By the time I started writing in these pages 22 years ago, the Advocate was already a teenager and the glory days of Valley theater were already over. At least you might get that impression from talking with some of the people who were around back then, when Hamp was getting in touch with its inner Noho and starting to think about becoming "The #1 Small Arts City in America," and when young artists were attracted to the Valley by low rents, plentiful if funky performance spaces and eager audiences.
These days the rents are prohibitive, the venues are few and getting fewer, especially in Northampton, and competition for audiences seems to be increasing. But people in the performing and other arts are still drawn to the Valley by, as one person put it, "a bountiful cultural environment of active, working artists who are excited about the creative process."
Innovations and Experiments
I showed up at the tail end of a wild ferment of theatrical activity which—then as now—had its epicenter in Northampton but spread up and down the Valley and into the hilltowns. Those were the days when theater invaded public spaces and often blurred or erased the line between patrons and performers. The days when Present Stage traipsed their epic spectacle The Dragon through the streets of Northampton, when ABIA (American Branch of International Artists) closed part of downtown Greenfield to perform Archibald MacLeish's Panic, and when the audience came to Little Hand theater's Alice in Wonderland dressed as their favorite characters.
In those days, the Advocate was cheekier too. One of the first people I met here was former arts editor Chuck Smith, whose nickname for the paper, "the Avocado," became its movie ratings symbol—not stars but little avocados, and total dogs were awarded "the pit."
Someone who has been creating theater here since the mid-'70s told me she chose to be a struggling artist in the Valley instead of New York because she figured, "If I'm going to be a waitress, it might as well be in a beautiful place, with politically active people, at a scale I can deal with." Another cited being attracted by the audiences here, "who are receptive, not the kind who will only go to well-known plays," adding that "there is enough academic context that people are aware of what a new play is."
When I arrived in the early '80s, I was struck by the scope and variety of performance. In Northampton, No Theater was stirring audiences' imaginations with sleight-of-hand shows like the one that took place simultaneously in the A.P.E. performance space on the top floor of Thorne's and in an apartment across Main Street seen through an open window. In Springfield, StageWest was drawing the more traditional audience with elegant productions from the international repertoire, while also experimenting with postmodern takes on Shakespearean and Greek tragedies.
Theater in non-theatrical settings and non-traditional forms lives in memory and thrives today. A colonial-era biodrama, performed in the '80s against the backdrop of the subject's house in Old Deerfield Village, is reminiscent of Enchanted Circle Theatre's original productions that capture Holyoke's history, staged in a mill building and a mill owner's mansion. The all-woman Sleeveless Theater troupe, assaulting right-wing targets with their weapon of choice, the funnybone, was the antecedent of today's female comedy-improv groups like the Ha-Ha Sisterhood and the Villa Jidiots (OK, there's one guy in that one).
I've always been particularly attracted to the quirky and experimental in theater, to the multidisciplinary and multicultural, and to the socially and politically engaged. The Valley has an abundance of all these strands, and they often intertwine. I'm a perennial admirer of Ko Theater Works, whose summer festival is a kaleidoscope of on-the-edge performance art; of Double Edge Theatre's intimate, elliptical experiments and peripatetic outdoor spectacles on its Ashfield farm; of Sandglass Theater's world-class puppetry in Putney; and of New World Theater's 30-year devotion to artists and audiences of color.
There's not as much overtly political theater as there was in the '70s and '80s, when artists who came of age during the Vietnam protests turned their talents to fighting nuclear power and the Contra war in Nicaragua, but there is some. The multiracial Chrysalis Theatre specializes in Andrea Hairston's poetic metaphors of social crisis and stubborn hope. The Performance Project creates stark movement-theater pieces with formerly incarcerated men and women and at-risk urban youth. The Serious Play! ensemble uses avant-garde stagecraft to reflect on power and identity and the American dream-gone-sour.
Roots and Flowers
If the Advocate's early years coincided with the first flowering of Valley theater, the '90s saw new theaters putting down lasting roots. Sam Rush and Jack Neary came from the Mount Holyoke College Summer Theatre to Smith College and launched New Century Theatre with the fond hope of surviving until the millennium. Brian Marsh and Tim Holcomb started the Hampshire Shakespeare Company "on spit and chutzpah" in the garden of the Lord Jeffery Inn; the venture was dedicated to accessible stagings of the Bard. Vincent Dowling founded the Miniature Theatre in the tiny hilltown of Chester with the motto "Small stage, small casts, giant scripts and actors." Danny Eaton carved a playhouse out of the old Majestic Theater in West Springfield as a permanent home for his itinerant Theater Project.
New Century not only made it to Y2K but has become the Valley's anchor summer theater and model of professionalism. Hampshire Shakespeare still holds forth outdoors, now at the Hartsbrook School in Hadley with the Holyoke Range as backdrop. The Miniature Theater of Chester, now called the Chester Theater Company, is still the area's most literate and stimulating small-scale summer theater. And the Majestic has grown into the Valley's most successful theater, with attendance figures and a subscriber base most companies only dream of.
Over the years, I haven't seen as much community theater as I could have, and several local groups have succumbed to rising prices or failing energy since I started writing. The doyenne of the group is Arena Civic Theater, founded in 1970 at the Roundhouse on the Franklin County Fairgrounds and now one of the resident companies at the cozy Shea Theater in Turners Falls. Panache Productions mounts just about the only original productions seen these days at CityStage, which inherited StageWest's downtown Springfield theater and turned it into a touring house.
The Five Colleges, with their well-equipped theaters and enviable production budgets, have often drawn resentment from small troupes "scrabbling like crazy" to stay afloat. But they've also been a constant source of new blood for the Valley scene, as some in each generation of theater majors decide to stay and work in this "fertile and tolerant area for new forms and ideas." And the academic theater departments themselves have become more daring and inclusive. Hampshire (of course) has always been a student-driven engine of innovation. But UMass, once a bastion of the standard repertoire, is now a frequent champion of new work from diverse voices.
Media and Message
Where does Valley theater stand today? One of my sources says the scene has coalesced into "a critical mass of talented artists—no longer a hippie-dippie backwater of wonderful dilettantes and dedicated amateurs but a place where you can see really good, provocative theater," while another bemoans the fact that it's still "extraordinarily hard to make a living here, unless you are affiliated with the Five Colleges and/or you travel vast distances for work."
But "the love for the Valley can trump poverty" and the urge to create keeps overcoming the obstacles. The sale of Thorne's has been a blow to the theater and dance companies for whom it was home for three decades. The new Window, A.P.E.'s smaller replacement space on Main Street, illustrates both the dearth of viable performance venues and the determination to keep things going.
While there's general agreement on the theater's contribution to the Valley's cultural vitality, there's no such consensus on the media's contribution to the vitality of the theater. Some say the Advocate has been "very important to the development of theater in the Valley" and praise the paper for its "wonderful job of making us central to the life of the Valley." For others it's been "really inconsistent and lousy," giving disproportionate attention to music and film. Some hark back to the early days, when the Advocate "was really an alternative newspaper, before it became successful."
Of course, artists have always had a love/hate relationship with critics and the media, on whom they depend for exposure but live at the mercy of reviewers' raves and pans. Over the years, I've gotten my share of bouquets and brickbats from those on the receiving end of my reviews. Like its practitioners, I love the Valley and its theater, and plan to keep encouraging, evaluating, admiring and, I hope, helping to perfect our theater artists' creative efforts.
Finally, apologies to the many artists and troupes, old and young, whose work I couldn't cover here but deeply appreciate, and thanks to those whose insights and reminiscences contributed to this article: Len Berkman, Court Dorsey, Vincent Dowling, Danny Eaton, Harley Erdman, Andrea Hairston, Lucinda Kidder, Julie Lichtenberg, Brian Marsh, Sondra Radosh, Sheryl Stoodley, Lisa Thompson and Sarah Wilson
