Description

Dogtown Common is staged like a tableau where performers build a dramatic series of narratives of their lives in the early years of the settlements in Dogtown. 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.