Looking over the season lineups at the Valley’s summer theaters, I’ve been struck by how many of this year’s shows have “ripped-from-the-headlines” plots and themes. These are contemporary plays that draw on current issues, controversies and other front-page news.
This applies to three of New Century Theatre’s four mainstage productions. The season opener, Steven Dietz’s Yankee Tavern, is a “what’s really going on?” thriller set in a shabby bar with a mysterious clientele that includes a conspiracy theorist with persuasive hypotheses about 9/11. That’s followed by Stephen Sachs’ Bakersfield Mist, a two-hander about art, class and (ahem) criticism that’s inspired, as they say, by real events — a painting picked up for pennies at a flea market that just might be a genuine Jackson Pollock. And Donald Margulies’ Time Stands Still unfolds around wounds, physical and psychological, sustained in the Iraq war.
The Middle East inferno also figures in Two Rooms, by Lee Blessing, at Greenfield’s Silverthorne Theater Company. It’s a psychic dialogue between a man held captive by terrorists and his wife back home, both of them gripped by fear and grief. Silverthorne’s season opens on what could be seen as an even more timely note: Molière’s The Miser, the incarnation of mean-spirited greed.
Also in Greenfield, Eggtooth Productions’ second annual Full Disclosure Festival, happening all over downtown this weekend, takes a wide-angle view of our intimate, but sometimes hostile relationship with the Earth. Against the Current: Human Impact upon Place has paired artists with historians and scientists to create original works. It’s aimed at embodying “scholarly data … in an affective way” to inspire dialogue, reflection and action.
Once a Blue Moon/Cada Luna Azul at Double Edge Theatre is an updated reprise of last summer’s “traveling spectacle,” in which the audience follows the flow of action all over the company’s Ashfield farm. It’s a mythic carnival, based on Latin American literature and music, informed by the geopolitical crisis of “progress” displacing people, both physically and culturally.
The growing awareness of issues around sexual violence is reflected in What Screams I Hear Are Mine, by Ashfield native Annalise Cain, produced by the Clementine Collective of Pioneer Valley Performing Arts alums. In it, a teenage girl overhears an apparent rape, but is afraid to intervene, which leads to a search, not just for the perpetrator but toward questions of responsibility, culpability and community. It’s performed next weekend in PVPA’s brand-new theater building in South Hadley.
At Chester Theatre Company, The Mountaintop, by Katori Hall, rewinds 50 years for an imagined prologue to a historic crime. It’s a late-night conversation between Martin Luther King Jr. and a young maid named Camae at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the eve of his assassination — the day he had delivered the “mountaintop” speech that foreshadowed his own death.
The Mountaintop is one of two Valley plays this summer with African-American casts. The other one reflects another recurring through-line I noticed in this season’s schedules: generational tensions and transitions. Cheryl L. West’s Jar the Floor, at New Century Theatre, finds four generations of African-American women in a cascade of mother-daughter squabbles, half hilarity and half home truths.
Three generations of political spouses are spotlighted in Tea for Three, a one-woman show in which we meet a trio of 20th-century First Ladies: Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon and Betty Ford. Emmy winner Elaine Bromka performs this trifecta of three presidential wives who do what Mrs. Nixon once called “the hardest unpaid job in the world.” It’s at West Springfield’s Majestic Theater next week, preceded this weekend by another one-woman play, Danny Eaton’s Mags, about a woman’s African memorial to her son, starring Cate Damon.
Another power behind the throne is highlighted in The Life and Death of Queen Margaret, drawing together the appearances of Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI and archenemy of Richard III, in four Shakespearean plays. Created by the Real Live Theatre collective, it’s performed July 29-Aug. 6 at Smith College.
At Hampshire Shakespeare Company, the course of true love runs afoul of the older generation’s will in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the bloody thane slaughters his way to a royal inheritance in Macbeth. Both will be performed under the stars at the UMass Renaissance Center.
The Ko Festival of Performance celebrates its 25th anniversary with past performers showcasing new work. In Sandglass Theater’s When I Put on Your Glove, Shoshana Bass takes the torch from her father, master puppeteer Eric Bass. And in Tenderness, the Performance Project’s First Generation youth ensemble strives to break free of the institutional racism and school-to- prison pipeline that has imprisoned many of their parents and siblings — yet another summer production that turns today’s headlines into compelling performance.
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and valleyadvocate.com/author/chris-rohmann.
