E-Mail This Article to a Friend Break a leg The curtain rises on the Provincetown Theater BY TAMARA WIEDER

ASK PEOPLE WHO’VE never been to Provincetown what they associate with the Cape Cod town, and their responses likely won’t veer far from cliché: beaches. Gay people. Restaurants. Traffic. Shopping.

Those in the know know better. Provincetown is also an artists’ colony, long home to painters, writers, and other creative talents who chose the town for its mix of restorative quiet, buzzing energy, and seaside beauty. Provincetown also prides itself on ushering in the era of American drama when, in 1916 on Lewis Wharf, Bound East for Cardiff became the first Eugene O’Neill play ever produced. And yet, for all its storied artistic history, Provincetown has been without a dedicated venue for live theater since 1977, when a fire destroyed the Provincetown Playhouse on the Wharf.

All that will change this week, with the grand opening of the Provincetown Theater. After several years of planning, building, and fundraising, the facility, which will house both the Provincetown Theatre Company and the Provincetown Repertory Theatre, kicks off its inaugural season with The Direct Line Play, written by 30 playwrights including Terrence McNally, Wendy Wasserstein, John Guare, Christopher Durang, and Harvey Fierstein. Just before the curtain rises on a new era in Provincetown drama, the theater’s executive director, Daniel Kells, talked with the Phoenix.

Q: How did this new theater come to be?

A: There were two performing-arts organizations in Provincetown — the Provincetown Repertory Theatre and the Provincetown Theatre Company — who essentially decided to join forces to create a theater for both of them. They both were extremely nomadic up until that point, meaning they performed in church basements, function rooms of hotels, restaurant lounges, things of that sort. Collectively, neither company had the prowess to build a theater itself, so they said, let’s take three members from our board, three members from your board, and three members of the community, and give it a go, and try and raise the money to build a theater.

Q: Have local businesses and community members been supportive of the idea of building this theater?

A: Yes, without a doubt. They’ve been fantastic. There’s always been a twinge of disbelief that it would ever actually happen. I think that type of disbelief permeates life in small towns in general. But the moment they knew it was going to happen, it was like the community did a 180. Suddenly it went from "This is never going to happen" to "We cannot believe this is going to happen." We did an open house in February; after being here for a month and a half, and just hearing every person I met going, "That theater’s never going to open," I said, I need to get people ... into the raw building, just to see that it doesn’t look like a mechanic’s garage anymore. The middle of February, I got 500 people — in a community that supposedly only counts 3000 members, there were 500 people who came out. If that percentage of Bostonians came out for something ... it would be Boston Lyric Opera inflating their numbers for Carmen on the Common. Them’s fightin’ words!

Q: How much money did you have to raise to complete the project?

A: And have to raise, because we’re still at it. The total nut is about $3.1 million. That’s construction, property acquisition, design, and internal build-out: computers, lighting equipment, things like that.

We’re at about $2.8 million. So we have about $300,000 to go. There’s two schools of thought in the world of building. You can raise all your money and then put your shovel in the ground, or you can put your shovel in the ground and pray. We’re praying. We don’t have to pray as hard as we did about four months ago; I mean, we probably raised close to a quarter of a million dollars in the past three months. Close to $75,000 in the past three weeks. So things are chugging along. The best tool we have for raising money is this gorgeous building. If you’re on the edge about giving money to us, come and check this place out. People are anteing up as a result.

Q: For people in the Boston area who might say that they have plenty of theater much closer to home, how do you convince them that coming here is worth the trip?

A: I think a lot of it is experiential. Coming to Provincetown is more than just walking through the door, sitting down, watching a show, and leaving. It is this otherworldly enclave that’s only two hours from Boston. It’s the closest you’ll get to a Key West experience without having to travel very far. There’s misconceptions that Provincetown is overpriced; you know, you can package a vacation to suit your needs, ultimately, and you can pull off a day trip easily and not break the bank. The ferries are running. The drive’s not as treacherous as people make it out to be.

The theater is positioning itself as a component of this community, as the oldest — I’m probably going to mess this quote up — as the oldest continuous arts colony, or something like that. Obviously it’s been an arts colony since the late 1800s. There’s a history here, of supporting playwrights, of nurturing artists. The strength of a theater company comes from having a playground. If you think about who’s strongest in Boston, the Lyric Stage is strong, the Huntington is strong, the ART is strong. SpeakEasy is strong because they’ve always been guaranteed their space from the BCA. Boston Playwrights’ Theatre is a strong incubator for artists because they have their theaters right there. When you’re forced to be nomadic, the instability can undermine the work you’re doing.

Q: How will having a dedicated home for these theater companies affect the audiences’ experience?

A: Because I have no control over the quality of what goes on stage — I’m not the director; I have no say in what shows our resident companies pick; I can’t come in and give notes — what’s most important for me is to ensure that the experience that the audience member has in the theater is sterling. From my perspective, if I can let an audience member know that regardless of what they’re seeing on stage, they are sitting in quality seats, the air conditioning works, the concession bar is well priced, the box office is easy to deal with, they get their tickets smoothly, they find parking, the bathroom lines are manageable — if I can make the entire experience wonderful, even if they see a piece of dreck, hopefully they’ll be like, "Well, that one didn’t get me; I’ll be back next week."