Dogtown Common by Percy MacKaye, adapted and directed by Peter Littlefield at the Windhover Center for the Performing Arts, Rockport, Ma
Percy MacKaye’s 1922 poem, Dogtown Common, is a beloved document of Gloucester lore. It tells the story of two legendary figures, Tammy Younger and her niece Judy Rhines, shunned for practicing witchcraft. It was inspired by Charles Mann’s 1906, The Story of Dogtown or In the Heart of Cape Ann, that compiles recollections about the outsiders, berry-pickers, subsistence farms and self-proclaimed witches that inhabited Dogtown after it was abandoned in the early 1800’s.
The poem has a history with The Windhover Center for the Performing Arts, where Ina Hahn performed it more than once. Lisa Hahn, the current Executive Director, asked Annisquam resident and Director Peter Littlefield to do a new production. Windhover had been a dairy farm. It seemed the perfect place to stage the poem because it looks the way Dogtown must have looked before it was abandoned after the Revolution. Windhover’s production combines the idea of an installation with a staged reading like a ghost story. The performers sit around a table and build an image of Dogtown as they enact the poem. The performance is as fully staged as a conventional play, but we put the emphasis on the imaginative act of engaging a poetic text.
