First there was a small woman, alone on the bare stage, relating a horrifying story of epic proportions that seemed to fill the dark echoing space. Then a couple of guys cramped inside a five-foot Plexiglas cube delivered a zany, rapid-fire evisceration of the art of political self-invention.
These were two of last week’s performances at the Berkshire Fringe, a festival of avant-garde theater, dance and music that holds forth in the Daniel Arts Center at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington for three whirlwind weeks each summer. The festival runs on the energy and passion of Sara Katzoff, Timothy Ryan Olson and Peter Wise, young Brooklyn-based artists who grew up in the Berkshires and/or went to school at Simon’s Rock.
Now in its seventh season, the Fringe presents two short productions in repertory each week, augmented by free lobby concerts and workshops with the visiting artists. This year the Pi Clowns physical comedy troupe of San Francisco is also in residence throughout the festival.
Katzoff says the aim of the Fringe is “to represent the most diverse spectrum of emerging artists,” with an emphasis on “craftsmanship, ingenuity, artistry and professionalism.” She says that in choosing six shows for the season—out of 100 submissions—the partners look for “innovative, generous, original stories [that display] a unique perspective or a style of performance that is not often represented in mainstream theater.”
She also admits that they are particularly drawn to pieces with “an inherent sense of humor.” She hastens to add that she doesn’t just mean “knee-slap funny,” but that “even the darkest, most harrowing stories exude a certain quality of hopefulness.”
A prime example is Face, written and performed by Haerry Kim, a young woman who plays a very old one recalling her life as a “comfort woman”—a sexual slave—for Japanese soldiers during the occupation of Korea before and during World War II. The piece is, indeed, harrowing, but Kim’s artistry elevates it as her mobile face and steady gaze, her agile body and amazingly supple voice take us from the woman’s na?ve girlhood through the atrocity and degradation of the “comfort stations” to finally joining with other women to seek apology and reparations from the Japanese government.
There are plenty of knee-slaps in Our Man, a sharp-edged lampoon in which Will Bowling and Christopher Kaminstein use Ronald Reagan’s fictionalization of his own biography to score points about current politics and media. Their claustrophobic cube becomes an old-time radio studio broadcasting letters from “Our Man on the Front Lines” to his sweetheart back home, recounting exploits against the Nazis of “the Gipper” and his buddy Knute Rockne.
The duo conduct informal talkbacks after each performance to discuss their interest in “the intersection of humor and politics” and elicit audience response. On the night I saw it, these ranged from commentary on the show’s style (“It’s like Beckett on happy-juice”) to “Why do you perform with no shoes and socks?”
The Berkshire Fringe concludes this week with two edge-stretching performances incorporating new media—an inquiry into obsession via the video artist Bill Viola and a tangled story that interweaves the Greek myth of sisters Ismene and Antigone with two real-life sisters-in-law.
Through Aug. 15, Daniel Arts Center, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, 84 Alford Rd., Great Barrington. 413-320-4175, berkshirefringe.org.
