Artist Perspective for the 2026 Toronto Sketchfest: Cody Sullivan, Town Meeting
It was November 2019, I had just moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts from Chicago, Illinois. I was sitting up in the balcony of our gorgeous old town hall, watching my first ever town meeting. I went because all the townies told me to go. “It’s the best show in town,” they said.
So I went, watching pleasantly as the town moderator introduced the issue at hand: Should the VFW building be made into a firehouse or affordable housing? She opened the floor up to the community to make comments. A woman ran to the mic holding a clipboard and shouted, “I AM HERE TO TALK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE!”
That was all I needed to fall in love. I spent the next three hours taking copious notes. What made me laugh the most was that almost no one spoke about the fire department’s proposal; instead, they gave impassioned speeches on every other issue in town, from ebikes to childcare.
I was spellbound. I’ve always loved small town insanity. But this sort of inability to get anything done is enjoyable only when it doesn’t affect you. I had no stake in the game, I hadn’t yet become invested in my life there, so it was pure comedy.
I moved from Chicago because I was an alcoholic mess who needed to stop drinking. I wasn’t living on the street … but I was puking on it. A lot. I felt I couldn’t be in the city any more. I needed a quiet place in nature to heal, and I found it in Provincetown.
For those of you unfamiliar, here is a condensed description of my little village: Ptown sits at the very tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The town started as a hunting ground for the native Nausets and Wampanoag, then it was a port for whaling, then an artist colony, and then a gay tourist destination. It is a town of extremes: hard to get to, and expensive to stay in. You have to really want to be in Ptown, to be in Ptown.
We have around 3500 permanent residents. In the summer, we receive about 60,000 visitors weekly. The summer visitors come from fancy cities around the world, but the year-rounders are the people that make this small town what it is. They are the people in my play.
My play is a microscopic view of government in the United States. I’m using my show about my little town as a way to show the horrific mess that is the federal government, in a digestible way —and as a way for myself as an artist to process my anxieties around the loss of US democracy. Many people say the Republicans in my country were so successful with the rise of far right extremism this past decade, in part because they started from the ground up. They worked their way up from the most extreme local level of government in small towns and small cities. In other words, they really connected with people on a micro level and grew to a much larger scale.
The ending of United States democracy and the end of our ecological system as we know it are topics too vast for me to tackle as a performer. Likewise, altering my whole life from one of alcohol dependency to complete sobriety was too vast for me to handle as a person. There are too many tragedies and injustices all at once—and there were too many behaviors of my own that I wanted to address all at once. What began to work for me was choosing to address the obstacles that came up in a given day, on that day only. After following this process, there are still behaviors connected to my addiction that cause me pain, and I’ve been sober six years. But the pain they cause me is much less, and I’ve let go of others completely.
That took six years of hard, slow work. In a similar vein, I do not think my play will affect the course of global politics. I wrote it because it was my way, each of the days I worked on it, to contribute: to do my small bit.
I wrote it because I want to survive. I can create a piece of work that condenses my fears and anxieties and pokes fun at my situation. It is quite practical in that way.
I also wrote it to give people an escape from the madness: to give them a tiny bit of hope. Live theater and comedy excites and invigorates and creates a mini-community in the theater on a given night. And live performance creates connections—which is the very thing dictators fear.
My play is a small way to show you a small town under the burden of the world, just like every other small town. With people doing their best and failing, just like all people everywhere.
I’m performing this play to make people laugh, together.
I’m performing this play to relieve anxiety, together.
I’m performing this play to try to find a really cute and kind Canadian man who is looking for a husband.
I am also performing this play, because … I AM HERE TO TALK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE!
That’s the best I can do today – and I hope you’ll come see me do it live.
© Cody Sullivan, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
