REMEMBERING NUTTING: A preacher of the "Gospel of beauty." |
Preacher-turned-photographer Wallace Nutting was enamored of “the earliest forms” of America. A Victorian and witness to the rapid industrialization of his age, he saw the imagery and artifacts of an older America as embodying “the strength and beauty” of our founding character and leaders.
His feeling for the ways of our nation’s past — which continues to be a profoundly American trait — is the fodder of Wallace Nutting’s Old America, a beautifully produced original performance about the New England preservationist and photographer who roused mass nostalgia for the Colonial era. Part of a six-month long series of Piscataqua-region events that will explore the sentiment and sensibility of the Colonial Revival Movement, Old America is the latest in an impressive array of historical productions created and performed by M. Marguerite Mathews and Greg Gathers, of Pontine Theater. They provide a potpourri of glimpses into Nutting’s enduring creation of “Old America,” as well as stories of his contemporaries, and their performance is both charming and culturally acute.
Raised near Augusta, Nutting first studied theology and then served as a pastor until a nervous breakdown at the age of 43 forced him to give up the pulpit. But he didn’t stop preaching, and instead changed his sermon to the secular “Gospel of beauty,” which he saw in the architecture and objects wrought by New England’s Colonial forebears. He photographed quintessential images of the old Northeast (birches, grazing animals, farmhouses), eventually hired more than 200 young women to hand-tint the prints, and sold them on a national scale. In the nineteen-teens, he began buying and renovating a string of five historic houses, which he used as backdrops for his photos, opened to an increasingly history-hungry public, and outfitted with his reproduced Colonial furniture.
Based in Portsmouth (which is home to many restored Colonials, including the Wentworth-Gardner House) Pontine has been producing explorations of New England phenomena for 29 years. Like its creators’ many other shows, Old America is marked by deft culling of primary and secondary sources (the script is drawn entirely from the books by Nutting and some contemporaries, the correspondence of historical society members, and newspaper pieces), and an elegantly traditional sensibility.
Old America is multi-medial, whimsical, and classic. A series of reversible quilted panels, hung in a grid on a wooden frame, depict sienna-toned images of the old Colonials. The two performers reach to open what look like books, and pull out folded wooden cutouts of the houses, which they set up on tables. They wear character masks and manipulate delicate wooden puppets. A modest white projection screen treats us to images of the old New England that so moved Nutting.
Mathews and Gathers move in and out of a small ensemble of characters and voices — officials of historical societies; colorful socialite Elizabeth Perkins, who summered in York, restored a “modest red-brown house” there, and wrote a book about it; the dramatic leads of South Berwick author Sarah Orne Jewett’s period novel The Tory Lover.
