Janet Moore in Colour My World
All photos by Jim Dalglish
by Rebecca M. Alvin
Jim Dalglish didn’t know what to expect when he put out a call for short plays by Cape Cod playwrights to submit for possible production. The founding artistic director of Helltown Players was looking for another round of short plays after the success of Helltown’s Little Devils, a collection of several short plays the group put together in the winter of 2024 and performed in Orleans and Provincetown. While those plays were written by the trustees of this two-year-old theater company, Dalglish wanted to cast a wider net this year by specifically putting out a call for works by Cape Cod writers whose works had not been produced in the first round. The stories could be about anything and touch on any theme. The only requirement was that they were by Cape Cod affiliated writers and that the plays be short, ideally under 15 minutes in length.
A playwright himself with a long history of working in the theater on the Cape, Dalglish knew he would receive solid work, as we have such a large pool of talent here to draw from, but anything was possible. All told, Helltown received 46 submissions that spanned a range of topics and approaches. With trustees Lynda Sturner and Ian Ryan, Dalglish read through all of the submissions and came to curate six plays, each one just 10 – 16 minutes in length, to present to audiences in More Little Devils, a production that has already been performed at Cape Rep in Brewster and the Academy Playhouse in Orleans, and comes to Pilgrim House in Provincetown this week.
“There were a preponderance of plays about Alzheimer’s. I think we got six or seven plays that touched on that theme, and we thought that that was something that should be reflected in the decision process because it obviously was a topic on people’s minds, on playwrights’ minds on Cape Cod,” Dalglish says.
And while these themes do come up in the ultimate program that was curated, the plays are not unified in subject matter; it’s more of a conceptual through line that we detect throughout the six plays that unfold over the course of 90 minutes, something about personal histories, recollections—reliable and not—of our own histories, and about loss. And while heavy themes are addressed, overall, the show is a cathartic expression of how art can uplift us, even when it looks at the dark sides of our lives.
It’s interesting that there are these strong conceptual links between all six plays, but there is no consensus on how exactly to describe these linkages; it differs depending on who you talk to. “If I wouldn’t try to encapsulate it, it might be: ‘Pay attention,’” says Wendy Watson, who wrote the second piece in the show, Rolando, a play about encounters with homelessness on a subway train in New York City in the early 1980s. “My first take when I saw the six together was oh, okay, two are pretty political, two are about memory loss. But that didn’t give me a theme. By the third or fourth time that I’d seen it, I thought, ‘oh, actually, yes, I can see that all of them involved some level of people who are overlooked and not listened to, whether that’s because they have memory loss or because they are unhoused and living in a camp under railroad tracks, you know. So that to me became sort of thematic.”
On the other hand, Bill Jacobs, who is an actor in the play Colour My World, but also wrote and directed the final play in the collection, Convergencee, sees a structural commonality, despite the range of subject matter covered in the collection. He says, “I think most of the short plays that are part of the More Little Devils festival had something, you know, a moment of special reveal or realization that gives the audience a bit of a shock, and I think that makes for great theater.”
In each play, the individuals in the audience discover what’s really going on for themselves, and not necessarily all at once, collectively. But while many of the plays feature little surprises that make them hard to write about without taking away from the intended impact, one can say they are united in a presentation of loss, memory, and history, with many variations on those themes embedded within the collection.
The program begins with No Surrender, written by Candace Perry and directed by Scott Cunningham, which imagines the thoughts of General Robert E. Lee after his statue is taken down in Louisiana. Then there is Watson’s play, Rolando, directed by Florence Heller, Melinda Buckley’s Colour My World, directed by Judith Partelow, which deals with what we remember from our past; The Pros and Cons of Implosion by R.D. Murphy and directed by Mary Arnault, which centers on a conversation between a young girl who wants to have her neighbor’s car, which hasn’t been driven since September of 2001; and Remembering When I Used to Remember, written by Patrick Riviere and also directed by Heller, about an elderly couple coping with the loss and periodic return of unpleasant memories. And then we finish with Jacobs’ Convergence, which brings together three 20-year-olds from different walks of life for one brief moment in 1966 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and reveals the distinct paths they will take in life and what role support systems play in their developing identities.
Dalglish emphasizes it was essential that the plays be meaningful and thoughtful works. “Especially in light of contemporary society and what’s happening right now, we did not want skits. We did not want sketches; we wanted real plays that had meaning,” he explains. “My rule of thumb for plays that I think are successful is that there are three things: They stimulate the mind. They move your emotions, you know, they stimulate your heart. And then they also haunt you for three days.”
A good example is Buckley’s play Colour My World, which Judith Partelow selected to direct because it had such a strong impact on her, emotionally. In fact, she says she requested to direct it immediately after reading it. “I was as moved as everybody [in the audience] is at the end of the play. I just had chills and I was so touched,” she recalls.
Helltown Players was founded two years ago to present the work of Cape Cod playwrights. Although Dalglish says his inspiration in founding it was the Provincetown Players, the theater company that featured works by Eugene O’Neil and Susan Glaspell back in the 1910s, he says, “We didn’t want to name it the ‘Provincetown Players II’ or More Provincetown Players’,” Dalglish says with a laugh. And yet he wanted to pay homage to Provincetown specifically as the birthplace of modern American drama, so they used the nickname for Provincetown, “Helltown.” Likewise, he says, everyone who works with the group in any capacity is called a “Hellion,” hence the name for these short play collections Little Devils.
More Little Devils demonstrates, the plays can take place anywhere and tackle all sorts of different aspects of the human experience, using minimal props and spare sets, with everyone kind of pitching in for these collaborative productions. (Not only did Bill Jacobs act in one play and direct and write another, but Florence Heller directed two different plays and was also acted the technical director for all six!) Operating with low overhead and no space committed to their use, Helltown is able to expand its reach beyond just a single town and produce plays all over the Cape. Coming up after More Little Devils, Helltown trustee and well-known local playwright Margaret van Sant will have her play Portraiture, about an imagined meeting between Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Mabel Dodge Luhan produced by the company at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, as well as at the Cotuit Center for the Arts.
While Cape audiences are typically sophisticated theater-goers, there are differences every time you put on a play in front of a different group, and it is that communal experience that is vital to theater wherever it is performed. “A play is not like a novel,” Dalglish says. “When you go see a play, you’re a part of a collective audience, and to me, you’re there because you’re trying to experience this collective meaning with each other in a human community.”
More Little Devils will be performed at Pilgrim House, 336 Commercial St., Provincetown, April 17 – 19, 8 p.m. and Easter Sunday, April 20, 4 p.m. For tickets and information visit helltownplayers.org.
