A Classic Whodunit on the Stage
Anna Marie Johansen typically directs comedies. But she’s also a fan of Agatha Christie. So, Johansen said yes when she was asked to direct a new production of Christie’s And Then There Were None at the Academy Playhouse in Orleans.
Her challenge was to keep things moving. “There’s a lot of people sitting around talking, like in old-fashioned parlor dramas,” she says. “I’m bringing more life into it, a little more action, and more of a feeling of suspense.”
That suspense builds around a familiar story: ten guests with checkered pasts and long-hidden secrets are invited to a remote island. Stranded by bad weather, they are killed off one by one, just as predicted in the creepy nursery rhyme that gives the play its name. In this production, Johansen says, the murders aren’t gruesome. “There’s no blood and gore,” she says.
Published in 1939, And Then There Were None is among the all-time best-selling murder mysteries. Johansen knew the book well and considers detectives Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot “old friends.”
There’s no detective here, though, Johansen notes, so anyone on the island could be the murderer. Even Christie fans familiar with the novel will be in the dark because the script she’s using offers two endings — the original and Christie’s rewrite for the 1943 stage adaptation. Johansen’s not telling which she picked.
And Then There Were None runs Thursdays through Saturdays at 7 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. from Sept. 5 to 22. Tickets are $25 to $35 at academyplayhouse.org. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Paintings of Constancy and Change
Variations on a theme is a form frequently used in musical composition. It’s also a concept that is central to the visual art of Ellen Sinel.
Sinel’s current show at AMZehnder Gallery in Wellfleet features paintings of the landscape behind her home in Truro. The same trees, recognizable by their lack of foliage and their distinct shapes and branch structures, appear repeatedly in different paintings like actors inhabiting different roles in a play.
Although the “characters” in Sinel’s scenes remain constant, the landscape they inhabit changes from painting to painting. The trees arise out of lush expanses of wildflowers and grass in some paintings and stand precariously against a desolate backdrop of pale skies and denuded forest in others. Patterns and geometric shapes — often created from mixed media like resin and collage elements — appear in the background of several images, blurring the difference between the representational and the abstract.
These formal differences are the artist’s way of conveying a deeper truth through her art. For Sinel, the paintings of a limited and particular part of the Outer Cape landscape are a response to larger issues in the world outside like war and global warming.
“I want to preserve the images and emotional essence of our landscape that may or may not exist in decades to come,” says Sinel in a statement accompanying the exhibition. “Landscape painting is, for me, a meditative gathering-in of nature’s constant changes, and its undercurrent of enigmatic mystery.”
Sinel’s paintings are on view at 25 Bank St. in Wellfleet through Sept. 10. See amzehnder.com for information. —John D’Addario
Dick Morrill Shares a Lifetime of Stories
Dick Morrill of Wellfleet has many stories. A founder of the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, he is generous with what gives him joy.
“I like it when people laugh,” says Morrill. “I enjoy sharing what amuses me.” Inspired by the Mosquito Story Slam, he decided to create “Morrill of the Stories,” “my one-man show for people who aren’t good at math,” as the show also features his “co-conspirator,” Stephen Russell.
“Stephen and I are gonna have fun,” says Morrill. “I like telling these true stories about things that happened in my life.”
The stories range from co-founding WHAT in 1985 to his explorations in the use of acupressure therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. After undergoing multiple traumatic experiences living and working in Vietnam in the late 1960s, Morrill dealt with PTSD for 28 years until he underwent an acupressure session with Tapas Fleming.
Morrill now practices the technique with others. When he meets a new client, he starts with focusing on lighter issues before addressing trauma. “One of the things I first work on in my practice is finding out if my clients have a sense of humor,” he says. “We can be a lot more productive if someone has a sense of humor.” Recovery, Morrill adds, can often hinge on the adage that humor is tragedy plus time.
Why is his storytelling show advertised as being for adults? “I have some stories about growing up Catholic,” says Morrill with a chuckle. “Stephen and I will probably have more fun than anyone else. I know everything he’ll say. But he doesn’t know everything I’ll say.”
“Morrill of the Stories” takes place at Wellfleet Preservation Hall (335 Main St.) on Wednesday, Sept. 11 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20 at wellfleetpreservationhall.org. —Hazel Everett
Music to Make Space for Reproductive Justice
When Terry McGovern started working in public health, she was looking for solutions. “All everyone does is pile up statistics on how bad things are for various populations — women of color, indigenous people,” she says. “But where are the strategies?”
Before she became senior associate dean for academic and faculty affairs at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy, where she also teaches health policy and management, McGovern worked at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. There, she began fundraising for a professorship that would embody a concept that Provincetown health-care activist Byllye Avery and others had put forward in their work.
“We’re not talking about reproductive rights,” says McGovern. “We’re not talking about choice. We’re talking about justice.”
With the new Byllye Avery Sexual and Reproductive Justice Professorship, McGovern hopes to make CUNY a hub for the kind of advocacy that Avery epitomizes. “We’re raising the money, slowly but surely,” she says. The Provincetown Arts Society will host a benefit concert for the cause at the Mary Heaton Vorse house on Sunday, Sept. 8 at 6 p.m. Pianist and composer Adrienne Torf will perform with fellow musicians James Jackson Jr., Suede, and Sallie Tighe.
Torf sees the professorship addressing the glaring disparity in access to sexual and reproductive medical care for women of color and women who live in poverty. “For me, to put it simply, the concert is a matter of doing something toward reparations,” she says.
Avery, who founded the Black Women’s Health Imperative in Atlanta in 1983, received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989 and founded the Avery Institute for Social Change in 2002. “What’s exciting about this professorship is the institutionalization of the work so that it can live forever,” she says. “We’re establishing a model that I hope other schools of public health will adopt, so that we can produce more scholar activists — people who are looking at our issues from the viewpoint of the people.
“We own very few things in life,” she continues. “One of them is our bodies.” Justice, she says, means real freedoms: “We deserve the right to have control over our bodies, to say what happens and what doesn’t happen.” And if some think abortion is wrong, she says, “Well, don’t have one. It’s about compassion. It’s about understanding one another. It’s about respecting each other’s decisions, even though they might be different from ours.”
Tickets for the benefit are $150. See provincetownartssociety.com for information. —Dorothea Samaha
Sarah Holl’s Lifetime of Art
Growing up, Sarah Holl was surrounded by an artistic legacy. Her family ran the Scargo Pottery studio in Dennis, and artist Sam Feinstein’s large-scale abstract paintings hung on the walls of her family’s home. While her own artistic career began with clay sculpture, it’s her colorful mixed-media collages that may get the most attention in “Color and Clay,” her current retrospective at the Cape Cod Museum of Art.
The exhibition is arranged chronologically and includes high-relief figurative sculptures, oil paintings on canvas, and ink drawings on paper. The most recent pieces are large-scale collages of still lifes, gardens, ponds, and beaches. Holl’s motifs include the Moon, seen over water and through trees, and images of animals and people, including one woman underwater and another skinny-dipping.
Some of Holl’s collages shimmer with torn foil, Mylar, and gold leaf. “I started using bits of Christmas wrapping paper and tin foil because I liked the reflective quality of it,” says Holl. “I work with what’s available.” The pieces also have a sheen from the resin Holl uses to keep the collaged elements together.
The exhibition celebrates Holl’s achievements and commitment to the Cape art community, including her many years as a mentor for art students (she was awarded the museum’s Artist Muse Award in 2022) and her family’s connection to the museum: her father, Harry Holl, was one of the museum’s co-founders, and works by her maternal grandfather, sculptor Arnold Geissbuhler, are also part of its collection.
“It means everything to me,” says Holl about the museum honoring both her family’s and her own art and contributions. When her father’s name was spoken at the outdoor opening of the exhibition, she says, “there was a clap of thunder in the sky. Everyone felt my father’s presence.”
Holl, who currently teaches at her own studio, will also lead two two-day museum workshops on drawing, painting, and relief sculpture over the course of the exhibition. The show is on view until Nov. 10. See ccmoa.org for information. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
A Visual History of an Outer Cape Tradition
In conjunction with the 37th annual Provincetown Swim for Life & Paddler Flotilla on Saturday, Sept. 7, an exhibition at Frederick Studio in Provincetown explores nearly four decades of getting wet for a good cause.
Curated by photographer Mike Syers, “Splash: 1 Million Views” includes photographs dating back to the swim’s earliest years. The exhibition title celebrates the archive’s recent milestone: according to its organizers, the photos in the online galleries at flickr.com/photos/swim4lifephotos have received more than one million views since the archive was established in 2011.
In addition to Syers’s work, the show includes images by other notable Outer Cape photographers including Mark Finnen, Jane Paradise, Dan McKeon, and Igor Myakotin. Artist and activist Jay Critchley, who co-founded the Swim for Life in 1988, also has works in the exhibition.
There will be an opening reception for the show at Frederick Studio (237 Commercial St., Provincetown) on Friday, Sept. 6 from 6 to 8 p.m., preceding the annual Celebration of Life concert at the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown across the street. The exhibition will be on view through Sunday, Sept. 8. Both the exhibition and the concert are free. See swim4life.org for information. —John D’Addario
