The Double Life of Beverly Hall

August 4, 2026

Interview by Paige Martino

Photography courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association

Long before Greater Light became one of Nantucket’s most beloved historic houses, it was an aging 18th-century cow barn tucked away on what was then Bull Lane. Where others might have seen a weathered farm building, Quaker sisters Hanna and Gertrude Monaghan envisioned something extraordinary, transforming the humble barn into an exuberant home and art studio layered with salvaged architectural treasures, handcrafted furnishings and original paintings. They called it Greater Light.

A hundred years later, Beverly Hall keeps HannaMonaghan’s spirit alive, putting on period clothes and performing as Hanna at Greater Light. “My feeling when I walked inside [Greater Light] for the first time was almost visceral,” Hall said. “One day during the process, I just got so immersed I said, ‘That house just needs someone to bring it alive.’ I just said it. I blurted it out. ‘Someone needs to be Hanna.’ The whole group turned around and said, ‘Beverly, why not you?’”

Becoming Hanna meant immersing herself in Hanna’s memoir, filling pages with underlined passages, colorful notes and thoughtful observations tucked into the margins. She interviewed people who had known Hanna and spent countless hours researching both the Monaghan sisters and Greater Light itself. Along the way, she began recognizing unexpected parallels between their lives, particularly in their shared devotion to faith and the arts. “The attraction was immediate,” Hall said. “[Hanna] really sparked something within me, so I took it and ran with it.”

For Hall, art has always been inseparable from spirituality. “I believe in a higher power; I believe in art as being an expression of the divine,” she said. “I think we find our divinity within ourselves, within other people, and within the work of the hands of craftsmen who have made beautiful works of art. What [Hanna] brought into her house was a tapestry, an eclectic tapestry of different fabrics made by hand—each one had a spark of the divine.”

Although Hall considers her theatrical experience limited, recalling her first role as George in Our Town during boarding school, stepping into Hanna’s shoes felt less like acting than interpretation. Physical resemblance mattered little. Hanna, Hall laughs, was “a feisty, Irish, five-foot-tall ball of energy!”

By the time Hall welcomed visitors into Greater Light, she no longer felt she was portraying Hanna as much as inviting audiences to meet her. “By being there in the house, acting through her life and interpreting her story, I think the people get the feeling that I don’t have to look like her; I just am,” she said.

For more than a decade, Hall and her husband, David Billings, hauled props and camera equipment to Greater Light for weekly afternoon performances of the one-woman show Hanna in the Garden. Hall assembled Hanna’s wardrobe from local flea markets and thrift shops, searching for garments that echoed the fashions of her era. Among other props, a peacock chair and a vintage suitcase completed the setting, but it was Hall’s storytelling that transported audiences.

“After they see, hear or feel what I have to say about Hanna, they go home with a feeling of a living person, not just a historical site,” she said, adding: “It is something lively enough, historical enough, and quirky enough in its own way.”

Because Greater Light was a labor of love, filled with Navajo rugs, iron gates and handcrafted heirlooms like a sofa made by the Monaghans’ mother, it became a space defined by both eccentricity and deep spirituality. That same spirit has resonated with Hall since she moved to Nantucket 62 years ago.

“In 1964, I came to a little shack on the creek, and here I am in 2026, still here,” she said. “Only it went from shack to chateau.” Just as the Monaghans lovingly preserved and transformed Greater Light into a reflection of their artistic vision, Hall has spent decades shaping her own home in Madaket, which she affectionately calls “Greater Light West.”

Over the years, Hall has become so immersed in portraying Hanna Monaghan that the line between performer and subject has begun to blur. “All I have to do is start talking, and I become Hanna,” she said.

Now 85, Hall reflects on the role with a new perspective. “I am now older than Hanna, who died at 82,” she said. “I feel I’ve earned my stripes, so to speak, in embodying her.” That emotional connection is especially evident in the closing soliloquy Hall wrote for the performance, which still brings tears to her eyes as she imagines Hanna finding peace in knowing her home and legacy would endure. “I nailed it for her; she nailed it for me.”