As first reported by Playbill.com, Adam Rapp, whose Red Light Winter is currently playing Off-Broadway, will direct a workshop of his latest play at the Cape Cod Theatre Project. Essential Self-Defense is the name of the piece. Dates at July 6-8.
In the play, "Yul Carrol makes his living by being a human punching bag for a women's self-defense class. He falls in love with the woman who injures him, and then things get strange."
Rapp's other works include Stone Cold Dead Serious, Nocturne and Blackbird.
The season will continue July 13-15 with Love Lasts on Myrtle Avenue, a new play by legendary journalist and columnist Jimmy Breslin, directed by Gordon Edelstein. The show is described as a love story based on true events. Breslin is known for his Runyonesque, man-of-the-street prose style, and his focus on the travails of criminals, mobsters and the common man. He has written several books.
Next up is Badcat, the latest by Leslie Ayvazian, a talent once best known for her acting, but now more frequently working as a playwright (Nine Armenians). The new work asks, "When you're unhappy with the role you are playing in your marriage, why not make a drastic change?" Actress Blair Brown, who directed Ayvazian's Lovely Day Off-Broadway, stages the work. Dates are July 20-22. Concluding the season will be a play directed by CCTP artistic director, Andrew Polk: Have You Seen Steve Steven? by Ann Marie Healy. In it, "Mary and Frank are having a dinner party with some neighbors they never met, reminiscing about some times they never had. Their two children are trying to find the exit to a door they never opened. It's a long, cold night in outer suburbia, if they could only remember the way home." Dates are July 27-29.
The 12-year-old CCTP has developed a reputation for nurturing plays that eventually find their way Off-Broadway. Just this past season alone, New York has seen Manuscript by Paul Grellong, Almost, Maine by John Cariani and BFE by Julia Cho, all developed at one point at the Falmouth company.
The summer theatre festival rehearses (in a brief process) and offers readings of new works each July. The company is stationed in Falmouth in the southwest corner of Cape Cod, and performs out of The Falmouth Academy, a private school. Though the company never stages full productions and makes no bones about its plays being in a state of development, the season has become quite popular with the local populace.
