Sunday, March 23, 2025 10:00 AM
Join us on March 23, 2025, for BESTON, a Collage for Performance of the Words of Henry Beston, Elizabeth Coatsworth, and Kate Beston Barnes. Adapted and arranged by John Dennis Anderson, with cast members John Dennis Anderson, Karen McPherson and Laura Scribner.
This script is compiled and arranged from primary and secondary sources listed below. It
incorporates passages from Henry Beston’s enduring work of nature writing, The Outermost House, and a few of his other works. The Outermost House, published in 1928, recounts a year Beston spent living in and observing nature in a dune shack on the Great Beach of Cape Cod in Eastham; it has been cited as an inspiration for the creation of the National Seashore.
Juxtaposed with these passages by Beston are the points of view of his wife Elizabeth Coatsworth and their daughter Kate Beston Barnes on the disparate writing methods of Beston and Coatsworth. Barnes’ words are from her poems and interviews about her parents and provide her perspective on her parents and their marriage.
John Dennis Anderson, a native of Waco, Texas, now living on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, is a performance studies scholar and Professor Emeritus in Communication Studies at Emerson College in Boston. Anderson has received grants to develop Chautauqua performances. Anderson was a faculty member for the Chautauqua Training Institute of Humanities North Dakota in 2022-2023. He teaches for the Open University of Wellfleet in Massachusetts, and he serves on their Board and is a trustee of the Helltown Players. His website is jdanderson.org.
Learn more at 10 a.m. on Sunday, March 23, 2025 at the Chapel in the Pines in Eastham. Doors open at 9:30. Also on Zoom via this Zoom program link.
All are welcome.