Two companies situated on the fringes of the Berkshires invite adventurous playgoers to step outside the comfort zones of the region's major summer theaters. Both Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield and the Berkshire Fringe in Great Barrington specialize in original work that is, like their locations, outside the mainstream. This month Double Edge performs its annual indoor/outdoor extravaganza, and this weekend the Fringe closes its fifth season with two new plays that place young people at painful turning points.
I caught up with the Berkshire Fringe for the first time last weekend. Hosted by Bard College at Simons Rock and run by a trio of New York-based Gen-Xers, two of whom grew up in Great Barrington, the Fringe is a disarming mix of country casual, city chic and buoyant enthusiasm. The accent is on new theater pieces by young writers and performers, including solo shows, ensemble explorations, dance theater and the occasional mini-musical. Six shows fill the three-week schedule, two at a time in repertory. Last week's pair examined, from quite different perspectives, the conflict between our rational (and rationalizing) intellects and animal bodies.
Circumference marked Amy Salloway's third appearance at the Fringe and her second show whose main subject is her weight. The title refers both to her round physique and to her circular journey from junior-high gym class misfit to gastric-bypass surgery candidate, via fitness-center humiliations and Cheeto binges. Salloway is a smart, engaging performer and her confessional is both heartbreaking and very funny, including testy exchanges with her own body, personified as a chain-smoking hedonist with attitude.
Elephants and Gold, an ensemble piece written and composed by Eliza Ladd, considers the arrogance of the human species in the context of our violent exploitation of elephants and our willful ignorance of their natures. In a multilayered series of vignettes employing text, music (played by Ladd and Ian Smit) and movement, a five-person ensemble creates a historical diorama of self-satisfied human evolution. The performers also embody elephants with a lumbering four-footed gait that is both majestic and vulnerable.
This week, the Fringe presents Phi Alpha Gamma, a one-man show in which Dan Bernitt portrays four frat brothers in the aftermath of a gay-bashing incident, and Graveyard Shift, by local playwright Gabriel Patel. The latter takes place right in Great Barrington and derives its bleak tone and its young characters' almost poetic inarticulateness from the author's growing-up experience there. Directed by John Hadden, the cast includes Valley resident Rachel Zeiger-Haag.
The action, oscillating between the shabby home of two teenage sisters and an all-night convenience store, involves the recent death of the girls' mother, the affair one of them is having with their stepfather, and the pissed-off hopelessness of the other, a skateboarding stoner whose nihilistic rage threatens to consume her. It's an edgy drama flecked with bitter humor, giving a back-street view of the hilltowns the summer tourists never see.
"Nights" on the Farm
The Islamic world has always held a strange fascination for Westerners. It's traditionally seen as a pungently exotic, somewhat sinister realm, a view that's been exploited and magnified since 9/11. That image was fixed in the popular imagination by 19th-century translations of the ancient Arabic, Persian and Indian folktales collected in The Thousand and One Nights, commonly known in the West as The Arabian Nights.
Today, saturated by Disneyfied versions which combine Aryanized characters with Islamophobic caricatures, it's tricky for artists to venture into that rich territory creatively but respectfully. Double Edge Theatre's solution is to avoid the pretense of "authenticity" and instead emphasize the tales' transnational origins and universal themes.
Their inspiration comes from Marc Chagall's series of lithographs illustrating four of the "nights," which he was drawn to by their flying, floating figures—his characteristic image—and the similarities he saw in the magical Hasidic tales of his native Poland. The eclectic approach is also reflected in songs from several Middle Eastern countries as well as Spain and Bulgaria.
The production, in which the audience follows the action to multiple locations around the ensemble's Ashfield farm, employs the familiar framing device: Princess Sheherezade (Jeremy Louise Eaton) spinning stories night after night to keep King Shahriyar (Matthew Glassman) from having her put to death. The tales enacted here feature a couple of the Nights' best-known characters, Sindbad the Sailor and Aladdin, along with the four stories illustrated by Chagall: Abdallah the fisherman, who travels to underwater worlds with a merman; the lovers Qamar al-Zaman and Budur; Jullanar the sea-princess; and the enchanted flying horse.
It's a lively, colorful family entertainment (the company plans to include some of the Nights' more erotic passages in a revised version for their winter season) and is the most visually arresting of the troupe's summertime epics so far. Chagall's art is reflected in the faces of stick puppets, long mural banners and two huge multicolored beasts, the flying horse and the giant bird that carries Sindbad from one adventure to the next—all created by local artists working with Double Edge.
The Arabian Nights: August 12-16, 19-22, Double Edge Theatre, 948 Conway Rd., Ashfield, information 413-628-0277, tickets 866-811-4111, www.doubleedgetheatre.org.
Graveyard Shift and Phi Alpha Gamma: Through August 17, Berkshire Fringe, Daniel Arts Center, Bard College at Simons Rock, 84 Alford Rd., Great Barrington, 413-320-4175, www.berkshirefringe.org.
