A Mixed Media Night at the A Gallery

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From left, Niki Patton, Tony Omer, Leslie J Baker and John Ortman read “W. Shakespeare, Diagnosis: Paranoid Schizophrenia.” —Photo by Tanya Augoustinos

Gwyn McAllister, writer, reporter, and impresario-in-spite-of-herself, is a positive Merlin at pulling things together. Give her a Victorian porch (which she owns in Oak Bluffs), a rack of vintage clothes, and a Tarot card reader, and she’ll host an impromptu yard sale. Last Saturday night she enlarged her scope and helped to transform The A Gallery on Uncas Avenue in Oak Bluffs into a mixed media event or, as Ms. McAllister called it, “a cabaret with fabulous art all around it.”

A Gallery owner Tanya Augoustinos has long been open to play readings and musicales in her space with its high rafters, concrete floors, and vast walls. Last winter, McAllister, in mover-and-shaker mode, convinced Ms. Augoustinos to put together a night debuting McAllister’s half-hour play, a spoof on A Christmas Carol starring a Bernie Madoff type as Scrooge. Along with some great contemporary art on the walls, Christmas lights, snacks, and grog, the evening was an unqualified success.

In the past month, McAllister felt drawn to mount a new show, and she and Ms. Augoustinos marked their calendars for Columbus Day Weekend. To a packed house of 60-plus people, the following performers held sway:

Young Milo Silva of Oak Bluffs mesmerized the audience with a Mongolian horsehair fiddle, the size of a long and sinewy mandolin, known to Russians as a morin khuur. Mr. Silva, tall, with a mane and beard of ginger-brown hair, studied at the University of Mongolia, and returned with an utter mastery of this distinctly unusual instrument. He set about playing a composition of his own, “Horses Having Sex,” followed by a short piece from Tchaikovsky.

Next, poet Donald Nitchie of Chilmark, also Island-reared, read several poems bespeaking Vineyard settings. One of them described a long-ago football skirmish between our home team and Nantucket’s: “Not much between us. / Their two hundred pound linemen, / our tailback like a greased pig. / Their winters even longer than ours.” And then the mood darkens as Nitchie describes the players: “same solitude we thought was all ours. / Some stick around, some go long, and don’t look back. / Some stumble into trouble and break free, some / don’t. Like fraternal twins separated at birth.”

Next on deck was 18 year-old Claudia Taylor of Chilmark, who in the past couple of years has enchanted audiences with her precocious talent for poetry. This night she read three untitled compositions with riveting lines such as: “I carve a door in you, and enter / the cathedral of your ribcage.” . . . “And now my eyes, too, / are full of blood-rivers, / small and far away / as those on a map.” . . . “Stars rot like berries. / I pick them. I eat them. They taste / like you, serpent girl.”

Ms. Taylor graduated from MVRHS last June and is taking a gap year while she decides what comes next. Her sister Paige, also in attendance, also writes poetry, and has joined a poetry group in her last year of high school.

Meanwhile, Ms. McAllister’s players took their places, and suddenly this reporter was aware of the surrounding beauty of the art making up a sort of unplanned proscenium: Deep blue tints of an oil painting by Christopher Wright, “Moonstones,” a huge oil canvas by Rez Williams of a boat at harbor, “Dawn Arrival New Bedford,” five canvases creating an effect of “Bright Blue Waves”by John Redick and, perfectly albeit unintentionally placed behind the live entertainment, an enormous bronze bas relief, “Emerging,” of a girl and a bouquet of flowers pressed against a gate, by Ilka List.

And so, the play being the thing, according to Hamlet, Ms. McAllister trotted out a sublimely clever quarter-hour one-act called W. Shakespeare, Diagnosis: Paranoid Schizophrenia (or Get Thee To A Psychopharmacologist).

Ms. McAllister poses an Elizabethan-themed world in which poor Will (read by Tony Omer, already adorned with a bardly salt-and-pepper beard), with a string of hits at the Globe behind him, has gone nuts — or perhaps was already innately nuts — as he racks his brain for new material. His maid (Niki Patton with a sublime cockney accent), his physician (John Ortman), his agent (Lesley J. Stark), and wife Anne Hathaway (Niki Patton again, this time with a more refined London-town accent — or is it Stratford-on-Avon?) all try to assuage the tormented soul with potions, naps, and even scoldings such as the hilarious, “don’t be so dramatic!”

Through it all, Will comes up with snatches of ideas, “Hmm, a potion to make me appear dead,“ and “two brothers with the same name,” and “slain and baked into a pie” while the others look on approvingly. “He writes some of his best lines when he’s delusional,” says his doc. “He makes up words, it’s part of his disease.”

Does the play end with Shakespeare all set with a new blockbuster hit? Maybe not, but Ms. McAllister has definitely polished her own play to a fare-thee-well and a hey-nonny-nonny.

The evening wrapped up with two more Mongolian fiddle pieces from the brilliant Mr. Silva, traditional folk songs evoking a mystery that carried us to past centuries over bare Mongolian steppes (or at least one presumes they’re bare: the melodies suggest a stark landscape.)

Ms. Augoustinos plans more of what she calls “multi-performing events,” but first she’s redefining the gallery design. In an email to The Times, she wrote, “I’ve acquired an additional room in the building to set up a sizable storage area. The part of the gallery that presently serves as a storage area I can reclaim for more exhibition space.”

Stay tuned for the next theater and music evening; a wonderful way to come in from the cold and have all the senses dazzled.