New England has been home to many famous and creative people, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson. But some lesser-known artists have been overshadowed by these greats. They may have been well known in their own time, but over the years, their art has been buried under newer interests by subsequent generations.  

Thankfully, there are people like M. Marguerite Mathews and Gregory Gathers, of Pontine Theatre on Islington Street in Portsmouth, who have brought the works of one such forgotten artist back to life.

Co-artistic directors Mathews and Gathers have taken a collection of poems by Ogden Nash and created a play titled “Home Is Heaven: 32 Poems by Ogden Nash.” The production chronicles the poet’s summers spent with his wife and two daughters on the Seacoast in the middle part of the 20th century.

Originally from Rye, N.Y., Nash was well-known for his light verse and unconventional rhymes. Not as well known, however, was his love for the Seacoast. He was particularly fond of the beaches of North Hampton, where he and his family had a summer home at Little Boar’s Head. North Hampton is also the town that Nash would eventually make his eternal resting place.
“It’s just nice to have that local connection,” said Gathers. “We were interested in focusing on someone who was so well known—and right in our own neighborhood.”

Mathews and Gathers knit Nash’s poems together to create a 75-minute, one-act play that creates a feeling of a funny, charismatic bedtime story. 

The play is divided into three parts that are arranged into three “summers at the beach,” which span the early, middle and late years of the family’s life. Cleverly using puppets, shadows, masks and toys, Mathews and Gathers reveal Nash’s story. 
The first part of the play paints a droll picture of the poet’s departure from bachelor life into marriage—finding a summer home, contemplating child rearing and, ultimately, having children. Once his daughters are born, the story takes a comical turn, delving into the trials of growing older and a father’s struggle to raise two daughters. The challenge is illustrated in the following verse:   

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
Contrariwise, my blood runs cold
When little boys go by.
For little boys as little boys,
No special hate I carry,
But now and then they grow to men,
And when they do, they marry.
No matter how they tarry,
Eventually they marry.
And, swine among the pearls,
They marry little girls.

The play closes with the couple approaching the winter of their lives. They become grandparents, and the dog that once pounced through their home grows old and passes away. They lament the days, before children and grandchildren, when they were young, carefree and threw caution to the wind. 

The play is a pleasure to the senses. The simplistic set consists of a small cottage that is also used as a stage for shadow theater and puppet shows. The use of masks and simple props cleverly adds depth to Nash’s lyrics, often heightening the humor.
Nash was known to the nation as “America’s Master of Light Verse.” He was born in 1902 and spent most of his life—when he wasn’t summering on the Seacoast—in his home city of Baltimore. He worked for many years at Doubleday Publishing, where he perfected his poetry.

Nash died of Crohn’s disease in Maryland in 1971, and he is buried in North Hampton. Nash was respected by the literary community, and his poems have frequently been anthologized in both humorous and serious collections.
“There are no conclusions here, only winding approaches to conclusions, but the endless search for knowledge has been an exceptionally happy one,” Nash wrote in the forward to his 1964 book of poetry, “Marriage Lines.”