Photo: Joe Navas

Cody Sullivan workshops Autocrat

by Rebecca M. Alvin

For Cody Sullivan, a sense of place is important. In particular, his native New England.

He situates his new play, Autocrat in Lincoln, Rhode Island, not far from where Sullivan grew up in Wrentham, Massachusetts. The title will hit differently, depending on whether or not you are from the area. For most, the word autocrat refers to a dictator or tyrant. But regionally, the word brings to mind the delicious coffee-flavored syrup called Autocrat used to make Rhode Island’s official state drink: coffee milk.

“I grew up drinking the Autocrat coffee syrup. I love it so much,” confesses Sullivan. “The bottle itself is so beautiful and so of a time. But yeah, that part of the story kind of happened in a fun, by-accident way that just came out of nowhere. But obviously it’s referencing our president. That double meaning is fun for me.”

The play explores moral and legal questions around a protest at the Autocrat company headquarters where a group of people have come to protest its purchase by Amazon.com. (In reality, Autocrat is owned by a British tea company, but still produced locally in Lincoln, Rhode Island). Two cops, who happen to be twins, arrest several protestors in the setup to the story. The officers have also brought their nephews to work as it is “Bring Your Kids to Work Day,” leading to intergenerational discussions, as well.

Sullivan says in developing the child characters for it, he had them drinking a lot of coffee milk, a nod to Rhode Island culture, but then he thought about actually centering the Autocrat company as part of his commitment to regionalism in his work. “I want everything I do to be about New England. That’s really important to me, to be regionalist,” he says, adding that part of the reason AI and globalization are frightening to him is because of the ways in which they can potentially overwhelm unique local cultures. 

“Like my mom has a Boston accent. I don’t because of television…Everyone in my high school, we all speak [without an accent], but our parents all speak very differently. And it’s like, I wish I spoke like my mom. I wish I had her accent, you know? And it’s important. Like, it’s sad and scary to me to see just specific cultural things be erased. So, it’s very important for me as an artist that I’m focusing on where I’m from and where I live and the very specific stories of that region.”

Aside from references to a local beverage, Sullivan says he also sees New England in the characters he’s created. And while he says he’s coming to appreciate New England men more and more as he ages, it is the New England woman that has always stood out for him.

“As a gay dude growing up when I did, boys would not talk to me. But every girl talked to me. So I’ve always kind of had this love for, a special place for women. And especially like a New England girl, especially like a Massachusetts woman. I love that cold, smart, tough, no B.S. I love it. And [they are] just like sharp.” he says. “I always love playing that type of woman. And there’s one of these women in the play, the history teacher… I find the directness super refreshing and it’s very New England. And I also do love a type of person where they won’t smile at you for two years, but then they see you did something good and then they finally let you in. I kind of love that gatekeeping, that very New England specific gatekeeping.”

Best known locally for his Cody Plays series at the Gifford House, Sullivan has been a playwright for a decade now and started out in Chicago, training in improvisation at iO Theater. He was the Playwright-in Residence at the Provincetown Theater, where Autocrat will open for a three-week run on Tuesdays this June. But right now, he is workshopping the play at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT), Friday and Saturday, April 17 –18. And even though he does perform in all of the roles in it, he adamantly says is not a “solo show.”

“I’m hilariously trying to avoid calling it a solo show because I feel like that puts such a bad taste in people’s mouths. So, like, they have an idea of what a solo show is, and this is not what I think they think they’re gonna get. This is not a monologue. This is not me addressing you as myself. This is not like sketches. This is a play, just performed by one person. So, I’m trying to keep that the focus. And I know people are going to say it’s a solo show, because I get that they want to talk about that, and I’ll just do my best to just not talk about it,” he explains with a laugh.

Sullivan’s work is always comedic, even when tackling darker subject matter, such as his 2025 play A Keeper, which he also performed at WHAT. Asked if he has any desire to write dramatic plays, he says, “No. I have no interest…[A Keeper] was set in an archive at a funeral. So it was a drama. You know, we’re trying to figure out, like, who is this gay dude that died? And like, why do we have his papers? And was he a pornographer? Was he taking advantage of models? Like, so these are, dark, more serious questions, but it’s all comedy. Shakespeare is a big inspiration—of course—but Shakespeare is so funny. There’s humor in everything. So, it’s not this black and white thing. But I just always will probably lean towards wanting to have people be laughing.”

Serious issues of right and wrong come up in Autocrat, but never in a heavy-handed way, he says. He likens it to putting a medication in a chunk of peanut butter to give to your dog so that only the peanut butter is really tasted, while the medication does sneak its way in and do what’s intended.

Sullivan has already done a few smaller readings of Autocrat, with mostly friends in the audience, and now he’s ready to open it up to anyone who wants to come. He explains he’ll use the Friday performance to directly work with audience feedback, starting and stopping as needed for questions that come up while performing. And then Saturday, it will all come together for an unbroken performance, utilizing what he’s gleaned from audiences the first night, with time for feedback at the very end of the play. Although Friday’s performance will be an actual show, he assures, “you’ll see me thinking during it.” It’s an exciting opportunity to help an artist fine-tune his creative work. 

These two workshop performances are important tools of creation for Sullivan, as he says the experiences of his audiences are a priority for him. Especially with comedy, the way to know you’re getting through to an audience is if you hear them responding to it with laughter.

“If you’re not enjoying being there, there’s no point. That’s very important to me, you know, because we’ve all sat through the four-hour play that has a beautiful message, but no one can understand it because no one wants to be there. Because they’re so bored, they’re thinking about what they want to eat. So it’s very important for me that they’re engaged and that they’re invested in it,” he says.

Autocratwill be performed in workshop mode Friday and Saturday, April 17 and 18, 7 p.m., at WHAT, 2357 Rte. 6, Wellfleet. Tickets are free with a suggested donation of $10. It opens as a finished play at the Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford St. on Tuesday, June 2 and plays every Tuesday in June at 7 p.m. Tickets are $37.80. For tickets and information about any of these performances and also Cody Sullivan’s Cody Plays at The Gifford House this season, visit codyplays.com.