WEST CHESTERFIELD, N.H.-This weekend's opening of 2025's Ten Minute Play Festival (TMPF) at Actors Theatre Playhouse (ATP) in West Chesterfield, New Hampshire, marks the start of the theater company's 50th season.
"Sort of 50 years," Artistic Director Sam Pilo explains. It was a peripatetic journey with a couple of fallow years.
The season also marks a transition from Pilo's singular artistic direction.
"In the last two or three years, we've gotten a new board," chaired by Bob Kramsky, Pilo says. Thankfully, he adds, "all the stuff I was doing has been taken off my plate by the new board and by volunteers."
"After 50 years, he's weaning himself off jobs he shouldn't have been doing," says Betty Frye, Pilo's wife and noted ATP designer. "He wore like 15 hats around here."
Moving forward, Pilo explains, "I'll be the chairman of the Artistic Direction Committee for this year, then a director on the committee. The idea is that the body, and not an individual, [will be] the artistic director. Lenin would be proud of me."
How the newly structured ATP will function, Pilo says, "is in progress, but basically there are 18 directors on the committee. Proposals are made and reviewed by a subcommittee, who pass their recommendations on to the whole committee" for review.
"Everyone is invited to have a say, but without doing the homework, one has no vote," he continues. From there, a Steering Committee will integrate the ideas into a cohesive season, with opportunities available for those interested in directing or producing.
Pilo will happily remain available to mentor others through the production process.
"As one person who's directed with us for years said, 'You have to mentor it for a while, because otherwise it'll just go crazy.' And I thought about it and said, 'Yeah, you're right.' So I'll just put my two cents in as it goes along."
Steeped in the theater
Pilo was born in Bensonhurst, in Brooklyn, New York, but his family soon moved to West Hempstead on Long Island. He'd been active in theater in New York City in his 20s.
He did undergraduate work in dramatic literature, performance, and production at Hofstra University on Long Island, then moved on to Columbia University for production and directing where he connected with The Public Theater of Manhattan, under the direction of Joseph Papp.
"Joe Papp was teaching there, and we wound up at the Public as 'Joe's kids.' The deal was we could go anywhere. [...] We were apprenticing in all the different departments. Plus, we were reading scripts for the Public," Pilo says. "That went on for about three years. That was a tremendous education."
Pilo then taught writing in New York at an alternative public high school before he and Frye, whom he'd met in Switzerland in 1972, moved to Brattleboro after having spent some on-and-off time here.
"We lived for a while in Brooklyn," he recalls, "and then in '74 or '75 we just said, "let's get out of here." So we moved out and came up here."
His move to Brattleboro, though, was fed by no intention to do theater. He'd seen New York theater: "I've done it. I know what it means; I know what the career is."
But when he saw that the Brattleboro Center for Performing Arts (BCPA) - housed briefly in the former First United Methodist Church on Elliot Street, most recently the site of Hotel Pharmacy - had folded, he took over the building and the organization.
"I did a film series and from that grew an acting company, and suddenly we were doing [productions]," he says, recalling that "tickets were $3."
"One thing led to another, and it sort of took off," Pilo recalls.
Thanks to a few years of grants from the federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, they had a several-person staff. And they fleetingly thought about trying to turn a profit with performances.
"But we spent more time talking about who gets how many points for doing what," Pilo recalls, and after the first show, "I said, no, it's never going to be about money. We're going to do this [...] because we want to do it.
"So it's always been volunteer," including Pilo's role as artistic director, he says. "Nobody gets a salary."
The burden of staging shows that could cover the overhead of the former church led Pilo and the BCPA to part ways amicably in 1979, according to news accounts of the era.
Forming the Actors Theatre of Brattleboro, Pilo, Frye, and company found a home at the Latchis Ballroom, which was then a little square studio.
"We did that for many years. And then we went over to the Hooker-Dunham, [where] we showed movies for a couple of years," Pilo said. "We did a lot of work on our own, but no public performances."
In 1987, the organization went to West Chesterfield, taking over the 1886 Citizens' Hall on "a no-rent lease" basis, a long-term arrangement with the Ladies Benevolent Society of West Chesterfield. For ongoing use of the repurposed clapboard building housing a green room area for actors, an office, a parlor-type lobby downstairs, and a 75-seat, three-quarter-thrust stage theater upstairs, the lease stipulates that ATP "just maintain it."
ATP has been, for Pilo, "a hobby."
"Seriously, I mean, if we put anybody on salary, the whole thing would have fallen apart," he says.
To craft a living, he's taught bookkeeping, worked as a substitute teacher, and served three years each as faculty at the Stoneleigh-Burnham School in Greenfield, Massachusetts, the Putney School, and Keene State College.
Embracing the quirks
ATP has produced hundreds of productions involving hundreds of theater people over the years, as it has featured some of the region's best-loved actors and most highly-regarded designers, directors, and technical people.
As seasons have evolved, ATP has presented comedies, tragedies, staged readings, and revue-style productions, in addition to the Ten-Minute Plays, a season opener since 2010.
And at every stage of the selection process, a balance is considered.
"If you care about it," Pilo tells prospective directors, "our audience will probably care about it."
Given that the TMPF brings in 80%, on average, of the season's budget, he tells them that "everything else is gravy" and says they can "do risky [or] not risky" while always understanding the audience is essential.
Pilo has come to know the ATP audience well as it's grown over the years: "People who go to the library. People who read. People who are curious. We have a niche audience. And of a certain age. We don't get many young people coming in" as audience, he says.
To perform, though, "they'll come to the 10-minute play auditions. We'll get some. But we don't make a big reach out, which is a problem."
As an aside, he adds that a lack of understanding of theater's roots and history hampers involvement of younger people, and it "stems from a theory" that he's "been banging away at for several years."
"It's that this thing, the texting thing, the phone thing, has killed curiosity," Pilo says. "Overall, and about everything."
'Functional prop storage'
ATP's setting might be described as quirky and charming. In contrast to its austere black-walled playing space, a downstairs parlor packed with history has its own appeal.
"People come early - they want to be there before the show" to sit comfortably amid the ephemera, the historic decor, to chat with friends and explore.
"Part of the parlor is stuff from my house when I grew up," Pilo explains. "And the rest of it is just stuff that has been donated to us. It's like functional prop storage.
"But then Betty does the design of it," he says.
Frye has been involved all along, primarily in design, her talents manifest in the downstairs of the Playhouse.
Frye will carry on in a designer role. Having thought of being a therapist at one point, she ended up graduating from Smith College in anthropology and sociology.
"[But] I always loved design," she says. "I'd wanted to be an interior decorator since fourth grade. So it's been a great combination for the two of us because my specialty is to take anything and turn it into something."
Brilliance lost
Pilo brings forth names of many, like Jim Bombacino, who've been instrumental in the growth of ATP over the years.
He brings up Greg Lesch, who died in February.
"We still can't put it into perspective," Pilo says of the loss of Lesch, which was felt community-wide.
"We'd pitch ideas and find scripts together," he says, noting that Lesch's "level of commitment was insane" - like when "we put that place together in the summer of '87, just the two of us."
Pilo recalls that Lesch secured a hay wagon from a friend.
"And we literally carted all the seats and all the lights and all the equipment and all the cable and all the pipe and all the boards and all the electrical. And we spent the whole summer putting that theater together," Pilo recalls.
"We literally put the seats together," he adds, noting that "the platforms were insanely heavy."
"Greg and I spent the whole summer doing this thing, not knowing where it was going to go, but it went," Pilo says.
"The first year we had no running water," he recalls. As the season went into November, "people were leaving between the acts, and Pilo recalls thinking, 'Oh, Christ, they're all leaving."
But "no, they went to get blankets," he says. "And they came back."
Reflecting on his favorite shows over the years, the first one Pilo mentions is Twelve Angry Men (2007). Praising the whole cast, he singles out Lesch as the lead: "Greg was brilliant - absolutely brilliant."
'That's the point of it'
As Pilo phases out of leadership, he says, "It's like I sold the business, and now I'm training people how to run it."
While acknowledging that his successors will "do whatever they want," Frye adds that Pilo will carry on "teaching other people to be better directors, producers - helping them find scripts and all that."
Pilo says he's also "been playing pickleball a lot," and he's taken up the ukulele. He's thinking about vacating the area in wintertime, and he's thinking about getting another dog. He and Frye lost one last year.
He's having fun.
And, in the end, he says, "If it ain't fun, it ain't worth doing. So that's the point of it. This should always be fun."
ATP opens this weekend with the Ten-Minute Play Festival at the Playhouse on the corner of Brook and Main streets in West Chesterfield, New Hampshire. For more information on ATP's history and details about its full 2025 season - and to purchase tickets - visit atplayhouse.org.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.