Windhover Center for the Performing Arts and Gloucester 400+
Dogtown Common by Percy MacKaye Adapted and Directed by Peter Littlefield
By: Windhover - Apr 24, 2023
Windhover Center for the Performing Arts and Gloucester 400+ present
Dogtown Common by Percy MacKaye
adapted and directed by Peter Littlefield with Peter Berkrot, Judy Brain, Duncan Hollomon, Cass Tunick, Brain Weed and Deirdre Weed
music arranged and performed by Kathleen Adams
Forest Form sculptures by Liz Sibley Fletcher
with a pre-performance talk by Grace Schrafft on Gloucester's 17th century witch persecutions
Friday, May 19 and Saturday, May 20 at 7:30
Windhover Center for the Performing Arts
257R Granite St
Rockport, Ma 01966
978-546-3611
Tickets are $15
Takes place indoors in the back dance studio.
Percy MacKaye’s 1922 poem, Dogtown Common, is a beloved document of Gloucester lore. It tells the story of two legendary figures, Tammy Younger and her niece Judy Rhines, shunned for practicing witchcraft.
It was inspired by Charles Mann’s 1906, The Story of Dogtown or In the Heart of Cape Ann, that compiles recollections about the outsiders, berry-pickers, subsistence farms and self-proclaimed witches that inhabited Dogtown after it was abandoned in the early 1800’s.
The poem has a history with The Windhover Center for the Performing Arts, where Ina Hahn performed it more than once. Lisa Hahn, the current Executive Director, asked Annisquam resident and Director Peter Littlefield to do a new production.
Windhover had been a dairy farm. It seemed the perfect place to stage the poem because it looks the way Dogtown must have looked before it was abandoned after the Revolution. Windhover’s production combines the idea of an installation with a staged reading like a ghost story.
The performers sit around a table and build an image of Dogtown as they enact the poem. The performance is as fully staged as a conventional play, but we put the emphasis on the imaginative act of engaging a poetic text.
Cast: Peter Berkrot, Judy Brain, Duncan Hollomon, Cass Tunick, Brain Weed and Deirdre Weed
Music arranged and performed by Kathleen Adams
Forest Form sculptures by Liz Sibley Fletcher