Seattle philanthropist Grace Nordhoff has joined forces with Pulitzer-winning playwright Paula Vogel and Michael Maso, longtime managing director of Boston’s Huntington Theatre, to launch the artists retreat Bards on the Bay.
The theater center, which will be housed on a historic property in Wellfleet, Mass., overlooking Cape Cod Bay, will welcome its first cohort of artists in 2028.
The endeavor, which prizes the catalytic power of natural beauty and creative aspiration, hit a powerful chord for Nordhoff, who was a longtime board member at Hedgebrook, the Whidbey Island women writers retreat co-founded by her mother, Nancy Nordhoff.
A few years ago, Nordhoff said, she was connected to Vogel by a mutual friend after the playwright (also a Hedgebrook alumna) put out feelers on Facebook looking for potential backers for this new creative project.
“It’s an honor to be able to help create a space like that,” she said. “By me taking them seriously, they’ll take themselves seriously and do what they can do to bring their play into the world, to dig deep into their soul and their sense of purpose and see what comes out of it.”
Nordhoff has seen countless women come through Hedgebrook over the years, including the more than 10 years that the retreat held its Women Playwrights Festival, and be transformed by the creative alchemy of that space.
“I don’t think there’s anything more powerful a person like me could do than to say to an artist, ‘Yes, I believe in you and I want to support you,’” Nordhoff said. “When an artist is treated with respect and invited to create, it’s an affirmation both of the artist and of their very soul, their being, their sense of purpose and their identity.”
It’s all a leap of faith, Nordhoff said, and one that feels important at this juncture in American theater.
“We are in the most perilous time ever for writing and producing new plays,” Vogel said in a statement, citing plummeting theater budgets and the closure of such major theater development centers like Sundance Theatre Lab, The Lark and Space at Ryder Farm as catalysts for the endeavor. The renowned writer and theater educator, whose play “How I Learned to Drive” won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, said Bards on the Bay will bring writers and theatrical composers of different generations together to “mingle, share ideas and write the next plays to enrich our stages. Their voices must continue to be heard during this turbulent time.”
There’s plenty to do between now and 2028, as the team members bend to their various tasks of creative programming and rehabbing the historic property, locally known as The Colony at Wellfleet. Bards on the Bay’s new 4-acre home includes six Bauhaus-style cottages, designed by midcentury architecture giants Nathaniel Saltonstall and Oliver P. Morton, and originally opened in 1948 as Mayo Hill Colony Club. Over the years, the colony hosted actors Paul Newman and Faye Dunaway and writers Bernard Malamud and Lionel and Diana Trilling, among others.
Soon, the cottages will welcome a new generation of creatives. Participating theatrical composers, lyricists and playwrights will be selected by the Bards on the Bay advisory board, which includes theater leaders from around the country, including Seattle’s own Valerie Curtis-Newton. Beginning in 2028, the center will offer artists stays of one to three weeks during the summer months, and bookend that season with community programming in the spring and fall.
The residencies will offer artists unencumbered writing time, opportunities to hold readings of their work, communal gatherings with fellow writers and mentors, and no obligation to end with a finished product.
Given Nancy Nordhoff’s bone-deep commitment to writers and to the land at Hedgebrook, her mother’s influence on this new project is undeniable, Grace Nordhoff said. But she was still stunned when, earlier this year, Vogel and Maso told her what they’d like to call the physical space that will house the Bards on the Bay program: The Nancy Nordhoff Theatre Center.
“I think she’d think it’s magic,” Nordhoff said. “I think it would put a huge smile on her face.”
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