The fourth character is you. Hours before the first preview, the married actors talked about the night their kids finally saw them act, why comedy is the hardest genre they do, and a summer in Manchester that has them asking why anyone would ever leave.
The biggest night of Katie Lowes and Adam Shapiro's summer had already happened by the time we spoke on Friday afternoon, and it had an audience of roughly twenty.
Thursday was the final dress rehearsal for Advice, the New England premiere now running at the Dorset Playhouse. In the house were the couple's two children, Albee, eight, and Vera, five, watching their parents act for the first time in their lives.
“They have never seen their mommy and daddy act before, because all of our television shows are a bit too inappropriate for kids,” Lowes says. “Having your kids in the audience was so incredible that I feel like I could do anything now. I feel unstoppable.”
“It kind of felt like last night was bigger than opening night,” Shapiro says.
The two of them have spent their children's entire lives as actors, but always somewhere else. “They've watched us studying lines and having to go here and there, and mommy's working in Charlotte, daddy's working in Chicago,” Lowes says. “But they've never actually seen what we do.”
It required a briefing. “We had to warn them before the show,” she says. “Okay, these are the curse words we say. Mommy's going to maybe cry. Mommy's going to maybe yell at somebody.”
“Mommy's not married to Daddy,” Shapiro adds.
“Mommy's married to another actor named Nayib Felix, who just graduated from Juilliard, and that's okay,” Lowes jokes.
With only twenty people in the room, Shapiro could pick his son out of the laughter. “I could hear every single one of Albee's laughs,” he says. “It was awesome.” Their daughter came away with different priorities. “Our five-year-old just wanted a bunch of the stuffed animal props to take home forever,” Lowes says.
With the opening-night premiere set for tonight (Sat. 8/1), exactly one thing is missing: the thing a comedy cannot rehearse.
“We had a designer run on Sunday in a little rehearsal room, and then last night, maybe twenty people, our kids, some friends and family,” Lowes says. “But we are still missing this fourth character in the play. That is you all.”
“Everybody get ready to make their Dorset Theatre Festival debut,” Shapiro says. “We need you.”
It is a real invitation, not a bit. Advice runs 90 minutes with no intermission and three people at one dinner party, and the timing of it gets built in public over the course of a run. Tickets are on sale now through August 15. Lowes, is blunt about the challenges.
“I one hundred percent think comedy is the hardest of all the genres,” she says. “It requires the most twisting and turning, and it requires so much of what I studied and trained for at school. And at the same time, you have to make it look like it's completely easy and you've never thought about it at all.”
Shapiro's problem is the opposite one. “A second doesn't go by in my life where I'm not trying to think of what the funniest possible thing I could do next,” he says. Which is why a script this sharp comes as a relief rather than a constraint. “I don't have to work that hard. I can just do what's written.” He has been here before: “I used to be on a show that Mindy Kaling wrote, and people would ask, do you improvise a lot? No. It's Mindy Kaling. What she wrote down is hilarious.”
Advice is by Brent Askari, and it arrives in Dorset off a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere that took it through Florida Studio Theatre, B Street Theatre and Florida Repertory Theatre. Askari has spent part of this rehearsal process sitting in the room, which is the distinction between a summer stock booking and what Dorset actually does. The festival has spent five decades developing new American plays in a converted barn turned theater, including one that went from a reading here to the Pulitzer Prize.
For Lowes, that comes with a specific kind of pressure. “Brent is a really, really smart playwright, and this is a very short, truncated rehearsal time, and I have a lot of words to say,” she says. “I want to get his words right because they're so good. Every single one he's chosen so perfectly. So there's that pressure, because I believe in him and his art.”
And then the pressure lets go, because he is in the room. “In rehearsal, he said, this line you keep messing up, I like the way you're saying it better than how I wrote it. Let's just do it how you're saying it,” Lowes says. “He's so open to this whole experience. I think the festival calls in artists who are just very open to this sort of vibe.”
Shapiro uses the access differently. “I'm so specific with jokes and how to play them, and where the wordplay is, and what the subtext is,” he says. “He's gotten a chance to see this play get done a couple of times and in readings, so he's bringing all that experience to the room. In a process this fast, it's nice to cut right to the chase and say, what worked here?”
Askari also gave them the sentence that functions as the whole argument for the evening. As Shapiro relays it: “There is every type of play imaginable that has been written and performed, and sometimes we just need to sit in a theater and laugh together.”
The easy version of this story is the married couple playing a married couple. Director Adrienne Campbell-Holt, who has now directed seven productions at Dorset and directed Lowes and Shapiro about nine years ago at their own company in Los Angeles, refused to write it.
“She sent us this play and said, I've been thinking about you guys for this,” Shapiro says. “Katie and I read it and we were like, yeah, we could play the husband and wife. And she was like, no, no, no. Not the husband and wife. You play Gary. She plays Joy. And I was like, oh, that's hilarious.”
So Lowes plays Joy, a high-priced lawyer married to Ron, played by Nayib Felix in his Dorset debut. Shapiro plays Gary, the college friend who turns up at their anniversary dinner freshly divorced, chronically chaotic and newly self-appointed as a life coach, carrying a self-help book he wrote called How To Maximize The Most Successful You. His own life is a wreck. The wine flows, the team-building exercises begin, and the evening comes apart.
“Directors and casting directors think of us better than we would cast ourselves,” Shapiro says.
Lowes has been coming to Manchester since her parents moved there fifteen years ago, which means Dorset has been in her peripheral vision for much of her career. She knew the Dorset Players. She knew the festival. She had been reading Theresa Rebeck, the festival's resident playwright, since college.
“I studied her plays in college and in scene study class,” Lowes says. “And one time we were visiting my parents and we were at the Dorset Farmers Market, and I saw Theresa Rebeck. I marched right up to her and said, oh my god, you're the famous playwright, I can't believe it. And she said, I live in Dorset. I work at the theater festival.”
“I always had it in my mind,” she says. “When Adrienne mentioned she directs at Dorset, I said, if a play could wind up there, I'd love to spend the summer and have our kids have the extra special time with my parents.”
And that is more or less what happened. The kids have cycled through Long Trail School's camp, the Manchester Rec Center, and Southern Vermont Arts Center, and on the morning we spoke they were on a bus to a nearby planetarium. Two children raised on Los Angeles blacktop are now negotiating. “They don't want to leave Dorset,” Shapiro says.
Neither, apparently, does anyone else. “My parents' four grandkids are in LA and they miss them terribly,” Lowes says. “But I'm like, why would you ever leave Manchester? I dropped my kids off at camp this morning and my mom was at the courts next door playing pickleball with about forty people. You don't get this where I live.”
Lowes and Shapiro co-founded IAMA Theatre Company in Los Angeles, which does new work exclusively, so they know what it costs to make a season happen. They came to Dorset braced to pitch in and spent three weeks being quietly astonished instead.
“Every day we're just like, whoa, that was so professional,” Shapiro says. “Every step of the way, this festival is pro level. And we're used to running our own theater companies.”
“To be told, you just need to show up here and this will be done, and then you show up and the set is immaculate and the theater's ready,” Shapiro says. “The whole process has been amazing.”
The detail that stuck with them was a safety walkthrough before tech, in which the company was shown the set, the props, the backstage traffic, and who would be on headset. “It was such a great little informational session,” Shapiro says. “And I'm like, hey, we need to do this at our theater.”
Lowes went further. “We were walking around and we were like, we didn't get this treatment even on Broadway,” she says. She and Shapiro joined Waitress as replacements, so she allows that the originating company may have gotten the full tour. “But we never had a walkthrough on Broadway of, this is how the set works.”
The math of the season impressed them too. Four full productions and a gala between late June and early September, out of one building. “To be able to put up four really high quality big plays in one summer is kind of insane,” Shapiro says. “And it's not insane for them at all. They know exactly what to do on every single day.”
“We do festivals in this amount of time,” he adds, “but they're reading festivals.”
Lowes has moved on to recruiting. “They have an amazing program of college students who are majoring in this and that, and they're coming and living here for the summer,” she says. “I'm like, the minute you graduate college, I need all of your information. You have to come work for me.”
The thing they keep circling back to is not the production values. It is the audience that kept introducing themselves before the show had even opened.
“I've met countless people in town, whether here or down in Manchester, saying we're coming to the show, we're coming to the show,” Shapiro says. “It reminds me of when we were little and we'd make a play and tell our family, 'Tonight we're doing a play after dinner.', and everybody would say, can't wait for the show. It feels like we know the audience better than we ever have.”
Lowes was in the checkout line at Shaw's when she spotted a Dorset Theatre Festival t-shirt. “This lovely gentleman says, I'll be there opening night,” she says. “And he's on the board!”
Shapiro went to see Rent at Weston Theater Company two nights earlier with Felix. The woman to his left mentioned she had tickets for the weekend. The woman behind him was coming Wednesday. The woman on the other side had tickets for the end of the run.
And then there is the neighbor. The festival houses its artists locally, and the owner of the cottage where the family is staying lives next door. “He came over with a jar of maple syrup to say break a leg,” Shapiro says. “It doesn't get any more Vermont theater festival than that.”
“You make theater in a big city, that's one thing,” Lowes says. “But you make this quality of theater in this town and it feels like the whole town is a part of it. They have an arrangement with Barrows House that if you're working on the festival you can go over there with your kids and use the pool. And the folks from Barrows House are coming to see the play. It just feels like what theater is supposed to be, which is a real connection to community.”
That connection is also the balance sheet. A rural professional theater at this level does not run on ticket sales alone, and the festival leans on donors and business sponsors to get from one summer to the next. The 49th season is the last one before Dorset turns fifty, and its already shaping up to be sensational.
Fifteen summers in, Lowes and Shapiro have a rotation, and they are actively expanding it. The festival's own Destination Dorset program exists for exactly this reason, pairing a night at the Playhouse with the rest of the day around it.
Lunch is often H.N. Williams in Dorset. “The Vermonter sandwich is next level,” Lowes says. Shapiro's first answer was Neighborhood Noodle in back in Manchester. Breakfast the morning we spoke was Up for Breakfast. They had been to Lola for dinner earlier in the week, and they drive down to the Chocolate Barn in Shaftsbury for ice cream at a rate Shapiro puts at “at least once a week.” If you want more of the same, we keep a running list of Manchester's most photogenic plates.
“We have our places we've been going for fifteen years,” Shapiro says, “but I'm so into trying all these new spots.”
The one they will not let you skip is Heart of the Village Yoga in Manchester Village, where Lowes's mother, Barb Lowes, teaches. “Everyone needs to go to my mom's yoga class,” Lowes says. “She specializes in brain longevity yoga. Incredible meditation, incredible flow classes.”
Advice opens Saturday, August 1 and runs through a 2 p.m. matinee on Saturday, August 15. It is the third of four productions in the festival's 49th season, the last one before Dorset turns fifty.
There is no version of this show that works without a full house, and both of them know it. Lowes does not think that requires any instruction.
“I don't think you have to tell the audience to laugh,” she says. “Laughing is healthy for you in all the ways.”
She and Shapiro spent most of an hour during our time together on Friday doing it to each other, finishing each other's setups, laughing at jokes the other one had not finished making yet, and just having a blast. That energy is what they are bringing to a 298-seat barn in Dorset for the next two weeks, and it is worth the drive to go sit and be a part of it.
Advice by Brent Askari, directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt. New England premiere. Through August 15 at the Dorset Playhouse, 104 Cheney Rd, Dorset, VT. 90 minutes, no intermission. Starring Katie Lowes, Adam Shapiro and Nayib Felix.
Get tickets online or call the box office at (802) 867-2223. Dorset Theatre Festival's 49th season closes with Kenneth Lonergan's Lobby Hero, August 21 through September 5.
More to read: our full 2026 season preview with Executive Artistic Director Will Rucker and Managing Creative Director Ryan Koss, the story of how a Vermont barn became a launching pad for new American plays.
