Jonathan Fielding is taking a well-deserved break after the recent conclusion of his theater company’s season. Harbor Stage Company near Cape Cod presents only in the summer — for good reason.
“Our building doesn’t have heat,” he said, “and summer is the tourists’ busy season. We’ll occasionally do a show in the winter and produce them in New York or Boston because a lot of our audience lives there.”
A big part of his fundraising effort for next season is promoting a film he made with Harbor Stage’s other founders. The dramedy Dindin, attempting a dissection of class prejudice in New England, will premiere on Tuesday, Oct. 8, on Apple TV, Amazon, and other streaming services.
Fielding’s story began here in Fort Worth, where he grew up on the East Side. While he acted in school plays, he didn’t become passionate about acting until his days at Eastern Hills High School. He graduated from TCU with a theater degree, then entered the graduate program at Rutgers University. The opportunities in the Northeast enticed him to stay there, especially since soon after his graduation he understudied in the Broadway production of Pygmalion, starring Claire Danes.
Harbor Stage came about in 2012, with the removal of the artistic director of a Cape Cod venue where Fielding was working with fellow actors Stacy Fischer, Robert Kropf, and Brenda Withers. The four of them founded the troupe and took over the space.
“As an actor, you don’t always have a choice about what you do,” Fielding said. “You take jobs that come your way. We’ve been able to cast ourselves in classical and new things.”
The actors do everything from deciding which plays to act out to cleaning the bathrooms, and Fielding loves being able to step out of the theater and be 100 yards from the Atlantic Ocean. Still, he comes back to Fort Worth when he has the chance to act for Amphibian Stage Productions (which he calls his home in Texas) and others, and he was here a few weeks recently when Amphibian held a party for the retirement of former artistic director Kathleen Culebro.
Fielding refers to Dindin as a “pandemic baby.” Withers had been writing the script as a stage play in 2019, but when the pandemic hit and closed down Harbor Stage along with most other theaters in America, the actors decided to hold a dramatic reading over Zoom for the company’s patrons.
“For a theater company, these technical things are not easy to do,” he said. “Somehow it turned out really well. People really responded to it.”
Director Brendan Hughes, who introduced the four actors to one another at Rutgers, agreed to shoot the film over two and a half weeks in Fischer and Kropf’s house in Stowe, Massachusetts, on a budget of less than $200,000.
The contemporary story is about a wealthy married couple (Fischer and Kropf) who hold a dinner party for a carpenter (Fielding) and an artist (Withers) with the intention of getting them together as a couple, which ends in disaster. Fielding describes his character, who can’t comprehend a woman owning a German Shepherd because he thinks women should only own cats, as a libertarian: “He isn’t afraid to call people out. He’s just so direct about what he’s thinking.”
The film begins in black-and-white, then switches to color after a dramatic revelation. The entire story takes place on the house’s ground floor, and Fielding disclosed that in most of the shots, Fischer and Kropf’s new dog was sitting under the table close to her owners.
“Being out in the air lets the audience off the hook,” Fielding said. Staying in the house’s interior “adds to the claustrophobia and makes the audience uneasy.”
Fielding, who is in his mid-40s, has had experience acting on TV shows such as Daredevil and Gotham, so he was no stranger to playing to cameras. The rest of the filmmaking process, however, has been educational for him and his co-stars (who also produced the film). While they largely left editing and post-production to Hughes, shopping the film has been a new experience, and Fielding praised the film’s distributor, Good Deed Entertainment, for taking on projects that don’t have established stars. Through that company, Dindin will be available to viewers throughout the English-speaking world.
Meanwhile, the Harbor Stage actors performed Dindin live as a play soon after they were finished shooting, and they’re now contemplating a number of ideas about a possible next movie project.
“Film producers could look more into plays for material,” Fielding said. “They can really push the envelope if they listen to more playwrights.”
