Remembering Good Harbor Beach: A One-Act Play by Debbie Wiess

Summer 1923 – Celebrating 100 Years

Although they had met before, it was not until summer 1923 when Josephine Nivison and Edward Hopper came to Gloucester, MA to paint, that they started to court.

At Jo’s urging Ed started to use watercolors to capture the light and later that year she arranged for his work to be up next to hers in a show at the Brooklyn Museum that would help launch his career. Remembering Good Harbor Beach takes you from this first summer in Gloucester to 16 years later at their summer home in Truro, as it delves into the complicated relationship of this artist couple. It is often forgotten that Jo was an artist in her own right, her work hanging next to that of Picasso, Modigliani and others. The play recognizes her talent and gives her, her due. This two-character 30-minute one-act play set on two Massachusetts Capes, Cape Ann and Cape Cod, will be presented in a wide variety of arts and cultural venues throughout the region this year, the 100th anniversary of the summer that would be so pivotal.

After a staged reading of the play by local actors John Dennis Anderson and Jarice Hanson, PAAM’s CEO, Christine McCarthy, will speak about how some of the Hoppers’ artwork and memorabilia came to become a part of PAAM’s permanent collection.

Admission is $20, paid at the door. Doors open at 5:30pm, no reservations.

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Debbie Wiess (Author & Director) is a Boston-based writer, who writes plays and poetry, in French as well as English. Her work in both languages has been presented throughout the US and abroad in traditional theatres, alternative spaces, on the radio, cable and internet. She is a published author, and several of her plays have won awards. In addition to writing, she directs and produces, projects and events. Passionate about the Arts and a great frequenter of museums and galleries, she is drawn to subjects related to Art and Artists, and loves to be able to present in museum and gallery spaces. She is thrilled and honored to be presenting her play about the Hoppers, Remembering Good Harbor Beach, at PAAM, one of her favorite regional museums.

John Dennis Anderson (Edward Hopper), a Wellfleetian from Texas, is a retired professor of performance studies at Emerson College and has appeared at the Provincetown Theater in You Can’t Take It With You, The Laramie Project, and Casa Valentina. Anderson performs interactive solo presentations as authors Henry James, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Marshall McLuhan and others, and he has presented three readings on Cape Cod of his play-in-progress about novelist Madison Cooper. Anderson is a member of the Truro Playwright Collective, for which his play Isherwood was read last month at the Truro Public Library. His website is jdanderson.org.

Jarice Hanson (Josephine Nivison Hopper) is an actor and Professor Emerita of Communication at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, and a writer/actor. She’s been seen in Provincetown in August: Osage County and The Glass Menagerie, and in Wellfleet at several readings at Preservation Hall in association with offerings of Wellfleet Universities’ programs over the past few years. She currently tours with her one-woman Chautauqua show, Frances Perkins: A Woman’s Work, and is developing other portrayals of strong women who deserve a more prominent place in history. She welcomes the opportunity to know Jo Hopper, who is also one of the strong women of her time, and understand the light and shadows of her life.