By Lynda Sturner**** La La is so excited about David Drake, the new Artistic Director of Provincetown Theater. He is transforming a struggling theatre and making it come alive again.
Director, actor, playwright, dancer, teacher, activist and visionary, Drake is a magical man; one who also knows that running a theatre takes more than abracadabra to make magic happen. Drake was ten years old when he made his theatrical debut. His mother took him to class with her when she was taking a musical theatre course for her Masters in Education.
“I don’t know if I wanted to go or she said, ‘you’re going,’ but she recognized it was the right thing. I ended up in their class project; a production of Most Happy Fella,” says Drake. “My mother was getting her Masters Degree from Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland, an all-black college. She was white, so she got in on a minority scholarship. We did the class production; my mother and me were the albino people of Napa Valley. The rest of the cast was all black. So, my introduction to theatre was a non-traditional look at things in a different way.” He’s been doing just that for 30 years.
Now, he is finishing his first year as Artistic Director of Provincetown Theater. Drake has a passion for community theatre. “I want to do big shows. It feels like a community event doing a big show. Let’s all get together and put on a play.”
He came to Ptown in 2008, to direct Our Town, a play with 28 characters and wants to continue doing big ones with Ptown people.
“I asked the late Bob Seaver to be in it. I knew he had a long relationship with the theatre and devoted countless hours to keeping theatre alive in Ptown,” he said. “He’s a visible member of the community, so when audiences came to see the play, they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s Bob Seaver. He’s that guy who lives on Commercial Street.’ That’s important to me. You see this reflection of your neighbors, your friends or that guy who works at the Stop & Shop. It speaks to the original Provincetown Players who were amateurs. It’s in their manifesto. We are not professionals. We are amateurs and will remain that way. They were the new American voice in theatre, not polished, unvarnished and raw. They were pouring their own stuff out there rather than imitating anyone else.”
Drake kept in touch with his actors from Our Town and at the same time, cast new ones, creating a troupe of players who love working for him. “Anne Stott, Scott Cunningham and Myra Slotnick are like family to me. And of course, I want to work with them. I want to see them expand and grow and I want to share that experience with them,” says Drake. “Both of my parents were teachers. It was all about service to a larger story,” Drake says. “I learned a lot about community service from them. You went where your passion was rather than staying in your own hometown. That makes me comfortable living out here again.”
Drake brings a lifetime of experience and success to Provincetown Theater. He came to New York City when he was 20 years old, just as the AIDS epidemic was beginning its devastating rampage. He landed his first acting job in 4 days, Street Theatre, a comedy about the Stonewall Uprising by Doric Wilson, playing at the Actor’s Playhouse in the West Village.
“I discovered that my birthday and the Stonewall riots are on the same day,” Drake says. “It connected to something very permanent in my psyche. It’s my birthday and the birthday of the modern gay rights movement. That play changed my life. I started claiming a gay identity.”
Street Theatre was just the beginning for him. He went on to many more acting roles including, Long Time Companion, Philadelphia, “The Good Wife,” “Law and Order,” Boys In the Band, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, “New York Undercover”and After Louie.
He wrote The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, which became the longest-running, Off –Broadway solo show in New York. Drake won an Obie, two DramaLogue Awards and garnered a Lambda Literary Award nomination. He also wrote the screenplay and starred in the movie.
Drake has directed at Theater for the New City, Joe’s Pub and The Sundance Theatre Lab. His credits include, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, Taylor Mac’s five-act musical; Lily’s Revenge at the Sundance Theatre Lab; 2 Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter’s Night at the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival; J. Stephen Brantley’s The Jamb; Myra Slotnick’s The Weight of Water; The Divine Sister, Slap and Tickle and a gender-bending production of The Importance of Being Earnest at Provincetown Theater. This season, Drake presented a large cast production of You Can’t Take It with You, 4*Solo Show Festival with a different star every week, Love! Valor! Compassion! and The Laramie Project.
However, this wonderfully successful season with packed houses and great reviews is not over yet. Drake is directing Always…. Patsy Cline, which runs from November 29 – December 16 and features Ptown Theater regulars Laura Cappello and Julia Salinger.
“I didn’t come from a lifetime of directing a lot of classics. I come from 30 years of directing new plays, 90 per cent of the time. The winter months will be the incubation months,” says Drake.
He is building a program for the development of new plays for January, February and March. Former Executive Director of the Dramatist Guild, Gary Garrison, is helping him curate and shape this program. Along with a playwright in residence program, there will be readings of new plays every other Tuesday. They’ll use local actors and a mix of local playwrights and outside writers. The first few years, the focus will be on lesbian writers. “The underserved writers,” he says.
“All theatre is local,” says Drake. “I want to create an environment here that invites first class artists or emerging artists or artists that people forgot about and send them back in the world refurbished. I got refurbished here and I hope I can do that for this theatre. It deserves to be a first-class theatre. It’s a community theatre, but this is a very special community.”
