Most of the region's summer theaters are up and running, with a couple more still waiting in the wings. A glance through the schedules—and the ticket prices—reveals two interesting disparities: between the Valley and the Berkshires, and in the hills between the mainstage lineups and the companies' more informal second stages.
At the flagship companies in Williamstown, Lenox, Stockbridge and now Pittsfield (where the Barrington Stage Company moved last year) you can pay over $100 for a pair of tickets in the main theater. And what you'll see is most likely tried and true material geared to a comfortable clientele with conventional aesthetics.
But off the mainstage it's possible to find more adventurous and affordable fare, including new plays, experimental stagings, and genre-bending works-in-progress. Here's a rundown of some of the most intriguing shows on this summer's stages.
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The Valley
The area's edgiest work can be seen at Amherst College, where two companies split the season at the black-box Holden Theater. This weekend New World Theater premieres Parang Sabil, a movement-theater staging of an epic ballad from the Philippines. Performed by the Filipino-American troupe Kinding Sindaw, it recounts the resistance and ultimate massacre of an indigenous Muslim community struggling against U.S. military occupation. (Sound familiar?) Also on New World's schedule are two performances grounded in hip-hop rhythms. It Is the Seeing celebrates the battles being waged in communities of color against AIDS, drugs, incarceration and other societal violence, and the theater's energetic Project 2050 youth program examines The Love in Revolution.
The Ko Festival of Performance brings three women-centered shows to Amherst in July. In Matermorphosis, Serious Play's postmodern take on Kafka's classic tale of transformation and despair, the character who wakes up as a bug is a menopausal housewife who works as a stripper, and the metamorph metaphor becomes a commentary on sexuality and aging. That's followed by two one-woman shows. Michelle Matlock's The Mammy Project investigates the black Mammy stereotype, from minstrel shows to Aunt Jemima, exploring its history and influence in American culture. O, Yes I Will (I will remember the spirit and texture of this conversation) (yes, that's the whole title) is the latest from Deb Margolin, of the seminal feminist theater duo Split Britches. In five seriocomic monologues, she imagines what she might have said, under the influence of pre-op sodium pentathol, to the team of surgeons poised to cut her open in search of a spreading cancer.
In Northampton, New Century Theatre's publicity promises a summer of comedy, but the four-show lineup is not all fun and frills. After next week's farcical season opener, Kong's Night Out, which takes place on the night of King Kong's debut in New York (the ape, not the movie—the play is set in the film's fictional world), things turn more thoughtful. In each of the past three seasons, NCT's director, Sam Rush, has made a point of programming a play that raises prickly questions about race relations. Spinning into Butter takes on political correctness at a small New England college, where a black student is the target of racist graffiti and the white faculty's response exposes caustic truths about deep-seated contradictions in the liberal psyche. That's followed by two tragicomedies that paint parent-child collisions: Kimberly Akimbo, a quirky piece about a teenager with a rare condition that makes her age at four times the normal rate, and A.J. Gurney's The Cocktail Hour.
A matinee adjunct to New Century is Paintbox Theatre, Tom McCabe's crazy, inspired, hilarious children's theater. Half twisted fairy tales, half comedy improv, it's a unique, way-offbeat mosaic of zany storytelling that lampoons theatrical and literary conventions, gives grownups as many laughs as the kids, and slips in wacky lessons in reading and math along the way.
The Chester Theatre Company (formerly the Miniature Theatre) occupies a hilltop midway between the Valley and the Berkshires, and a unique position in the region's summer theater scene as well. Known for intelligent productions of literate, small-scale dramas, it's a stand-alone parallel to the Berkshire theaters' studio spaces. I'm most intrigued by the second and fourth slots in this summer's quartet of shows. The Interview pairs an elderly Holocaust survivor, estranged from her assimilated daughter, with a child of Holocaust survivors who has her own issues with family history and relationships. Craig Wright's Grace looks at religious zealotry in the person of an evangelical entrepreneur planning a chain of gospel-themed motels, who believes his own single-minded ambitions are manifestations of God's personally revealed will. (Sound familiar?)
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The Berkshires
Last winter, Shakespeare & Company sold part of their property, including the mansion that had housed their tradition of Edwardian drawing-room dramas. This year's constricted season of only four full-scale productions presents two Shakespeares and two modern works: Tom Stoppard's flimsy musical homage to 1930s musicals, Rough Crossing, and an acerbic comedy-drama by the hot young British playwright Joe Penhall. Blue/Orange, which swept the best-play awards in London a few years back, delves into questions of race and insanity—and medical bureaucracy—as two psychiatrists debate the condition of a schizophrenic young African who says he's the son of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
With S&Co's repertoire steadily shrinking over the last couple of seasons, some of their core company members have begun appearing on neighboring stages. Two of them, Corinna May and Diane Prusha, make up the cast of Two-Headed at the Berkshire Theatre Festival's intimate Unicorn Theatre. Julie Jensen's play traces the 40-year friendship of two Mormon women in frontier Utah in the decades following the 1857 massacre of over 100 California-bound settlers. The piece examines family and clan history, patriarchy and polygamy (the two women are related in several disturbing ways), beginning when the characters are 10 years old and following, over four decades, their "two-headed" attempts to both understand and avoid the truth.
Also at the Unicorn is a sequel to 2005's audience pleaser, My Buddy Bill, Rick Cleveland's one-man show about his brief, unlikely friendship with Bill Clinton. Cleveland, whose humorous first-person monologues elicit comparisons to both Spalding Gray and Mark Twain, will be trying out a new, unfinished work, My Pal George, which relates his equally improbable brush with the current Oval Office incumbent.
This year the Williamstown Theatre Festival has added a third venue in Williams College's new, multimillion-dollar theater complex. The bare-bones, black-box Center Stage will host two platform productions. Herringbone, which Hartford Stage premiered in 1993, is a bizarre one-man musical about a child inhabited by the spirit, and talent, of a murdered vaudevillian. The versatile B.D. Wong (he originated the title role in M. Butterfly and is now seen as Dr. George Huang on Law & Order: SVU) plays multiple roles in rapid-fire succession, including the boy, his parents, and his mentor, the killer. Williamstown's artistic director, Roger Rees, stars in the other Center Stage offering, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's philosophical comedy The Physicists, about three inmates in a mental institution who claim to be Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Johann Möbius, and who may or may not actually be delusional.
Williamstown's Nikos Stage boasts world premieres by two more hot young British playwrights. Damien Lanigan is a cheeky satirist known on the other side of the pond for his comic novels about angst-ridden 20-somethings. In Dissonance he plops a rock star down amidst a classical string quartet and plays with the resulting culture clash. Crispin Whittell's last play, Darwin in Malibu, found the evolution man enjoying a quiet afterlife on the beach. Villa America imagines more real-life people at the seashore, this time on the French Riviera in the '20s. It focuses on Jazz Age socialites Gerald and Sara Murphy, who were at the center of the dazzling, dissolute artists' circle that included Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Picasso. The college's art museum is mounting a companion exhibit on the Murphys' lives and friendships.
Barrington Stage Company has become an anchor of the revitalization of downtown Pittsfield. While the mainstage presents a classic musical (West Side Story), with a classic Chekhov (Uncle Vanya) coming up, the company's experimental Musical Theatre Lab opens next week with a takeoff of another classic, Cyrano de Bergerac. Here the swashbuckler with the embarrassing nose is transposed from 17th-century France into an American high school. Calvin Berger is all about adolescent insecurity, with a handsome jock who becomes asthmatic when he tries to talk to the pretty girl who is secretly beloved by the brainy and talented but nasally challenged title character. The second Lab production, Funked Up Fairy Tales, is a semi-hip-hop spoof of the Andersen-Grimm canon.
Tickets at the region's smaller venues peak where most of the main houses' start. Prices in the Berkshires fall in the $25-35 range, with the Valley companies coming in around $15-30. If you've seen enough Coward and Williams, Shaffer and Shaw for the time being, check out the alternatives. "
