Post 150 - August 8, 2020

Day 150…

Cape Cod extends eastward away from Boston like a flexed arm with its hand bent back towards the shoulder. Provincetown sits at the tip of its fingers.

I was talking with a local who owns and runs a jewelry store on Commercial Street yesterday. She said that from the point where Provincetown is situated down through the next three big towns, which is about halfway to the elbow, the population tends to skew Democratic. After that, heading towards Boston, they skew more towards the Republican side.

When Europeans first landed in Provincetown in 1602, the area was settled by the Nauset tribe. The sailors caught a huge amount of cod so named what is now Provincetown, Cape Cod. It wasn’t until later that the name got applied to the whole area that it now covers.

Eighteen years later, the Mayflower landed here, and this is where the Mayflower Compact was drawn up and signed.  Eventually the pilgrims moved across the bay and settled permanently in Plymouth, but the area remained a popular fishing ground for the colony. In 1654 the Governor of the Plymouth Colony bought this land from the Nauset Chief for two brass kettles, six coats, twelve hoes, twelve axes, twelve knives and a box.

After the American Revolution, the area grew into a major fishing and whaling center. By the 1890’s it had also become popular with writers and artists and had started to become a popular destination for summer tourists.  

A sizeable population of Portuguese sailors from the Azores settled here. The Portuguese Bakery, which catered to the sailors, was opened on Commercial Street in about 1900. It is extremely popular to this day and you have to get up pretty early in the morning if you want to get a fresh buttered Portuguese sweet roll before their stock runs out. I’ve gotten a delicious breakfast to go from there several times over the course of this week.

In 1898, a huge storm called the Portland Gale largely destroyed the fishing industry. The town’s artists moved into the abandoned fishing buildings where they still are. Contemporary Commercial street is lined with art galleries housed in all sorts of different-looking buildings.

In the 1960’s, Provincetown became popular with hippies. Many of them moved out here and opened up groovy businesses like hand-tooled leather shops, cafes and head-shops. Many of those are still here as well.

Back in the early 1900’s, the area started also started attracting a sizeable gay population. Drag Queens were performing here as early as the 1940’s. The Provincetown Business Guild was formed in 1978 to help promote gay tourism. Nowadays, more than 200 local businesses contribute to its ongoing work. The 2010 census showed that there were 163.1 same-sex couples for every 1000 - the highest rate in the country.

The Provincetown Players started performing on the porch of a summer rental in 1915. The group of writers and artists who participated, returned to New York’s Greenwich Village at the end of the season and encouraged a much wider group to return here with them the next summer.

Among the people who came up the next year was the journalist and poet John Reed. He invited his friend Eugene O’Neill who, apparently unbeknownst to him, was having an affair with his wife, writer Louise Bryant.

Warren Beatty wrote, directed and starred in one of my favorite movies of all time, Reds, which is all about Reed. Beatty (Reed), Diane Keaton (Bryant) and Jack Nicholson (O’Neill) were all nominated for Oscars in 1982. Almost everything about the movie was nominated including the movie itself. Maureen Stapleton won for her portrayal of activist Emma Goldman and Beatty won Best Director. It’s a fantastic film that touches on all of this. I am sure I have seen it at least ten times.

As of 1916, O’Neill had never had a single one of his plays performed. His famous father (Actor James O’Neill - see Long Day’s Journey into Night) had bankrolled the publication of a collection of his, at that point, unproduced work, but the Provincetown Players weren’t impressed by any of it.

That summer, however, he read for them a play he had written called Bound East for Cardiff. In it, a sailor lies dying out at sea on a ship. He talks to his mate, while a storm rages all around them. The two sailors’ language is crude as befitting who they are, which was something that audiences at the time were not used to hearing.

Susan Glaspell, a novelist and one of the founders of the Players said that when they all heard O’Neill read them the play for the first time that the group finally “knew what they were for”.

The Provincetown Players occupied a building out on a wharf where the sounds of the fishermen, and the waves from the surrounding sea only added to the performance. The company got a little attention from some Boston newspapers and that fall, performed a series of the plays back in New York City including Bound East for Cardiff.

In the first two years of the Provincetown Players, Eugene O’Neill had six of his plays performed. They took over an abandoned stable at 133 MacDougal Street in the Village and converted it into a theatre.

In 1920, O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones premiered there starring the great African American actor Charles Gilpin. He was the first black actor to ever receive the Drama League award and be listed in their annual compilation of the ten most influential people in theatre of the year.

From its founding on, the Provincetown Players was also notable for the large percentage of women that made up its management team as well as those who were represented onstage as playwrights.

The Provincetown Players only performed for two seasons out here on the Cape but lasted for six seasons back in New York. After they disbanded, associates kept the name and mission going until the Stock Market crash of 1929 when they were forced to shutter for good. Despite that, the theatre and its name continued on.

Edward Albee’s first play to be performed in New York, the one-act The Zoo Story, premiered there. Writers such as Sam Shepard and John Guare and David Mamet had premieres of their work in that theatre. Charles Busch’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom ran there for five years.

In 2008, the original structure was torn down but the new building that went up in its place incorporated a comparable space that is still an active theatre to this day and still called the Provincetown Playhouse.

The Spanish Flu pandemic struck two years after the final performance of the Players in Provincetown.

On August 26, 1918, several sailors on Commonwealth Pier in Boston reported in sick. By the next day, there were eight new cases. The day after that, there were 58. Ten days later on September 7, it was reported that Provincetown had 415 cases.

There were no doctors or nurses here because they had all been drafted into World War 1. The Unitarian Universalist Meetinghouse on Commercial Street opened its doors and became a makeshift hospital. A total of 47 people in Provincetown died over seven months which works out to be one person every four days in this small town.

Local lore says that the ghosts of the victims still roam the halls of the Meetinghouse.

Looking at the news on TV this morning, there seems to be just a lot of the same happening. We are in a sort of holding pattern.

The Democrats and the White House are deadlocked over the stimulus plan. The President is threatening to issue some sort of an executive order if an agreement can’t be reached, but it is unclear if that will have any legal basis.

Meanwhile, we will likely hit five million cases of COVID-19 nation-wide by tomorrow or the next day.

For what it’s worth, Dr. Allan Lichtman, who has accurately predicted the outcome of every Presidential election since 1984, is predicting that former V.P. Joe Biden will win the election in November. Lichtman is a political historian and a professor at American University.

He correctly predicted not only the President’s win in 2016 but also his impeachment.

He uses a series of 13 key points to make his predictions. Those keys have less to do with the candidates themselves and more to do with national trends in the economy and the work of the administrations around them. He looks at things like social unrest and foreign policy although does take into account individual candidate’s charisma or lack thereof.

Putting an asterisk after this announcement, he cites two unknown factors that could alter the outcome.

The first is voter suppression. If the GOP is successful in its efforts to block enough people from voting through such actions as stopping mail-in balloting, that could change the result.

The second is if there is significant interference from a foreign power such as Russia. Neither of those, unfortunately, can be ruled out.

Michael’s making breakfast. It’s a beautiful day. Not too hot. Perfect beach day.

Later, we are having dinner with one of my college roommates and his partner tonight in town.

Before that, I will drag Michael down to Gosnold Street, and we will try and see where the original wharf was that held the Provincetown Players theatre.

We will also stop by and pay our respects to the spectres of the 1918 pandemic at the Meetinghouse.

Maybe later we will re-watch Reds.

We can’t predict what is going to happen.

So, today, we aren’t even going to try.