A New Act Three in Provincetown
There were no arts classes in the schools that Nan LeClaire-Hirst went to when she was growing up, she says, and she didn’t attend college until after she became a mother. But she’s long loved theater, sent her children to theater day camps, and has a daughter who worked in costume design in Italy. “Theater has been in my life, but I nurtured it in everybody but me,” says the 72-year-old Wellfleet resident.
That is, until this spring: after responding to a notice she saw in March, LeClaire-Hirst joined Act Three, the Provincetown Theater’s new program for aspiring and professional actors age 60 and over. She was happy to find old friends there and enlarged her circle with new ones.
“It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done,” she says. Act Three, she says, has given seniors “a creative place where we can grow, learn new things, and learn more about ourselves than we ever thought we would.” Truro theater veteran Sallie Tighe calls Act Three “an incredible experience” that’s brought together people from different backgrounds in a powerful way.
Both praise Brittany Rolfs, who started Act Three. “Listening to the stories of our Provincetown elders during my time here has been inspiring, and I wanted to create a space where more of these stories could be heard and celebrated,” Rolfs says.
Fourteen members of the group will offer personal monologues in Timeshare, described as “Heartfelt. Hilarious. Human.” Rolfs says she hopes the show will prove that “no one is alone in their life experiences” and that sharing stories can fight the disconnection caused by our digital obsession.
LeClaire-Hirst, whose first onstage experience was in Rolfs’s staged reading of The Vagina Monologues for the B Plot series during Lesbian Visibility Week in April, will be telling a story about her family’s move when she was seven from Connecticut to South Carolina, where they encountered a very different social climate. Other participants in Timeshare include Nicole Barnum, Joan Butterton, Connie Chan, Bill Clark, Corinne Diana, Jo Hull Brisbane, Karen Jasper, Bob Junker, MaryChris Kenney, Karen Pagano, Shannon Scarry, and Jen Zee.
Timeshare will be performed on Sunday, June 1 at 2 p.m. with pay-what-you-can admission. See provincetowntheater.org for information. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Not-So-Bitter Songs at Preservation Hall
The Bitter and Broken Men’s Chorus isn’t actually a chorus. Led by Tom Fettig, it’s a six-person band with Fettig on vocals, his brother Andrew on electric bass, Lary Chaplan on violin, Frank Poranski on guitar, Kami Lyle on trumpet, and Benny Albro on drums and piano. And they’re neither bitter nor broken — though Fettig admits that his lyrics, while often humorous, also “lend themselves to being morose.” All six will be onstage at Wellfleet Preservation Hall (335 Main St.) for a WOMR benefit concert on Saturday, May 31 at 7 p.m.
The band approaches music with “a punk rock ethos,” says Fettig, but they play everything: “sad acoustic songs,” rock and roll, post punk indie rock, country, and jazz. The group released its debut album in November, featuring songs with titles like “Late Stage Capitalism Post Colonial Mambo” (a relaxed tune featuring syncopated beats and jazzy trumpet) and “Stupid Punk Song” (a punk rock track with a teenage garage band feel).
At Preservation Hall, Fettig says, the group will perform the entire album, time permitting, along with some new songs. They also occasionally cover songs by other artists. “Glenn Campbell, or John Prine,” says Fettig: it’s the kind of country that fits with the band’s “bitter and broken” theme.
Not everything they play is melancholy, though. “I’m a hopeful person,” he says, “and that gets expressed in our music. We talk about loss, but we also talk about resilience.” Balance is something he strives for. “I’ve always been a lyricist,” says Fettig, who studied journalism and English in college. “I love language, I love being funny, and I love being poignant. If I can pull that off in a song, it’s very rewarding.”
Tickets are $20 plus fees at wellfleetpreservationhall.org. —Eve Samaha
Esperanza Cortés Celebrates Life
Colombian-born artist Esperanza Cortés uses a wide variety of materials to create her sculptures, installations, and wall pieces: glass beads, embroidered cloth, clay, gold and silver leaf, chains, leather, repurposed pieces of furniture, and chandeliers. But it is her work with encaustic — a process of painting with pigmented hot wax — that brings her to the Outer Cape this weekend.
Cortés is the keynote speaker at the 18th annual International Encaustic Conference at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill’s Edgewood Farm (3 Edgewood Way) from Friday, May 30 through Sunday, June 1.
During the conference, the studios at Edgewood Farm will be used for workshops and demonstrations, and a large tent will be set up in the field for lunches, the keynote address, and roundtable discussions. On Sunday, artists will gather under the tent to share and sell their work. “It’s a nice way to support people’s art and see what everyone has been doing,” says Cherie Mittenthal, executive director at Castle Hill. The art sale is open to the public.
Cortés, who has spent most of her life in New York City, will be visiting the Cape for the first time. “I have traveled throughout my career,” she says. “It’s more interesting to me to meet people through art, a conference, an exhibition, a residency. It’s like I’m entering a new world, and it’s fascinating.”
Cortés’s work has focused on the effects of colonialism and the European plundering of Latin American resources and culture; the importance and power of women; and, more recently, the experiences of death and fear during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Cortés’s most recent series came out of this moment of anxiety. When the pandemic began, she was taking care of her father. Not wanting to visit stores to buy art supplies, she decided to make art with what she already had in her studio and returned to encaustic pieces she had previously given up on. She began incorporating beads and pieces of embroidered cloth from all over the world to create pieces like Tree of Life. “It’s a way of including everyone in the celebration that is life,” she says.
Celebration is part of all of Cortés’s work, even when the primary subject is more challenging. “Sometimes life can be so tough, but the thing about Latin American culture is that even though you go through moments of sorrow you still have to celebrate life,” she says.
See castlehill.org for more information. —Antonia DaSilva
The Sound of Neon
Glitterfox’s name fits the band’s sound. “It has a little bit of a rock-and-roll feeling,” says guitarist Andrea Walker. “It also has a little bit of dazzle.” The Portland, Ore.-based band — which also includes lead vocalist Solange Igoa, Eric Stalker on bass, and Blaine Heinonen on drums — will perform at the Hawthorne Barn (29 Miller Hill Road, Provincetown) on Friday, May 30, as part of Twenty Summers.
The group plays mainly indie rock infused with sounds reminiscent of the ’80s and ’90s. Walker uses vintage pedals with an electric guitar to warp its sound. “The pedals I use for my guitar are the same kinds that bands like the Cure and Depeche Mode used,” says Walker. “I love the way the guitar sounded in that era. It sounds like neon.” The band formed in 2012 as a duo with Walker and Igoa, and their sound was “a lot folkier,” says Igoa. Now that Stalker and Heinonen have joined, the sound has grown more complex, with elements of rock, folk, soul, and dance music.
Glitterfox’s debut full-length album, decoder, will be released by Jealous Butcher Records in August. Its songs cover themes of handling neurodivergence, mental health, and the effects of Walker and Igoa’s recent romantic split — they were a couple for years, and they say that they will remain musical collaborators. While Walker is the band’s lead songwriter, Igoa contributes “when the mood strikes.”
For their Twenty Summers concert, the group will play songs from their upcoming album as well as their previously released singles. Walker says the band plays two songs at every show: one, called “La da da,” is grungy and rich with emotion, while “Married to the Ground” has a more traditional Americana sound.
Tickets are $45 plus fees at 20summers.org. —Eve Samaha
Portraits of Aging, Beauty, and Resilience
A new photography exhibition at the Wellfleet Adult Community Center is the culmination of a project several decades in the making.
Curated by Robert Rindler, “Here Today: Portraits of Aging” is a series of photographs by Jane Paradise that, in the artist’s words, “celebrates the lives and challenges of four ‘older’ women, all nearing 100 years old, who lived diverse lives.” For Paradise, the project, which has previously been exhibited in Houston, Boston, Spain, and Ireland, is a means of providing visibility to those whose very existence is often overlooked. “These are the most invisible people in our culture, and the exhibit is an attempt to shine a light on their existence, their values, and their beauty,” she says.
The subjects are three family members — her mother, mother-in-law, and aunt — and a fellow artist and mentor: photographer Norma Holt, who died in 2013 and is best known for her public art project They Also Faced the Sea on Fisherman’s Wharf in Provincetown. The photographs of Holt (as well as those of Paradise’s aunt) are accompanied by reflections of life and aging in the subjects’ own words: for one photograph, the subject provides the caption I wish I had been less scared when I was young, while another of the still-beautiful Holt is wistfully titled When I was young I was considered beautiful.
But it is Paradise’s words that resonate throughout the exhibition. “Through these photographs I am hoping to demonstrate that a meaningful life can and often does exist even within a deteriorating body, and that our culture renders these women invisible at its own loss and peril,” she says. “It was a privilege and honor to be part of these women’s lives. What an extraordinary gift they’ve given me.”
Accompanying the exhibition is a preview of Paradise’s current work-in-process, “My Husband Had Alzheimer’s,” which documents and celebrates the life she shared with Frank DiGirolamo, who died earlier this year.
“Here Today: Portraits of Aging” is on view at the Wellfleet Adult Community Center (715 Old King’s Hwy.) through June 30. There will be an opening reception for the exhibition on Sunday, June 1 at 4 p.m., and admission to the show is free. See wellfleetcoa.org for information. —John D’Addario
Drag as Celebration and Rebellion
Tina Burner, who describes herself as “a showgirl at heart,” says that she’s a perfectionist — and that she also has adult attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. (“I can be all over the place.”) Together, those qualities can be helpful when she’s running through every aspect of her shows, including her latest, “BoobTube: Putting the HD Back in ADHD,” which she’s been working on since last fall.
The show, which opened over Memorial Day Weekend at the Crown & Anchor (247 Commercial St., Provincetown), kicks off with a parody song, “Internet Killed the Video Star,” and “jumps inside” some of Burner’s favorite television shows (including Cheers, Designing Women, and Sex and the City.) It will be Burner’s third full season at the Crown & Anchor; Provincetown, she says, “feels like home to me.”
Burner grew up on a horse farm in the small town of Lowville, N.Y., where her father was a veterinarian for racehorses. Her path led from childhood sports to tap dancing to a boy band called 5th Ring, and then to New York City. On a fateful night 16 years ago while Burner was bartending, a gap turned up in the karaoke lineup that needed to be filled. “They asked me if I did drag,” she says. “I said, ‘Not really.’ ” But she decided to step in anyway. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute — I get to sing, perform, and have a cocktail?’ This works for me!”
Drag queens wear many hats, she says. (“Literally — wigs are the worst.”) But these days, she thinks of drag as a form of rebellion. “It isn’t just dressing up,” she says. “It’s not as frivolous as I thought it was. You have the power to change the world, but in a pair of pumps and a wig.” Drag performers are artists, entertainers, and manifestations of resistance. It’s more important now than ever to support drag as an art form, “and it’s more important now than ever to laugh,” she says.
“Boob Tube” runs Sundays through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. through Sept. 11. Tickets are $40 plus fees at onlyatthecrown.com. —Dorothea Samaha
