“Everything has been told. It’s not what you’re saying, it’s how you say it,” Andrew Polk declares. Mr. Polk has become an expert at finding new playwrights and shaping their stories. He has created a summer incubator environment before the fall season begins in the cities – the Cape Cod Theater Project.

Although he is a member of that rare breed, the successful New York actor, Mr. Polk has not been content to rest on his film, television and stage credits.

He had hardly set foot in New York in 1986, fresh from his acting training in London, when he won a role in the touring company of “Biloxi Blues,” a job that kept him working for two years. Since then he hasn’t had trouble finding employment, whether doing voiceovers for advertisements, acting in the theater, or in the 1999 movie “Hit and Runway” or on the various “Law and Order” spinoffs.

“‘Law and Order’ isn’t really something to brag about. If someone hasn’t been on ‘Law and Order,’ you have to kind of wonder if he’s any good,” Mr. Polk said.

Acting alone could not satisfy Mr. Polk’s desire to shape his profession.

Though gentle in demeanor, Mr. Polk has, as one of his colleagues, the Tony award-winning actor Frank Wood, put it “a laid-back intensity” about him that leaves no doubt about his clarity of vision.

Ten years ago, Mr. Polk was a member of the Circle Repertory Theater in Greenwich Village and invited his fellow thespians to Cape Cod to spend a week rehearsing new plays. His sister lives near Woods Hole, Mass., and Mr. Polk thought the village would be a place to audition and cultivate new talent.

His is no standard summer-stock stage. Rather, his theater has the air of laboratory, where actors, directors, and writers alike are encouraged to experiment – free from the constraints of learning lines or designing sets. Mr. Polk began the Cape Cod Theater Project, of which he now serves as artistic director, as a showcase for staged readings

If scripts are the seeds of a play, Andrew Polk, artistic director of the Cape Cod Project, is a gardener.

The comparison might surprise both the man and his acquaintances – he is, after all, a lifelong city boy.

Nonetheless, Mr. Polk coddles his charges in the quiet of the country before they’re subjected to the sharp eyes and ears of New York City or Los Angeles critics.

Mr. Polk receives 300 plays a year for entry into the project, and he reads about 100 of them (the rest are read by a committee of volunteers, but he has final say). He searches for “a unique voice.”

“It sounds vague, but you know it when you see it,” Mr. Polk said.

And he likes the plays to tell distinctly American stories. “There’s so much talent out there,” Mr. Polk said. “And I’m decidedly Americanphilic.”

Every show bears the marks of Mr. Polk’s influence; he chooses the plays and works on the scripts for months in New York before they get to Cape Cod. At the end of each reading, Mr. Polk moderates an audience discussion of the play with the actors and the playwright. Some writers are quite sensitive about hearing their dialogue for the first time.

“We had one playwright who was so nervous he couldn’t even watch. I found him under the promenade, drinking cape codders,” Mr. Polk said. He makes a point of interviewing playwrights before accepting them to ensure that they’re open to criticism.

The process seems to work: Of the 34 scripts the project has read, 20 have been harvested by professional theaters. On Broadway, the Manhattan Theater Club staged “Between Us” and The Roundabout Theater put up “The Mineola Twins” last year, which featured Swoozie Kurtz.

In the spring he was convinced he had struck gold in the form of Noah Heidl, a playwright who Mr. Polk believes possesses a “unique comedic voice,” a rare commodity. The show, called “Kitty Kitty Kitty,” had already been shown in an amateur theater with a young cast and a youthful audience, but the Cape Cod remained unconvinced.

“It was just the wrong play for the audience. It’s a young person’s play,” Mr. Polk said. “It’s about cats, heavy cat sex, which was too much for our audience. They’re very liberal-minded, but old. They found it useless in general.”

That performance tested Mr. Polk’s skills as a moderator.

“He’s very open to what anyone has to say; he’s very good at prompting an audience to get talking,” said a director who has worked with Mr. Polk, Ethan McSweeney. But, “He’s very firm if the conversation starts to veer off into an unproductive conversation.”

Neither the writer, the original producer, nor Mr. Polk were much deterred, and they’re working to get a professional theater to stage “Kitty Kitty Kitty”.

The actors, who have ranged from Tony-Award winner Frank Wood to Oscar winner Anna Paquin, work with the playwright to reshape his or her play by pointing out dramatic problems or false notes in the dialogue.

Increasingly, Mr. Polk’s Cape Cod labors are taking over his career. Reading the scripts and interviewing authors have become year-round jobs.

Mr. Polk’s taste and vision have been so successful that the Cape Cod Theater Project is expanding and looking to its own future. The organization is putting together its first business plan, and Mr. Polk wants to become more involved in guiding the shows out into the larger theater world.

This year, he hopes to commission the project’s first play.