Double Edge Theatre differs from most other performing companies in several ways. One, of course, is the location. They live and work together on a 100-acre farm in Ashfield, where the stage is a not-very-converted barn. In the summer, performances spill out over the whole property.
The company's process also differs radically from most other theaters, which rehearse, open, run and close a show, all within a matter of weeks or a couple of months. Double Edge is what's known as a laboratory theater, encompassing several meanings of the term. The work is experimental and exploratory, occupying months and even years, and the preparatory work itself—the labor in laboratory—is organic to the final product. Performances are created out of ideas and pieces of text, and developed through open-ended improvisations.
And the product is never really final. The process continues even after the work is officially premiered. This extended gestation has delivered three new pieces over the past five years, in addition to the summertime spectacles, which follow a more conventional trajectory of intensive creation and short-term performance.
On Saturdays this month and next, the latest embodiments of the 50-minute pieces are being performed, in creation-order, as a single-evening cycle under the umbrella title The Garden of Intimacy and Desire. While sharing some thematic and stylistic connections, the three plays derive from widely disparate sources. The UnPossessed is a whimsical deconstruction of the Don Quixote story. Republic of Dreams is a fantasia drawn from the life and work of the Polish fabulist Bruno Schultz. And The Disappearance imagines the story behind a real-life mystery.
A line of stylistic development can be discerned, from The UnPossessed, in which the eye is ravished by visual images and the spoken text is almost a footnote, to The Disappearance, by far the most closely text-based of all the company's works so far.
Before the performances begin, the audience gathers in the ensemble's greenroom, a rustic wood-paneled structure decorated with posters from their international travels and displays of the books and documents they've used in their creative researches. We're then led across the hay-strewn courtyard (it is mud season, after all) and into the barn, where the performance of The UnPossessed is already underway.
Two towering figures glide about the space, their heads almost scraping the rafters and their arms waving long streamers. They are the windmills the man of La Mancha jousts with at the outset of his adventures. Hanging nervously from the roof beam on a long silken sash is Quixote's squire, Sancho Panza (Matthew Glassman). Where the fabric touches the floor, a pile of old books stirs and the Don himself (Carlos Uriona) emerges from the mass of chivalric romances in which he has—in this case, literally—buried himself. The arresting images multiply as the half-dozen performers bestride the stage on six-foot stilts, roll around it inside circular metal frames and swing vertiginously above it on fabric trapezes.
Between shows, we're ushered back into the greenroom while the set is changed in the barn, and given a light supper of homemade soup and hearty slices of granary loaf from Haydenville's Bread Euphoria.
The ragged gypsy band that supplies jaunty incidental music in The UnPossessed reappears in slightly different guise in The Republic of Dreams, with a score by guest composer Jacek Ostaszewski. But here the landscape of fantasy takes on a darker, more desperate edge. Bruno Schultz died young, shot by a jealous Nazi, and has since become a cult figure of Jewish magical realism. In this montage of words and images based on his fragmentary writings and fanciful drawings, the pervading subject is the Holocaust, but the feel is Weimar-in-Wonderland. A closet on wheels serves as a doorway into images of fantasy and horror: a seductive beauty (Hayley Brown) in slightly ridiculous lingerie; Emperor Franz Josef in a tutu (Uriona); and finally a huddled group, shaking with fear and the motion of a cattle car, bound for the camps.
Republic occupies a rather awkward transitional mid-section in the trilogy, more earthbound than The UnPossessed and less easily navigated than the last part of the evening. The Disappearance, with a script by Amherst College professor Ilan Stavans, takes its cue from an incident in which a Dutch-Jewish actor staged his own kidnapping. Here again Uriona and Glassman are a kind of Quixote/Sancho duo, a temperamental star and his younger colleague who are rehearsing The Merchant of Venice when the older man mysteriously disappears. Scenes from Shakespeare's script parallel the story as it unfolds, including Shylock's resentment of the anti-Semitism which the actor playing him feels in his own life. The set, representing both on- and offstage at the theater, is a virtual maze of doorways, windows and mirrors that both reveal and conceal the actions within them.
Despite their differences, certain threads run through all three pieces. They share the qualities of dreams—not only the dreamlike images that suffuse them, but the disjoints of time and place that dreams enjoy. And there is a thematic constant: the idea that in a world of confusion and pain, humans cope by creating alternative realities.
The trilogy also underlines the influence of Uriona, an Argentinian with a background in circus, street theater and puppetry, who joined the company in the late '90s. His playful aesthetic, married to company founder Stacy Klein's rigorous abstraction, gives these pieces a Fellini-esque quality of dignified foolery.
If there is a watchword for this trilogy, and for the company's work as a whole, it's the final line in the second play: "No dreams, however absurd or senseless, are wasted in this universe."
The Garden of Intimacy and Desire: Double Edge Theatre, 948 Conway Rd., Ashfield, Saturdays through May 2 at 6 p.m., (413) 628-0277, www.doubleedgetheatre.org.
No Background Music
Penny Rock served as an Army nurse in Vietnam in the late '60s. Her letters and journals provide the material for an unblinking look at the side of war that today's "embedded" war reporters aren't allowed to show.
Normi Noel first performed No Background Music in 2006 at Shakespeare & Company, where she's a longtime associate. As the war in Iraq enters its seventh year and Afghanistan turns into a Vietnam-model quagmire, this brief, mesmerizing one-woman play is being briefly revived at the Majestic Theater in honor of Vietnam Veterans Day. Both Noel and Rock will participate in audience talkbacks after both performances.
In her eloquent, unrelenting reports from the front, Rock reveals that she doesn't much like the Army—she joined to pay her nursing school bills—and doesn't support the war. But she has endless compassion for the soldiers caught up in, and torn apart by, the consequences of U.S. foreign policy.
She writes to her friend Lois back in the States ("the only one who wanted to really know") what it's like in the war zone. She relates the agonies of burn victims, the dying wishes of 19-year-old boys, the endless streams of casualties after a major battle—"body after body, sometimes for days."
She realizes that real war has nothing to do with Hollywood action adventures. "Old men make wars and young men die, and it's not glamorous. They die screaming for their mothers, and there's no background music."
The stories and images are gruesome, heartbreaking. You'd think Penny Rock's catalogue of horrors and her contained anger at war's cost in flesh and lives would simply be too much. But the clear-eyed truthfulness of the words and Noel's soft-spoken, deeply moving performance make a profoundly human connection and a classically cathartic theater experience.
No Background Music: Majestic Theater, 131 Elm St., West Springfield, March 29-30, 7 p.m., (413) 747-7797, www.majestictheater.com.
