In his small corner office at the Peterborough Players building on Thursday, Charles Morey apologized that the barn theater and other rooms were too chilly to tour; only the office wing is heated in winter.

While the theater may be cold and dark now, Morey and his team are hard at work planning the 2024 season. When previous Artistic Director Tom Frey, who led the Players through the COVID years, including successfully managing an all-outdoor season in 2021, moved on to new opportunities, Morey was willing to step in as interim producing artistic director.

At a full house of theater fans at the Mariposa Museum Friday night,  he outlined his vision for summer 2024.

“We think  people are going to really delighted with the shows next summer,” he said. “It’s going to be a season with a lot of familiar names, big titles, shows that people know and love. We need to get people excited about theater again, to get them to appreciate that communal human experience, which you can’t get at home. That’s our goal for next summer: to bring it all back.”

Morey has been involved in the Players since 1969.

“They hired me as a glorified intern,” he recalls. “They paid me a pittance and gave me housing and I did a little but of everything – tech work, building sets, you name it.” 

Morey was hired back the next summer and received his Equity contract, which made him official as a professional actor. At the time, he was working on his MFA in acting at Columbia. He returned to act at the Players every summer until 1977, when Sally Stearns Brown, daughter of Players founder Edith Bond Stearns, offered him the position of artistic director. In 1989, Morey was offered a position at the 900-seat Pioneer Theater in Salt Lake City, Utah. He accepted the position in Utah on the condition that he could return to Peterborough every summer to continue to work with the Players.

“I overlapped with the two theaters for five years, but after five years of running both theaters, it was just too much,” Morey said.

Morey left the Players to concentrate on the Pioneer, where he stayed for 28 years.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Morey started writing a play, “Laughing Stock,” inspired by his first summers as young actor at the Players. In 1992,  he wrote and directed a stage adaptation of “Dracula.” Morey permitted the Players to perform his adaptation of “Dracula”  in the summer of 1992, but when he came  back to Peterborough to see the production, which had highly complex technical requirements, he was dismayed.

“It was a mess. It was like ‘Dracula’ meets ‘Noises Off!’” Morey said.

The happy result of the “Dracula” fiasco was the final draft of “Laughing Stock,”  which  Morey returned to the Players to direct in 2004. “Laughing Stock” became a smash success, with productions running around the world ever since. 

In 2012, Morey retired from the Pioneer Theater and returned to Peterborough, renewing his involvement with the Players. After COVID shut down the theater world in 2020, the Players, like all theaters, has been fighting its way back. 

“The entire theater world was devastated by COVID,” Morey said. “We’re still rebuilding from those years. We need to bring back all our old friends, and we need to make new friends. Theater is a community experience. It’s not the same on Zoom, and it’s not even the same when people are sitting spaced apart in a theater. When we had 100 people spaced apart, it didn’t work the same way. People don’t laugh as much. They don’t respond the same way. The actors build on the energy of the audience; they time everything by the audience reacts. People laugh more, they react more strongly if they’re sitting close together at a live show. Everyone in the theater knows this.”

The Peterborough Players will announce the new season after the new year. For information, visit peterboroughplayers.org.