Playwright, director, actor, set designer, and marketing maven Robert Rosiello Jr. died unexpectedly on March 26, 2025 at Doylestown Hospital in Pennsylvania. The cause, confirmed by his husband, Mark Cole, was cardiopulmonary arrest. He was 52.

The son of Robert and Sharon Ann Rosiello, Rob was born in Philadelphia on April 16, 1972. He grew up in Deptford, N.J., where he was first onstage, playing Santa Claus in second grade and the villain in Babes in Toyland in third grade; in fourth grade, he staged his own play on the life of Saint Maximilian Kolbe. He graduated as valedictorian from Deptford High School in 1990.

After studying communications and theater at Trenton State College, Rob received a master’s degree in theater from Villanova. He was in a prize-winning ensemble for a production of Angels in America, about which he wrote his master’s thesis. He later taught theater at Lower Marion High School in Ardmore, Pa.

After a summer job at the Crowne Pointe Hotel in Provincetown, Rob became entertainment manager at the Crown & Anchor in 2001. “He ran everything entertainment-wise,” his successor, Rick Reynolds, said. “Being an actor and a playwright himself, he understood how artistic types needed to be treated. Everyone just loved him.”

He wrote and directed a one-woman play for Melenie Freedom Flynn at the Crown, he directed Terrence McNally’s Love! Valor! Compassion! in 2003 with McNally attending the final night, and he acted in Six Degrees of Separation at the Cape Repertory Theater in 2005. He became a manager for individual performers and a promoter of a wide range of LGBTQ charitable events. “My LGBTQ story is as diverse as the community,” he wrote, “and I hope to keep it growing and evolving.”

In 2006, Rob left Provincetown to work as a diversity specialist with SPI Marketing in New York, managing a multi-million-dollar budget for social media campaigns and new product launches. He was also the producer of the national tour for the winner of the first five seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race. That led to his writing “I Am the Drag Whisperer,” a chapter in RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture (Springer, 2017).

Rob remained active in community and regional theater in Pennsylvania, notably the Town and Country Players in Buckingham and the Old Academy Players in Philadelphia. He wrote nearly 20 full-length and one-act plays, directed many others, including The Laramie Project, and acted in many more, including The Santaland Diaries with the Provincetown Theatre Company.

A semifinalist for the Princess Grace Foundation and Eugene O’Neill Conference for Playwriting, a finalist for the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation Award for Playwriting, and a member of the Dramatists Guild, Rob taught playwriting at Primary Stages’ Off-Broadway Theater in New York, and beginning in 2015, he taught theater and film history at Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania.

During the pandemic, with theaters closing, Rob turned to radio plays, adapting two of his own plays through R5 Productions: Vernal Rites and Priceless.

Rob’s memoir, Boys Do Cry, was published by Pine Tree Press in 2024. “Told against the backdrop of a gay New York City in the late 1990s,” the promotional copy says, “Rob Rosiello’s story sheds light on the rarely spoken taboo of domestic abuse within the community, exploring a young man’s journey to find his voice amidst the shadows of loss and hardship.”

“I read it in a day,” Rick Reynolds said. “It is not an easy read, but it is an important book.”

“Rob had an enormous amount of energy,” said Melenie Freedom Flynn. “Whether at work, in the theater, or in recovery, community formed around him. He could find the magic anywhere.”

In 2017, Rob married artist T. Mark Cole, 16 years after they met — “the long-term consequences,” Mark said, “of a one-night stand in Philadelphia. I knew from the get-go there was something special about Rob.” Rob’s play The Song I Forgot to Sing was inspired by one of Mark’s paintings.

Even when living in New York or Pennsylvania, Rob considered Provincetown his real home to which he returned every year. He and Mark stayed at Wisteria, one of the Days Cottages in North Truro, usually in the fall.

During Rob’s visits, he walked the beaches looking for turtles stunned by the cold, which he and Melenie helped rescue. Rob’s play Cold Stun (2019) transposed Days Cottages into cottages with names of European cities where a family drama involves a son who works in turtle rescue.

“Rob knew every thrift shop on the Outer Cape,” Melenie said, “which he ransacked for costume design.”

He was recently accepted to the doctoral program in theater at Bowling Green State University and was hoping to start in the fall.

Rob is survived by his husband, T. Mark Cole, and by the many friends who are his family.

In lieu of flowers, donations in Rob’s memory can be made to the Matthew Shepard Foundation or the Princess Grace Foundation.