The Next Hot Playwright? They Prefer the Ones Who Cooled Off.

In the decades when he was running the widely influential Off Broadway nonprofit Playwrights Horizons, Tim Sanford would not have been the one driving to New Jersey to see a man about a tree.

But his new theater company, a scrappy, idealistic outfit dedicated to established older playwrights, is a more hands-on operation. So one day last month, he hopped into his S.U.V. and headed across the Hudson River to bring back a freshly felled tree — he couldn’t tell you what kind — to be used in the set of a Len Jenkin play he is producing, “How Is It That We Live or Shakey Jake + Alice.”

Such is the job that Sanford, 71, made for himself when he and his wife, Aimée Hayes, the former producing artistic director of Southern Rep Theater in New Orleans, founded the Tent Theater Company. Advocacy is intrinsic to its mission. Having exited Playwrights Horizons in 2021, after 25 years as its artistic director, Sanford has taken up the banner of a group of artists he sees as sidelined by an industry that thrives on discovering the latest hot playwrights, yet isn’t exactly diligent about sustaining them over their lifetimes of creativity.

There is, Sanford said, a feeling afoot that older playwrights should simply make way: “That kind of, you know, ‘The baby boomers had their time. Let them all go into the ash pits.’”

To him, though, age is an overlooked element of diversity — one that comes with accumulated knowledge of the human experience, and for which there is, and must be, room. It is a matter, too, of respecting these artists, whom the Tent calls elders.

“This theater we have, this community, was built on their backs,” he said.

As co-artistic directors of the Tent, Sanford and Hayes have curated a roster of 52 writers ranging from 60 (the minimum age) to 85 (there is no upper limit), with Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winners among them. To name just a half-dozen of the most prominent: Nilo Cruz, Beth Henley, David Rabe, Theresa Rebeck, Roger Guenveur Smith and Doug Wright. Many are less-well-known veterans of the field.

A nonprofit formed in 2021, the Tent is neither a jobs program nor a boneyard. Intended to nurture still-active playwrights and raise their profiles in the theater, it is also about creating a fellowship of artists and looking out for them in more tangential ways, should any of them need it. Toward that end, Hayes is pursuing a master’s degree in social work at Fordham University.

While some Tent playwrights are thriving professionally — like Craig Lucas (“Days of Wine and Roses,” “Paradise Square”), who has directed readings for the company — plenty of others’ careers have quieted down.

“They’re people I care about who are hurting, who don’t know what hit them,” Sanford said in the first interview I had with him and Hayes about the Tent, in spring 2023 on the edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, near their home.

“I’m thinking of certain writers,” he said. “It hit them when they realized that they gave a play to an artistic director who had produced them twice before over the last 20 years, and a year later they’re still wondering. And they run into him in the lobby and their eyebrows go expectantly up, and: crickets. There’s no mention of this play.”

As playwrights age, said Hayes, who is 58, “It just feels like people sort of disappear.”

CURRENTLY RUNNING at A.R.T./New York Theaters in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, Jenkin’s dark poetic romance — “Shakey Jake” for short — is the Tent’s second full production. Its first, directed by Hayes a year ago, was the absurdist comedy “Where Women Go” by Tina Howe, who attended a packed Tent reading of the play in April 2023 and died that August at 85. The full staging, a world premiere, was produced with Concord Theatricals, which licenses Howe’s plays.

For “Shakey Jake,” the Tent is going it alone. With Fred Weller as Jake and Kate Arrington as Alice, the play has a cast of four, telling a magic-tinged tale that stretches through the lives of a couple who first get together in their teens, and age from scene to scene.

On a frigid day last month in the East Village, I watched as they rehearsed, with Hayes directing, Jenkin taking notes, Sanford observing. A random hour in their process, it was much consumed with prop logistics: a coffee can, some beer bottles — all part of telling a story in three dimensions, channeled through human bodies. Plays aren’t meant to stay on the page, or in a drawer.

Later, by phone, the Obie Award-winning Jenkin said that it’s meaningful to him “to get the work out there, to not, you know, do it in a vacuum.”

Still, he had hesitated when Sanford, assembling the Tent writers, invited him to join.

“I’m not usually a joiner of things so much,” he said.

But he liked the idea that Rabe, whose “Sticks and Bones” won the Tony for best play in 1972, had signed on, as had Jenkin’s friends Richard Wesley and Michael Weller. And the thought of Sanford “stepping up” to support older writers really grabbed him.

“Nobody does it, you know?” Jenkin said. “I mean, you hope you don’t do your best work in your 30s. You hope you continue to grow and change, and you hope the work can get deeper and stronger. And I think that is true of a lot of older writers.”

Jenkin didn’t care to give his own age, but his first playwriting mention in The New York Times came in 1974. During the Bicentennial he was noted again, for having a workshop at the Public Theater: “Joseph Papp’s percolating play factory,” the reporter called it. In 2018, when The Times ran a list of “5 Plays That Made Soho Rep’s Reputation,” it included Jenkin’s “Dark Ride,” from 1981 — which the critic Mel Gussow described as being set in “a labyrinth in limbo, a favorite habitat of the author.”

In the version of “Shakey Jake” that I read, the final page of the script is a kind of I-was-here note from the playwright to the reader, tacked on after the end of the play. Calling back to a song that Arrington sings as Alice, it’s a patch of verse — and a reminder that plays outlive their makers:

“If anyone should ask you
Who it was that sang this song
Tell ’em it was Len Jenkin
He was a longtime here
He’ll be a longtime gone”

When I asked Jenkin about it, his immediate reaction was, “Oh, Jesus. I keep telling them to take that off.” But I told him I loved it, which was true.

“I don’t know why I did that,” he said. “I hadn’t done that before. It’s just that the play is about mortality. And there was enough of that that was personal to me that I put that little tag on the end of the script.”

MORTALITY AND SEX are two of the big topics across Tent work I have seen, like the reading last year of Kermit Frazier’s “Wheresoever They Lie” and an evening last month of playwrights — including Jacquelyn Reingold and Migdalia Cruz — reading from their work at a bookstore-cafe on the Lower East Side, which attracted a standing-room-only crowd.

When Sanford and Hayes started the Tent, they spent a year listening to playwrights to try to suss out what the writers needed.

Hayes said: “We heard the refrain, ‘Nobody will read my work. There is no champion. There’s nobody to speak up for me.’”

The Tent’s readings and playwright gatherings are their reply to that, as is Sanford’s effort to nudge his gatekeeper colleagues in the theater, pointing them to elder playwrights and their work, reminding them that these writers matter.

Full productions are a vital but smaller piece of the Tent’s plan: for now one a year, but Sanford hopes for two. As for assigning those rare slots, he said the 60-year-old playwrights are probably not at the front of the line.

Age has its privileges.