John Shuman Is Looking for Answers
Wellfleet-based actor and memoirist John Shuman has a lot of questions about the important things we often take for granted, like laughter, music, and life in general. He hopes that he can answer some of them in a free performance — titled “John Shuman Has a Lot of Questions” — at the Pond Hill School (65 Old Paine Hollow Road, South Wellfleet) on Saturday, Dec. 28 at 1 p.m.
Shuman grew up in Springfield and has lived and worked in Los Angeles, New York City, and Minneapolis. “But I’m not a city person,” he says. “When I came to New York, I thought, ‘Where’s the quiet? Where are the trees?’ ” The nature and quiet on the Outer Cape have always suited him, he says, because “life is so frenzied, we forget in this country about the things that really matter.”
As an actor, Shuman says he has always presented other people’s thoughts, so it’s a new and exciting experience to present his own. He dates the start of his writing career to a rafting trip in the Grand Canyon, during which he wrote a diary chronicling the adventure.
“The other members of the group wanted a copy of it,” he says. “That was the first time I wrote and was read.” He later wrote opinion pieces for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. After coming back East, he says, he was “drawn to writing workshops, which involved reading my essays aloud. Thus started my path into recitation.”
Shuman has also written for the Independent. In one piece, he put himself in the position of saying “Happy New Year” to people living 500 years in the future. What would life be like by then? How much would it have changed? After the piece was published, Shuman found himself asking more questions.
“The first thing I thought was ‘Do people want to hear this?’ ” he says. “There’s always a leap you take as a writer.”
Admission to Shuman’s performance at the Pond Hill School is free. See wellfleetculturaldistrict.org for information. —Hazel Everett
Marti Gould Cummings Rings In the New Year
Marti Gould Cummings is jet-lagged. They’re a cruise director and drag performer with Vacaya, an LGBTQ travel company. “They took me to Antarctica,” Cummings says. “I saw lots and lots of penguins. I did a polar plunge in drag, which was very cold.”
Cummings grew up in Kennedyville, Md. and has lived in New York City for 20 years. With Vacaya, they’ve traveled the world. “But when people ask me what my favorite place is,” Cummings says, “I always say Provincetown. It’s where my heart is.”
Last summer marked their 10th year of coming to Provincetown. On Monday, Dec. 30 at 7:30 p.m., Cummings will perform a New Year’s cabaret show at the Crown & Anchor (247 Commercial St.).
“A lot of cabaret shows have a strict script,” they say. “I love that and appreciate that.” But for Cummings, it’s the audience that decides the direction of their show. “My greatest joy as an entertainer is connecting with the people in my audience.”
Activism and protest have always been part of Cummings’s work. “Fundamentally, what I protest for, fight for, march for, is to better the lives of everyday people who are left out of conversations — or when they are brought up in conversation, it’s to be legislated against.”
Cummings served two terms on the NYC Nightlife Advisory Board, where they advised former mayor Bill DeBlasio, helping to strengthen protections for people working in bars, restaurants, bodegas, taxis, and cleaning services. “Anyone who works at night,” says Cummings. “Drag is a big part of that.”
In 2021, Cummings ran for City Council in New York. Though they didn’t win, Cummings says the campaign had other wins, like introducing policy positions and issues that others have picked up. “Government is for the people, by the people,” Cummings says. “That includes people who haven’t traditionally been at the table — queer, nonbinary, and trans people.”
In their performance at the Crown & Anchor, Cummings will sing some holiday songs. A newer addition to their repertoire is Cher’s “DJ Play a Christmas Song.” “It’s fun, dumb, and ridiculous,” says Cummings. “I love it.” The set list also includes numbers by Celine Dion, Miley Cyrus, and Judy Garland. “It’s a cool, eclectic bag of music,” they say. They’ll tell stories, too. Cummings’s goal is for the audience “to have an hour of laughter amid the chaos of the world.”
“It’s a New Year’s show,” Cummings says. “We’re starting a new chapter. Let’s try to go into it with some joy.” For more information see onlyatthecrown.com. —Eve Samaha
Behind the Scenes With Robert Rindler
Robert Rindler is the founder and volunteer curator of the Great Pond Gallery, which opened at 2018 in the Wellfleet Adult Community Center (715 Old King’s Hwy.). The gallery’s first exhibition featured work by Robert Henry, and since then the spacious windowed room has hosted shows by more than 60 Outer Cape artists. Exhibitions are held year-round.
“Our goal is to support local artists, well known or deserving recognition,” he says. This January, the gallery features art by Rosalind Pace, whose exhibition will open with a reception on Sunday, Jan. 5, at 3 p.m.
Rindler retired to Wellfleet in 2005 after being involved with the Outer Cape’s art scene for more than three decades as a part-time resident. He earned graduate degrees in architecture but found that art was his true passion. Administrative positions at the Rhode Island School of Design and Cooper Union in New York City, as well as teaching art, led to his current work orchestrating a gallery whose program encompasses diverse media, including oil painting, photography, watercolor, and collage. (Rindler’s own color-saturated sculptures, made of plastic objects he collects, were exhibited at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 2011.)
Rindler’s collaborative approach to the Pace exhibit exemplifies the success of the Great Pond Gallery. An award-winning collagist and poet, Pace’s formal art studies began in 1973 when she came to Truro to study at Castle Hill with Budd Hopkins, whose influence is seen in her carefully constructed artworks characterized by bright color forms and cut and torn edges.
Pace chose pieces that have not been shown previously. In tandem with Pace, Rindler then organized those pieces into an exhibit. “As curator, I create the series, picking the artists and the sequence in which they show,” says Rindler. “I tell them it’s their exhibit. They may choose work that’s not necessarily marketable. Often, they design a show to cover more wall space than a commercial gallery provides.”
While the works in the exhibitions at the Great Pond Gallery are for sale, the gallery doesn’t take a percentage; artists can donate to the community center. “When artists have gallery representation, our posters say to contact that gallery for sales information,” Rindler says. “It becomes another venue for the artist to exhibit. I also contact gallery owners, making sure they’re comfortable with me showing an artist’s work.”
Rindler credits his husband, James Connors, as an essential partner in organizing the gallery program, which they do as volunteers. They cannot afford to be major museum donors, he says. Instead, “We made a decision to do our philanthropy to benefit the Outer Cape’s creative community. Everything we do for the gallery we do together and on our own time.”
See wellfleetcoa.org for more information on current and upcoming exhibitions at the Great Pond Gallery. —Susan Rand Brown
New Year’s Day at the Mary Heaton Vorse House
The historic home of journalist, novelist, and activist Mary Heaton Vorse at 466 Commercial St. in Provincetown’s East End will be open to the public on Wednesday, Jan. 1, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a local scholar on hand offering stories and insights about Vorse’s life and achievements.
“She was in the house from 1907 to 1966,” says Mary Jane Treacy, who is currently researching the bohemian circle of friends who spent time with Vorse in Provincetown and at her home in Greenwich Village in New York City. “There are so many Mary Heaton Vorses over that time span. She was involved in the arts community and was also a war correspondent. Her labor activism took her all over the United States, Mexico, France, Italy, the Balkans. She was everywhere.” Vorse also wrote Time and the Town, a memoir of her life in Provincetown published in 1942.
It was only in the last decades of her life that Vorse lived in the house year-round. For Vorse, the house was both “a blessing and an albatross,” Treacy says. Stuck in an unhappy marriage when she bought the house, Vorse encouraged her first husband to decorate the parlor, which he did with little regard for what she might like: Albert Vorse bought a big fancy desk for himself and bought his wife a pie keep for storing pies, as if to establish the front of the house as his domain and the kitchen as hers.
“But she turns the tables on him and uses the pie keep for storing her manuscripts,” says Treacy.
In addition to newspaper articles, Vorse wrote short fiction for women’s magazines: stories she called “lollipops,” which helped pay the bills. She wrote upstairs in her bedroom, Treacy says, often desperate to find quiet space away from her three small children. The house was open to her bohemian friends including Susan Glaspell and “Jig” Cook, who co-founded the Provincetown Players, sometimes called the first modern theater company in the United States.
Treacy believes Vorse would have loved the contemporary renovation of the house by interior designer Ken Fulk and its ongoing use for residencies and events for artists and writers. “I don’t think it’s a replica of what she lived in,” she says. “But I think the spirit of the house is a replica of the life she wanted.”
The open house on New Year’s Day is presented by the Provincetown Arts Society, which manages the house, and gallerist Helen Addison. Over 100 artworks from the Addison Gallery in Orleans are currently on view in an exhibition curated by Gene Tartaglia in collaboration with Addison. Mary Jane Treacy will be available to answer questions from noon to 2 p.m. See provincetownartssociety.com for more information and to RSVP. —Katy Abel
