botsford, I was captivated, engaged in every breath, and profoundly moved."
Because Helltown does not have its own rehearsal and performing space, the Hellions quite literally rely on the "kindness of strangers," says Dalglish. "I often joke that there are fourteen different Cape Cods. Each community exists in their own little ecosphere, isolated and happily so." That reflects the attitudes of many of the nearly twenty theaters that offer programming on Cape Cod, he adds. "We've had a very fruitful time over the past two years, introducing ourselves to these theaters and getting to know how we can help fill out their programming. We have been grateful for the generosity of the Provincetown Theater, Cape Rep, the Academy, Cotuit Center for the Arts, the Cape Cod Museum of Art, WOMR, and the Pilgrim House for partnering with us and helping us with our mission."
Helltown Players foots all production expenses; their theater partners provide the venues. Sharing income from ticket sales or through a rental fee, it's a win-win. "They have a play they can airdrop into a blank space in their calendars, and we have a venue to perform our work." Along with support from generous donors and sponsors, ticket sales cover the cost of production and provide added revenue that performance spaces wouldn't otherwise see on a dark night.
"We have found wonderful collaborators who value our mission – Janine Perry and her excellent crew at Cape Rep, Judy Hamer and Missy Potash at the Academy of Performing Arts, Jason Mellon at Cotuit Center for the Arts, Benton Jones at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, and Ken Horgan at Pilgrim House are just a few," Dalglish says.
Helltown Players also provides stipends for all playwrights, actors, designers, technicians, and directors associated with our productions. "Not big stipends but as much as we can afford," he notes. "We think it is important that theater artists are valued and compensated for their work. We hope that as we become more successful, these stipends will increase."
Dalglish looks back at the creative journey that led him to Helltown. "I have been a playwright since I was in high school," he recalls. "Through my experiences with the Provincetown Playwrights Lab – I was one of the first members when Margaret Van Sant founded the group twenty-five years ago – as well as my participation with Provincetown Dramatic Arts and the O'Neill Festival of New Works, I've had the good fortune to meet many wonderful playwrights who were penning plays that deserved production, plays that faced impossible odds of getting produced by established theaters on Cape Cod and elsewhere. So I figured I would take matters in my own hands and form a group of Cape Cod playwrights and theater enthusiasts who shared my mission of getting their work produced."
Helltown Players, says Dalglish, "welcomes other Provincetown artists to take matters into their own hands and get their work out there. It doesn't matter if you are a visual artist, musician, or performer. Don't wait for the galleries, theaters, or venues to come to you. Follow Helltown's lead and be creative and scrappy. Reach out to Helltown and see if we can help you succeed!"
ROB PHELPS is Senior Editor at Provincetown Arts, Editor in Chief of the LGBTQ+ publication Boston Spirit magazine, and arts writer for the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and Tufts University Art Galleries. Previously, he was arts editor at the Provincetown Banner. He and his husband, Jim Dalglish, split their time between Plymouth and Truro, Massachusetts.
