Jay Sefton Confronts the Past in Unreconciled
When Jay Sefton was 13 and living in a town on the outskirts of Philadelphia, he won the starring role in a Catholic school production of a Passion play recounting the persecution and crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
It was during rehearsals that Sefton says he was sexually abused by a priest, who, following allegations made by another boy, was ultimately removed from the ministry by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia for “sadistic and depraved behavior.”
Four decades later, Sefton, an actor turned psychotherapist who lived and worked on the Outer Cape for five years, returns to the stage in Unreconciled, a new play he wrote with Mark Basquill. The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown will present the 80-minute solo production at 7 p.m. on Saturday, May 25.
“I want survivors to see their own story and feel emboldened by someone they see on stage,” says Sefton. “So, there was an honesty that had to happen in the writing.”
Sefton plays a dozen characters, including his mother, a nun, and the priest who abused him. He says it was important to him and Basquill to represent the priest’s point of view in the script.
“It’s fictional, but we have this whole thing where Father Smith says that what drew him into the priesthood was forgiveness,” says Sefton. “And in his monologue, he says, ‘I forgave all of you. I washed your souls clean every week in confession. Why does no one extend that to me?’ ”
While readily admitting there’s nothing funny about sexual abuse, Sefton uses humor to help audiences confront his painful past.
“I never want the audience to wonder, ‘Is he OK up there?’ ” he says. “It felt important to find the humor, like when I had a crush on the girl playing the Blessed Virgin Mary. What I enjoy is when these moments come right against each other, so you are feeling one emotion and then laughing the next minute.”
For more information and to register for the event, visit unreconciledtheplay.com. —Katy Abel
Buy Local, Read Local
Readers looking for a Cape Cod literary connection can encounter 20 local writers in one place on Saturday, May 25 at the Eastham Public Library (190 Samoset Road) at its inaugural Local Author Fair. From 1 to 3:30 p.m., the writers will sign their books and talk about storytelling.
“This is a chance for the community to come and see who the writers are around here, see what people are writing, and talk about how people are influenced by Cape Cod,” says librarian Corey Farrenkopf, who recently published the Harwich-based dark fantasy novel Living in Cemeteries.
The idea for the fair arose in a conversation between Farrenkopf and Yvonne deSousa, author of the memoir Shelter of the Monument: A Provincetown Love Story. Farrenkopf wanted to incorporate more local author events into the library’s programming, and the two decided that a group event was the way to go. They began contacting other writers.
After word got out about the event and additional authors contacted him about participating, Farrenkopf started making a list of people to include in the future. “Ideally, next year we’ll go into the file and pull newer people in, so everyone gets a turn,” he says.
The fair will also feature works by writers of mysteries, memoirs, fiction, nonfiction, fantasies, children’s books, and Cape histories — including Roger A. Smith, who is writing a historical fiction series, and Emily Wakeman Cyr, with a summer beach read set on Cape Cod.
For more information, visit easthamlibrary.org or call 508-240-5950. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Folk-Pop Duo Kicks Off ‘Washashore Sessions’
The Provincetown Brewing Co. (141 Bradford St.) will kick off its “Washashore Sessions” live music series with the Bay Area folk-pop duo the Lonely Parrots on Thursday, May 23 at 7 p.m. There is a $5 suggested donation.
“We’re planning on having a concert once a month for the summer,” says company cofounder Erik Borg. “We want to bring in a wide range of out-of-town acts. The idea is to open up the taproom and let people enjoy a fun concert.”
The Lonely Parrots — Max Embers and Michael Martinez — are best friends and both gay. They met as undergraduates in Boston at the Berklee College of Music. They started performing together in 2022 after a casual jam session at the beach revealed their creative chemistry. Both sing, Martinez plays piano, and Embers plays guitar. They also each have solo acts.
“They’re going around the country doing this makeshift national tour,” says Borg. “They’re going to bars, restaurants, parks, even back yards. They were doing a concert in Boston and a friend told them they should also perform in Provincetown. They were like, ‘Oh, we know just the right venue for that.’ ”
The duo writes original songs and performs covers — notably, Scott McKenzie’s 1967 “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” Their lyrics, sung in harmony over plucky strings and piano riffs, meditate on intimacy, friendship, and nature. The first song they ever wrote together, “Coldplay,” is an ode to the band that has inspired much of their songwriting.
—Paul Sullivan
MEMDAY Returns to Provincetown
For close to two decades, Beth McGurr and Lynette Molnar have brought lesbians to Provincetown for celebration and community over Memorial Day Weekend.
“The crowd has sort of grown up with me,” says McGurr, who runs the LGBTQ hub LesbianNightLife, which hosts events and parties throughout New England.
“It’s like a kickoff to the summer,” she adds. “You run into people you haven’t seen in a year.”
LesbianNightLife hosts MEMDAY Weekend Women’s Festival in collaboration with Provincetown for Women, which Molnar runs. The party kicks off on Thursday, May 23, 7 p.m. with a meet and greet at Harbor Lounge (359 Commercial St.). This first event is free. Those attending can pick up pre-purchased bracelets that grant access to six parties and a Saturday party boat.
Over the next three days, DJs and professional dancers reign, with performances planned from dance troupes like the Sea Coast Stilettos and the Orlando-based Lez Vixens, along with a few surprise appearances. There are also singles mixers and meet ups and pool parties on the schedule, including a glow-in-the-dark bash on Saturday night.
The weekend wraps on Sunday night with “This Ain’t Texas,” a closing party and Beyoncé tribute at the Crown & Anchor (247 Commercial St.). “We want a Coyote Ugly-type vibe going on in there,” says McGurr.
McGurr emphasizes that the weekend welcomes all. “You have 20-year-olds, 60-year-olds, and everyone in between,” she says. “We are definitely very LGBTQ+ friendly — we cater to lesbian, nonbinary, and trans folks.”
Visit lesbiannightlife.com for a full schedule of events and to purchase the all-inclusive bracelet. Tickets for each event will also be sold at the door. —Aden Choate
PAAM’s Annual Exhibition of Grant Recipients
Each year the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) hosts an exhibition for winners of the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant. This year the winners — Brian Cirmo, Frederick Hayes, Catherine McCarthy, Terri Rolland, and Elizabeth Thach — are represented in an exhibition on view through June 16 that showcases a broad range of painting, from Rolland’s nimble minimalism to McCarthy’s collage-like figurative mashups. It’s a playful and joyous group of paintings abundant with color and slippery shifts between abstraction and figuration.
The grant program has brought artists from throughout the country to Provincetown since 2010. Recipients’ work is exhibited, and they get a cash award. This year each winner, chosen from a pool of more than 500 applicants, received $7,000.
The grant was endowed by Lillian Orlowsky, who died in Provincetown in 2004, with an initial $2 million gift. Each year funding for the grants — a total of $35,000 — is drawn from the interest on the principal. Orlowsky and Freed, a married couple, studied with Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown and were active at PAAM throughout their lives as members and instructors.
“Lillian wanted the grant to be for painters who were 45 or older,” says PAAM’s Grace Ryder-O’Malley, overseer of the grant since its inception. According to Orlowsky’s stipulations, the grants are awarded by a rotating jury of three art professionals to under-recognized American painters who demonstrate financial need. “Orlowsky didn’t get the acclaim during her lifetime that she probably deserved,” says Ryder-O’Malley. “This was her way of giving to artists who are working really hard but haven’t been able to break out into the artworld. It gives them a boost.”
When Thach received her award she had just lost a lease on her Boston studio, and her options for a new space were more expensive. “Do I invest more money in my practice or lose my studio?” she asked herself. “Making art professionally requires a lot of resources, and it can feel like a quixotic endeavor to be putting money into opportunities without necessarily getting a return on your investment,” says Thach, who has a day job. “Getting this grant meant that I could commit to keeping a studio.”
An exhibition on the horizon also grounded Thach and focused her activity in the studio, which has yielded a body of paintings that remind me of how a cartoonist might make abstract paintings. The paintings are animated with a broad lexicon of experimental marks, buoyant color, and simplified, graphic images. They share an affinity with Cirmo’s more overtly comics-influenced paintings and Hayes’s juicy grids of color.
Ryder-O’Malley was struck by similarities among the artwork on view. “We were surprised by how well the art worked together,” she says. In the past they divided the gallery space into sections for each artist, “but this year we felt the work lent itself to being interspersed,” she says. “It’s so satisfying to have these works here and these artists in Provincetown.” —Abraham Storer
Queering Nature at the Hawthorne Barn
“I usually think, ‘OK, over here are my queer spaces and over here are my natural spaces and never do the twain meet,’ ” says Brooklyn-based freelance science journalist Sabrina Imbler. “But Provincetown is so amazing because you can go to a panel discussion about gender transition and polyamory and then you can walk 10 minutes and be at the beach and see a horseshoe crab. I can’t imagine a better place than Provincetown to talk about queering nature.”
Imbler will be doing just that when they join a panel discussion — “Queering Nature” — at the Hawthorne Barn (29 Miller Hill Road) on Friday, May 24 at 6 p.m. The panel is part of a three-day-long series of events hosted by Twenty Summers in collaboration with Atmos, a climate and culture magazine that weds science writing with fine art photography. For tickets and a full list of the weekend’s events, see 20summers.org.
Imbler will join Camila Falquez, a portrait photographer of Colombian heritage, Pınar Sinopoulos-Lloyd, an indigenous wildlife tracker, and Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, a curator of mycology at the New York State Museum.
“People have a lot of different interpretations about what it means to queer nature or find queerness in nature,” says Imbler, “but one of the biggest ones is looking for queerness in terms of sex and biological diversity in plants, animals, fungi. There are so many animals that change sex over the course of their lives. There’s a fungus with 17,000 sexes. Animals have this very fabulous way of being fluid.”
Imbler emphasizes that queering nature also means ensuring that LGBTQ people are represented in the sciences. “Different perspectives make science better,” Imbler says. “The best science happens when we consider everything together.” —Paul Sullivan
