Photo: Casey Martin
by Steve Desroches
Halloween is serious business in Provincetown. Slap together a blasé costume or show up in busted drag, or worse, wear no fancy dress at all, and you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of snickers of pity and side eyes full of mocking scorn. It is Gay Christmas after all. Show some respect.
As such, Karl Gregory and his friends began planning for their Halloween ensembles weeks ahead as they prepared to travel from New York City to Provincetown for the high haunted homo holiday in 2017. Gregory had once seen a man dressed a pizza for Halloween, but with the added caveat that he was a “sexy pizza.” And then he and his friends had an epiphany: why not go as sexy car accident victims? The stroke of demented genius was confirmed by the universe when days later Gregory was walking down the street in New York and saw a woman wearing a neck brace on which she’d written “Still Sexy,” using a Sharpie. That Halloween Gregory donned a blonde wig, neck brace, and pink dress, all complemented by some blacked out teeth, a bloodied nose with bruises under each eye, and a few bandages here and there. And he named her Trish.
“People were obsessed with her,” says Gregory, laughing and shrugging his shoulders as he puts his hands in the air. “Trish was a big hit. And it occurred to me that Trish is a thing. I kept pulling her out for tea dance, and people constantly asked if I had a show in town. Some people expressed genuine concern that I was hurt. I’ve laid off the blood since. It was a little too much for some.”
For Gregory, a seasoned actor, Trish was initially nothing more than a fun night out with friends. But it soon became clear that “Trish” had legs, albeit broken ones. But what to do with her was the question. As an actor Gregory was no stranger to character work, obviously. With a BFA in acting from Syracuse University, followed by an MFA from Brown University’s collaborative program with the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, Gregory’s resume is full of stage performances in shows as varied as Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and comedies like Buyer & Cellar and The SantaLand Diaries, as well as The Glass Menagerie and The Beauty Queen of Leenane. And his theatrical home was often on the stage with the Kitchen Theatre Company in Ithaca, New York, where he spent time, as his husband teaches at Cornell University.
While Trish often steals the show in Provincetown, audiences will remember Gregory from his recent portrayal of Louis Aronson in the Provincetown Theater’s spring production of Angels in America. It’s a role he’s long wanted to play and when the auditions were announced he called his friend and fellow actor Todd Flaherty and said that, “Let’s do this! You go for Prior and I’ll go for Louis.” And that’s exactly what came to be. But it would be a call from Flaherty, who is sometimes known by his drag moniker TaDonna, that encouraged Gregory to enter the annual Mz Bearded Mistress Pageant at the Provincetown Brewing Company as Trish. And she won, with her sustained injuries and all.
“I was legitimately shocked,” says Gregory. “Shocked. There were so many seasoned queens.”
It’s clear that the masses want more Trish, which has Gregory in a delightful state of confusion by an unexpected opportunity. So far Trish is little more than a product of the improvisational street theater that is available every day of the year, as costumes and camp are always in fashion when one leaves their home in Provincetown. But at the moment there’s not much back story to Trish, just that she keeps getting into accidents, was in a coma for five years, and is an eternal optimist, enthusiastically grateful to be alive, so much so that she ignores the fractures and scrapes that keep coming her way brushing them off to be in service to others.
While Gregory has great range, he’s particularly gifted as a comedic actor. He made his Provincetown debut in 2018 in the Lucky Devil Theater Company’s original production of Provincetown Murder Mystery followed the next year by Gene & Karl Are Ptown AF, which lampooned summer in Provincetown. So as he speaks about Trish’s future you can see it in his eyes that this hard luck gal with a heart of gold is an ever-expanding universe. Trish, in a strange way, represents the wild ride Gregory’s been on since the pandemic shuttered theaters putting him largely out of work followed by the decision for he and his husband to move to Provincetown year-round in 2022, followed by being cast in the romantic drama High Tide, set and filmed on the Cape tip, which screened at the Provincetown International Film Festival in June and opens in New York October 18, Los Angeles October 25, and select cities come November. And then there’s Trish, who—at the invitation of Steve Azar—is hosting Townie Summer Bingo at the Gifford House through Halloween, when it will pass the torch to Tiki Bronstein (Thirsty Burlington) who will continue the tradition of off-season bingo at the A House, a time when Gregory just might put pen to paper to see if Trish, neck brace and all, has a show in her.
“Life,” laughs Gregory. “I don’t know…life happens sometimes and it actually all ends up pretty good.”
Trish hosts Townie Summer Bingo every Sunday 8 to 10 p.m. now through Halloween at the Gifford House, 9 Carver St. For more information visit giffordsprovincetown.com or call 508.487.0688.
