McIntosh Retrospective at Truro Library
The late painter Hal McIntosh found early inspiration in a little dune shack on Cold Storage Beach in North Truro. He spent 10 bohemian summers there without electricity or running water, amid kerosene lamps, furnishings hauled from the local dump, and the constancy of Cape Cod Bay just outside the door. Then he spent about 60 more summers in a cottage he bought farther up the beach. This was the world in which McIntosh lived and created, and his paintings reflect that.
The Truro Public Library has a retrospective of McIntosh’s paintings on display until Dec. 30. Stephen Briscoe of the Larkin Gallery in Provincetown curated the exhibit with a focus on McIntosh’s forays into abstraction and portraiture over the course of his six-decade career.
In a 2009 interview recorded as part of the Truro Memories Road Show, which is now archived by UMass Boston, McIntosh became emotional recounting the relationships that shaped him and his work on the Outer Cape.
He recalled a collection of anecdotes, like eating Portuguese soup and bread with the painters Jerry Farnsworth and Helen Sawyer. Or the time he sat on a bench with Edward Hopper at a rummage sale, and their friends modeled moth-eaten sweaters in an impromptu fashion show. Or how another Truro family rented him an old barn on their property as studio space. These people, along with the friends he accumulated, made up his chosen family.
In these stories, and in his paintings of sea and sand and sky, the conclusion is self-evident. McIntosh’s story is infused with Truro, and Truro — its art, its geography, and its people — was infused with him. —Aden Choate
Neil McGarry Plays All the Characters
When he was a Barnstable High School senior, Neil McGarry first played miser Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, realized he could act for a living — and convinced his worried parents he could succeed.
He’s since played dozens of roles on stage and film, but Charles Dickens’s classic story continued to resonate enough with McGarry that, in 2013, while leading Marshfield’s Bay Colony Shakespeare Company, he created a one-man show. McGarry is Scrooge, the ghost, the Cratchits, and more in what has become an award-winning solo tour de force. He calls it “one of the most life-affirming and joyous pieces of work I’ve ever done.”
The 10th-anniversary tour of McGarry’s touching and humorous A Christmas Carol finishes with shows at 7:30 p.m. on Dec. 19 at Cotuit Center for the Arts and 7 p.m. on Dec. 20 at the Academy Playhouse in Orleans.
Sharing Dickens’s story has been a meaningful reminder, McGarry says, of his parents, now deceased, and what they taught him and his nine siblings about kindness and how we should leave the world better than we found it.
“It is a story of almost Shakespearian wonder,” he says, “about the most domestic of things, a man learning to care.”
The actor says he still often finds something new in the tale and believes performing overseas in 2018-2019 — wheeling his trunk of props through airports, London train stations, Swiss Christmas markets, and Prague’s city streets — helped him to trust the story and Dickens’s language in ways he hadn’t before.
“It needs to be shared, as simply and unadorned as possible,” McGarry says of the holiday staple. “My task is to meet people where they are when they come in the door, get out of the way, and let Dickens’s words do their work.”
Information and tickets for the Cape shows are at artsonthecape.org and academyplayhouse.org. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Members’ Open Small Works at PAAM
Each year, museum strollers are invited to purchase works by local Provincetown artists in the Members’ Open Small Works, a 12-by-12 show at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. The works vary in medium and approach, and there is no submission fee aside from having an up-to-date PAAM membership.
PAAM’s “open” exhibitions started in the 1970s. Works are displayed “salon style,” meaning they’re “stacked,” covering most of the walls.
PAAM invites purchasers to bring their new pieces home with them upon purchase instead of waiting for the conclusion of the exhibition.
Order attracts the eye in Stevan Jennis’s Blue Rectangle, 2023. We see deep-colored geometric shapes and bold black lines. The piece hearkens back to Kandinsky and the beginnings of abstraction. A bright narrow blue rectangle rests askew next to a hanging orange circle. The bright, raw cashew-colored background brings contrast to the piece and a faux sense of time and weathered canvas.
Bonnie Brewer’s Windy Day—Cape Cod uses swaths of acrylic to give a sense of movement in her energetic abstract work. Could it be a crowd outside a theater or leaves falling on a windy day?
Naya Bricher’s Frozen Delights in the Off-Season is an absurd array on a quiet beach. Although some call Provincetown the only open-air insane asylum in the country during the off-season, Bricher has decided to set herself up with a skyline of sweets.
Pat Schomer’s Winter at the OC, 2022 is a felt account of the withered front of the Old Colony Tap. Bright Christmas lights are faded inside the beer-tinted windows and dirt finds its way onto the plowed snow out front.
Butts are back at PAAM, and three of them are in Jane Paradise’s archival pigment print, Squeezing. Three swimmers are nude at an indoor pool. Goggles dangle against the far right cheek.
In Heather Pillar’s photograph of Moree Schwartz and Charlie Derber, Share a Laugh, we see the pair inside an apartment with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves behind them. Their laugh is connected and contagious. The reclining figure on the right rests his knees on a fuzzy, comfy blanket. Sunlight from the window outside makes the flowers next to him rejoice as he laughs away.
The Small Works exhibition is up from now until Jan. 7 at 460 Commercial St. —Pat Kearns
Another Lockwood Song for Townie Holiday Extravaganza
For years after relocating to Provincetown, Kenny Lockwood focused on his abstract painting. But in 2017 he returned to singing and songwriting after a friend encouraged him to be part of Provincetown Theater’s first Townie Holiday Extravaganza.
Lockwood wrote about coming home to his spouse at Christmas, and the warm reception he got brought him back each December after that with a new song. This year’s extravaganza will be at 7 p.m. on Dec. 14 to 16 and 2 p.m. Dec. 17 at the 238 Bradford St. theater.
“There’s something about the gathering of people, when everyone is holding the same intention, that resonates through everyone who’s present,” Lockwood says. “The joy and celebration is palpable. After the first show, I thought, ‘Count me in,’ and I feel lucky that they do.”
Lockwood will be among about 25 performers this year, says artistic director David Drake, from singers (including Madison Mayer, Trish LaRose, Beau Jackett, and Denise Page) to comedy groups, storytellers, and musical groups (including gospel and Bulgarian). There will be an improv audience sing-along, and the theater’s Casa Valentina actors will lip-synch a McGuire Sisters Christmas number in drag.
Tawny Heatherton, Drake’s drag persona, will host again, changing costumes throughout the family-friendly two-act production.
Since 2017, Lockwood has worked on a new album and returned to acting, too, in 2022’s The Humans and this year’s Casa Valentina. Drake says Lockwood’s songs are always a townie-show highlight.
“I love writing stories, but how do you tell a story in three minutes?” Lockwood says. He focuses his Christmas songs on two people, whether lovers or friends. “Not everyone is home with family for Christmas,” he notes.
This year, he’ll play “Out Here on the Edge,” his ode to living in Provincetown, written for Patrick Riviere’s short documentary Artists at the Edge that spotlights Lockwood’s painting and singer-actor Darlene Van Alstyne. But Lockwood might write another Christmas song in time, too: “Sometimes they come out in 10 minutes or sometimes they take weeks.” —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
