WELLFLEET - Can a modest gem of a theater turn a dismal strip mall into a social and cultural center?
The new Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, out on Route 9 on the Cape, looks pretty dismal plopped down on an asphalt parking lot. Its next-door neighbor is a dreary strip of shops and a post office. The strip sits behind its own asphalt parking lot, which looks big enough to serve the Super Bowl.
And worse, from Route 9, the Cape's main drag, all you see of the Wellfleet theater - everyone calls it WHAT - is its backside, a cluster of gray, blocky, windowless walls surfaced with a durable but inexpensive product called hardy board.
But there's hope for WHAT. Jeff Zinn, the artistic director, and John Freeman of Platt Anderson Freeman, the architect, offer a novel but logical reason for turning their backs on the highway. This way, they say, the theater's front - the lobbies and the box office - can face west. So as evening theatergoers arrive, they'll see the facade bathed in the warm light of the setting sun.
OK, but why not get that same result more reliably with floodlighting?
Because, says Freeman, the Cape has a "dark skies" law, which forbids you from producing light that could escape upward and dim someone's view of the stars.
That's architecture. There are always hidden forces at work. You never know where ideas come from until you ask.
Once I finally got around to WHAT's front, I liked it. This entry facade looks rather like a house in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright, with that master's love of flat walls and roofs, of horizontality, of projecting cornices and interpenetrating volumes. It isn't, I was glad to see, yet another gray-shingle-and-white-trim Cape Cod cliche.
The facade also looks, at least to me, like a big television set of the 1950s. The double height, glass-fronted lobby, with its frame of dark red, is a metaphor for the TV screen. Or you can think of the frame as a proscenium. From outside, you can see people moving around in the lobby as if they were performing for you.
Both images are appropriate. WHAT is domestic in scale, like a house, and it is also, of course, a machine for performance, like a TV.
Inside, the place is a pleasure. The lobby, which doubles as an art gallery, has been detailed by architect Freeman to make you feel a little as if you were gathering in a backstage area. Most of the construction - the structural framing, the struts and ducts and other paraphernalia - are left exposed, as they would be backstage.
The auditorium itself - the Julie Harris Stage, to give it its proper name - is a traditional proscenium format, with audience seating for only 220. The seats are steeply raked, so that everyone feels close to the action. Freeman points out that an actor standing on the stage makes level eye contact with a viewer seated in the fourth row. The actor feels in touch with the audience. There's no ornament, no visual distraction. Colors are a simple, recessive dark blue. The focus is entirely on the stage. It's a superb venue for the kind of intimate theater that WHAT produces.
Jeff Zinn says WHAT was begun in 1985 by six local actors who wanted a chance to perform in more challenging plays than were being offered by other Cape summer theaters - "Mamet, Shepard, Pinter," he says. The original theater was in a former industrial building on the Wellfleet waterfront, hence the name. "There were 45 wood folding chairs," says Zinn. He arrived in 1987 and soon became artistic director, a post he's held ever since. The annual budget now is $1.2 million. Construction cost of the new building was a modest $4.2 million, including a bridge to WHAT's offices above the post office next door.
Because of local zoning rules, WHAT wasn't allowed to build a full-height fly loft for scenery. It's typical of the ingenuity of this building that the architect compensated by providing a fully trapped stage floor, with a story of underground space beneath it.
Although it isn't up during the winter months, there is, besides the theater, a summer tent for children's theater - WHAT for Kids - next to the main building. The main stage will be alive year round. A cinema series will kick off on January 17, with the documentary "What Would Jesus Buy?" Later there will be plays, readings, and a small film festival for Cape filmmakers.
As for the old WHAT, down on the harbor, Zinn says the group will hang on to it and perhaps convert it into a flexible black-box space for cabaret theater.
And the new WHAT? If it's going to be a long-term success, everything depends on what happens around it. The gray strip-mall site of today is the result of a development project that got half built and then failed, which is why land became available for WHAT.
Will WHAT have the energy and magnetism to transform this grim roadside site? Could it perhaps be the beginning of a cultural town square for the mid-Cape? Already, the post office is a magnet that brings visitors. One imagines a restaurant, perhaps with a tree-shaded outdoor terrace, for dining before the show. And a bar for drinking and discussing the performance after it. Art galleries? Musical venues? How about some trees? Some upstairs apartments?
All such possibilities depend not only on WHAT, but on the permission of local zoning and other authorities. It will be fun to see how the site plays out over time.
Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.
Correction: Because of a reporting error, an architecture review of the new Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater building in the Sunday Arts & Entertainment section gave an incorrect location. The building is on Route 6.
