Bringing Dracula Into the Light
Since his childhood, Greg Williams has been interested in spooky things. He fondly remembers his mother taking him at eight to see Alex Nicols’s 1958 thriller The Screaming Skull and says he enjoyed reading the old National Enquirer when it was filled with stories about train wrecks and mysterious events.
After a career in law, including 15 years as a Mass. district court judge, Williams retired in 2015 and began lecturing about local history. He started giving yearly Halloween-themed talks at the Sturgis Public Library in Barnstable and continues to lecture on historical crimes, notable Cape Cod figures, and the “romantico-macabre.”
Williams’s interest in Dracula came from reading Bram Stoker’s classic novel several years ago. “I studied the book and its predecessors and followed the development of the character of the vampire in English and Irish literature,” he says. The various myths and legends surrounding Dracula will be the subject of Williams’s talk at the Eastham Public Library on Tuesday, Oct. 22 at 6 p.m.
There are common misconceptions about Dracula, says Williams, many of which have arisen because most people are familiar with the character through movies. But Williams sticks to written and historical sources for his talks. Was Dracula actually inspired by 15th-century Romanian King Vlad the Impaler? It turns out that he wasn’t. “Vlad Tepes, the Impaler, was not the inspiration for Dracula, though he is mentioned in the novel,” says Williams. “Stoker derived the name ‘Dracula’ from Vlad’s father. The word dracul means ‘dragon,’ but Stoker thought it meant ‘devil.’ ”
The talk is free. See easthamlibrary.org for more information. —Hazel Everett
Gail Ann Dorsey Finds Her Voice
Gail Ann Dorsey vividly remembers the call that would change her life: David Bowie was on the phone asking her to join him on tour.
Dorsey would go on to play bass with Bowie for more than 20 years until his last tour in 2004. Some artists give the musicians in their bands room to express their personalities through their instruments, says Dorsey. “Bowie was one of those people,” she says. “He taught me how to trust myself.”
She’s been on the road with bands for most of her life, playing bass and writing songs. But on Saturday, Oct. 19 at 8 p.m., Dorsey will perform original songs and covers on vocals and guitar at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Provincetown in a concert with Zoë Lewis. “This is me trying to get my training wheels off again,” says Dorsey. “It’s been a long time since I’ve concentrated on myself.”
Dorsey’s musical journey began on her ninth birthday when she received a guitar after begging for one for years. She taught herself to play by ear. “I don’t read music,” she says, “and I don’t know theory.”
By the time she was 14 she began scanning bulletin boards in music stores to find a job in a band. “Every ad said, ‘Guitar player seeks bassist.’ ” She chose a random number and called a band in her neighborhood. “They were covering the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, all the things that I was teaching myself how to play off the records,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’
“I borrowed a bass from my older sister’s best friend’s boyfriend,” says Dorsey. She worked all summer, playing in clubs she wasn’t old enough to enter as a customer.
Some people consider bass to be a background instrument. But “it takes up a lot more space than people realize,” says Dorsey. It drives the direction of a song and is melodic as well as a rhythm instrument. Dorsey’s tone is warm and round, and her playing both grounds the band and pushes it forward. “I’ve developed my own style at this point,” she says. “I’ve learned I’m there to serve the song.”
Playing solo can be terrifying, says Dorsey, noting that she’s more comfortable supported by a band. “And I’ve never gotten as good on the guitar as I have on the bass,” she says, though guitar remains her favorite instrument. But she’s determined to kick the nerves and relish the live experience she loves so much.
“I’m enjoying finding my voice again,” she says. “There’s nothing like being able to share your music with other people, whether it’s five people or 50,000.”
Tickets for the Oct. 19 concert are $37 at tickettailor.com. —Dorothea Samaha
Art of Destruction and Resilience
The two artists in “Late Wood,” a two-part exhibition currently on view at Farm Projects in Wellfleet, use the natural world as inspiration and medium. Featuring work by Grace Emmet and Susan Lyman, the show is a “meditation on eco-grief,” according to a statement on the gallery website. While the works mourn destruction, they also honor resilience.
Lyman’s Cone of Uncertainty — a term most often used to describe the path of extreme storms — is made from the branches of a fallen corkscrew willow tree that she rescued in Boston. Suspended from the ceiling, the branches of the sculpture twist together like a bouquet, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, which hovers an inch from the floor. Branches painted orange are woven through the bouquet, and dark, featureless birds are trapped within like bugs in a web. More dark gray birds hang on the wall behind the sculpture. The name of an endangered or threatened bird is written on the bottom of each one.
“I want the piece to have an uncertainty about it,” Lyman says. “Maybe it’s falling apart, or maybe it’s being built. Are you hopeful or are you depressed about it?”
Emmet’s beech leaf eco-prints, etched in wax, line another wall of the gallery. The project explores beech leaf disease in Provincetown’s beech forest. The prints track the changes of the leaves throughout the seasons. Emmet’s other pieces, depicting animals and made with natural inks, also relate to the ecosystem of the beech trees. “Blue jays feed on beech nuts,” says Emmet. “And the birds help in the dispersal of beech tree seeds.”
The exhibition, which opened on Oct. 12, is on view through Monday, Nov. 4 at 355 Main St. See farmprojectspace.org for information. —Eve Samaha
Reclaiming Gay Narratives at the Provincetown Theater
The Say Gay Plays project was started by New York City’s Voyage Theater Company as a response to Florida’s passage of the Parental Rights in Education Act — otherwise known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — in 2022. According to its website, the project is an “accessible, royalty-free tool for activism through art that all of us can use to reclaim our narrative.”
The Provincetown Theater will present readings of four contemporary short plays by both emerging and established playwrights from the project on Wednesday, Oct. 23 at 7 p.m.
The plays, which are presented by participants in the theater’s B Plot Play Reading Series, cover a range of topics, themes, and time periods. In Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Doug Wright’s An Address to the Florida Legislature, an outspoken conservative named “John Q. Public” offers pragmatic suggestions for strengthening Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Lucy Thurber’s Late Night Drink tells the story of two lesbians who connect at a nightclub in New York City.
In Harrison Davis Rivers’s i love the s*** out of you, a young gay man is triggered when his lover breaks up with him by Post-It note. Set in 1972, The Greenhouse by J. Harvey Stone is about a group of gay undergraduates who meet secretly to create a safe space for themselves and forge connection.
According to the ACLU, 520 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in state legislatures in the last year, with more than 75 becoming law. The Say Gay Plays project aims to “take back [that] narrative through plays of courage, triumph, and pride,” according to its organizers. The project also invites individuals and theater groups to produce play readings in their communities.
Tickets to the Oct. 23 show are free; reservations are required. See provincetowntheater.org and saygayplays.org for more information. —Pat Kearns
Susan Bernstein’s ‘Mud Garden’ at Zone7a
Susan Bernstein is interested in the pottery tradition as a language common to diverse cultures around the globe: a kinship across time and space through craft and hands-on processes. “There is a human need for tactile beauty in the objects of our lives,” she says.
“Mud Garden,” Bernstein’s most recent body of work currently on view at Zone7a Gallery and Books, connects this ancient medium to contemporary Provincetown — specifically, the dahlia garden of Stormy Mayo on Bradford Street in Provincetown’s East End. Mayo, a marine scientist, is intrigued by the unique genetics of dahlias and also propagates new varieties of the flower.
Similarly, Bernstein explores the infinite potential of her own medium. Using traditional methods of coils and slab construction, she exploits the sculptural and visual qualities of utilitarian objects. Lightscape, a lantern, glows from within. The reflected light of its colored interior, ranging from yellow to dark orange, is visible through cutout slivers. It is not functional light that is emitted but light that is experiential. The effect is evocative of light on water.
Some works are vases inspired by ikebana and read like small altars, while others are minimal sculptures that coexist with the dahlias they hold.
The growing zone of Provincetown and much of the Cape has recently been recategorized as “zone 7a” as its climate has gotten warmer. Plants that could not grow here previously now can. Zone7a Gallery and Books is thus a fitting venue for Bernstein’s exhibition.
“Mud Garden” is on view from Oct. 18 to 29, with an opening reception on Friday, Oct. 18 at 5 p.m. Ten percent of the proceeds will go to the Center for Coastal Studies in honor of “mad dahlia scientist” Stormy Mayo and Laura Ludwig. For more information, see zone7a.galleryandbooks.xhbtr.com. —Chet Domitz
