Possibility/Performance Space

The stage shapes the play.

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Though one of their less-performed operas, Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers nonetheless boasts a well-crafted and amusing score, a deft wordplay, and as whimsy-laden a plot as Pirates of Penzance. It is difficult, however, to sell tickets to a 19th-century comic operetta modern audiences know little-to-nothing about—unless, of course, you are the Averill Park Kayaker’s Club! Still smarting from the abrupt cancellation of their creative-but-flawed water-safety play some months ago, group director Sal Devroie pitched a project more ambitious by far: A staging of Gondoliers entirely from an assortment of kayaks, canoes, and paddleboats. Though delayed by Grafton State Park's uncertainty as to whether it could, in fact, issue a performance license for a portion of the Long Pond, the intersection of boating enthusiasts and Savoyards encompassed more than enough people to perform, accompany, and finagle permits for the production. The gimmick proved attractive, drawing in several hundred attendees over the course of the week's engagement—though an unexpectedly high number of children attending with free tickets meant that even these levels of attendance couldn't quite recoup Sal his personal investment in the show.

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The pulpit of Old North Church is built to carry a voice. Set back among the pews and at some height from the ground, no church-goer is too distant to hear—and the platform above the pulpit acts to reflect the voice down rather than losing it in the rafters, the bane of so many a deep-voiced speaker. A recent event here heard a series of voices recite or sing the entirety of the Book of Psalms, with each speaker or singer (or, in a few cases, ensemble) memorizing a single psalm to perform. Of the 160 performers, most decided on unaccompanied readings with carefully planned pace and emphases to communicate their understanding of the psalm and stress points of particular contemporary relevance; a few others trusted a mix of method acting and a sense of the divine to guide their performance in the moment. The most striking of these was the Roxbury Jazz Ensemble, a four-person outfit who did no preparation even for the musical component of their performance of Psalm 27, and nonetheless stirred the assembled listeners into lifting their heads for a capacious, electric performance—few are likely to soon forget the outstretched hand of the sustained-but-dipping electric organ chord as James Kelly crooned, in an almost speaking tone, “be of good courage.”

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In order to maintain unimpeded access to fire safety and weather-management equipment, building maintenance requests that people please stop re-enacting the scenes from the assault on the Endor-based shield generator in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi in front of this entrance to Corson Hall.

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North Station’s Signal Station A is now disused and largely derelict, a relic of an earlier era of city rail yard supervision looking very small beneath the modern automobile suspension bridge that overshadows it by day and outshines it by night. Clearly visible from a short gravel side-path in the river-spanning park at the end of the Charles River Walk, it appears in many a railfan’s photograph of the Amtrak and MBTA Commuter trains that pass through North Station. Rarer, though, are pictures of the scenes that the yard-workers will sometimes stage when two trains are set to pass the station in quick—but not immediate—succession, leaving a few seconds of clear view from the park to the old building between the last car leaving and the new engine arriving. The scenes aren’t over-ambitious—they have only a minute or two to set and un-set the stage as the trains pass—but are instead fairly simple; off-duty workers come out in period uniform with antiquated mechanisms and tools still stored in the signal station and set up quick tableaus of rail-work through the ages. They wave signal-lamps, survey line-sites, move cargo, and in short mime whatever tasks they can reconstruct with the tools at hand. The price is negligible, aside from occasional dry-cleaning—a service comped by the local Transit Workers Union, who appreciate a demonstration of the long lineage of specialized and vital labor rail workers have done in the Boston area for near to two centuries.

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The MBTA strictly discourages performances of The Dance of Distance, Green and Light for several reasons:

Dance is designed to be performed in the clearing at the center of the Webster Conservation Area, on the tracks of the Green Line’s D Branch; loitering on MBTA subway routes is a clear safety hazard.

Neither the fencing nor the gravel fill is designed to be particularly robust—serving mainly to ward animals and plants from the tracks—and is significantly disturbed by the powerful running leaps, anchored swaying, and twirl-skipping that characterize the bulk of the dance.

While performers are intended to use wood discarded by the trees, those who desire longer, thicker, or more sightly branches for the promenade entrance-exchange often wrench them from trees at the edge of the line, risking damaging the trees and bringing them down on the power lines, subway cars, and the rails. (The Conservancy, which largely ignores the yearly attempts to dance Distance, Green and Light, has taken to sending observers to prevent this.)

No Distance dancer has yet applied for the required $25 Subway Performers Permit.

Fortunately for the MBTA, the trademark “distance” of the site—a long straightaway railbed tunneled by century-old forest—means that Green Line operators can see performers of the Dance well ahead of time, allowing them to avoid collisions and report performers to the Transit Police.

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Swathed in the thick fog of Boston Harbor, Spectacle Island has hosted, by turns, a small farming community, a garbage dump, a rendering plant, and an ecological disaster. Today, though, it is a park accessible by regular ferry voyages throughout the summer; its noxious history has been remediated into winding trails through high-grass fields, charming wooden pavilions, and the eco-utopian vision of a solar-powered water-conserving visitor’s center—but what if it hadn’t been?

Anna Cohen, proprietor of local escape room, organized for a boat carrying a few dozen of her acquaintances from the acting community to arrive ahead of a ferry-full of spectators whom she had promised a “Sleep-No-More–esque” live interactive theater performance titled Fill the Sea. Arriving there, the majority donned and moistened their home-embellished latex suits, making to hide in the shallows of the island’s coast—bobbing under the docks, sidling up to the bulwarks, digging into the beach. Meanwhile, a small contingent—including Anna herself—set up a pleasant potluck meal at the pavilion atop the lower of Spectacle Island’s two hills, hanging a banner reading “Gratz Uncle Jim ••• 53 YEARS YOUNG!!” and then waiting for the ferry to arrive while they helped themselves to plates of scalloped potatoes and macaroni salad. Aside from a few folks coming over to sit at the table, not much changed when the ferry-goers arrived, ambling off of the ship and onto the island—until they rose from the water, dripping seaweed falling from suits of aging refuse and algae-slimed rusted tins as they lurched onto land, a century of buried insults to the Earth come to haunt the living—and, perhaps, to make the living take their place beneath the fill and amongst the trash.

Sadly, Uncle Jim sacrifices himself to them in seeing that all the island-goers make it to the ferry and off the island without injury—although he is allowed a dynamite final scene of self-sacrifice, and gets to share the remains of the potluck with the creature performers.

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Only ever staged in a black-box theatre during her residency in the Boston University Theatre Department, Joy Felipe's play They Ride On Us finally saw full production here, at Forest Hill Station, during a period of scheduled line-work that left the southern terminus of the Orange Line cut off from the rest of the Line. A dramatization of the events that lead to the deaths of four men working to build the tunnel under the Bay that connects the Blue Line to the city center, several earlier attempts to mount the production failed when Felipe found she could not produce a sufficiently claustrophobic, dark, and top-heavy feeling on the stage and in the stands. The subterranean train tunnels of Forest Hill, with their oppressive brick walls and squat concrete columns, met her approval, communicating the intense pressure the borers of the tunnel worked under, both from the ever-intruding sea and from the rail companies that directed its construction. The title They Ride On Us is a reference to Thoreau's observation in Walden that

“We do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man. [...] [I]f some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden on. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception.”

Felipe writes: "My object? To move the audience-member to consider the sublimated human price of the station, the trains, the road, the cars--to have her see the sacrifice."

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It was some weeks before Dolores Johnsguard realized her son had quietly lain the ingredients for a period comedy of manners around her restored boarding-house. Initially, she had assumed his exacting attention to cleaning the cabinets and handsome old secretary's desks was simply an example of his habit for fastidiousness, as was his careful re-setting of all the tchotchkes the family had collected at estate and rummage sales in their precise place at the end of the day; the prop letters and telegrams just practice for when he returned to Ithaca College at the end of the summer. True, she was becoming a mite concerned with how it seemed he was always tripping up and speaking loudly right by the guest's windows--but it was only ever well outside of quiet hours, so it was hardly worth a big to-do. No, it was when she returned from the grocer's one day to find him and two friends jovially arguing punning semantics in old-timey accents directly outside the dining-room window that the whole picture of the work resolved in her mind: A Wilde-inspired farce of competing 1870s-crash stockbrokers returned from Wall Street to their sleepy home-town for cash and love. She then stepped in the foyer, saw that the guests had all assembled in the dining to watch the show unfold, and decided to make the performance impermanent attraction.

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This group of boulders set between the peaks of severely hilly Middlesex Fells Reservation--a park just north of the Orange Line's terminus--are frequently capered over by Katherine Nemerouv, a geology educator based out of Cambridge, MA. Nemerouv tells their story--millions of years of deposition and pressure, the quick jog of glacial movement, the steady weathering of wind and life--in an energetic fashion fitting the compression of time, acting as each of the forces that have acted on them. The rocks, of course, cannot respond to her geologic action; she instead maneuvers her audience, positioning them to see lines of sedimentation, rotated layers, a chipping fault line, an entreating tree-root--and so moves them through time. Katherine is available for classroom and day-camp bookings until the end of the calendar year, when she will be leaving to conduct field research in Nova Scotia.

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Early on summer mornings the mist rises thick from the reservoir near Grafton Lake State Park, glowing with the light of the low sun and overspilling the squat concrete lips that serve as its rainy-season spill-way—and there, shadowed by the thick, primarily evergreen forests that have sprung up since farmland became the protected borders of a reservoir, it disappears and is felt only, a damp chill that passes your skin in waves.

Park Ranger Kaufman likes when he and his small groups of students—relinquished for a day into the Park’s care in the interregnum between school years—arrive at this spot at just such a time in the morning. The water is at its most ethereal—and so it is the perfect time to explain the functions of reservoir, how this lake was constructed, the eminent domaining of a great deal of farmland, the curious ecosystem it now bears—all these facts that burn off like mist as the students walk into the woods, looking for all the world as if a mere century were 10,000 years.

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Now obscured by a thicket of quick-growing sumac trees, ten years ago the protruding domed roof of this WWII-era installation was re-imagined as the main dock of a small fishing settlement from earlier in Massachusetts’ history. The concrete structure stands on the other side of a small hollow from the rise that carries the main pedestrian path through what is now a Northeastern University research station, granting the imagined ocean between the actors on the roof and the spectators on the rise a real sense of depth and distance. Old men came out to sit with their poles; the children who tagged along kicked their feet over the edge, feeling the chill resistance of the water; washer-women brought their buckets, their boards, and plenty of lye; young couples strolled by, arguing or holding hands as they looked out into the distance; a band of young men brought their boat to the landing, cast off to make bigger catches beyond the Bay, and never returned.

The effect of the boat launch was achieved by stringing the light paper boat model down along a wire and into hiding in a nearby thicket. The purported passengers, meanwhile, simply jumped off the roof behind it as it launched, landing behind a blind.

Largely improvised by the Nahant Historical Society—having taken a particularly theatrical bent in recent years—the event raised a tidy sum in donations for their preservation goals. It also rendered Tommy Cutchins bed-ridden for the next six weeks, following his poor landing during the boat-launch leap.

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This abandoned railroad trestle in Ithaca’s Cayuga Lake Park provided the perfect staging point for a group of students at Tompkins County Community College to mount their response to Halls of Power—by this point available on several streaming services—a campy but heartfelt production called A Keystone Placed First. Set a century later in what the opening narration calls “an empire’s last days,” the play challenges the aesthetics of power and austere beauty cultivated in Hall’s portrayal of empire, asserting that this attraction was always a counterfeit perpetrated by the Court on its people and itself—that empire was not a trap, but rather  the inevitable creation of the trapped.

Halls of Power writer G. Edinger has thus far refused to see A Keystone Placed First, despite the student’s drama professor offering to comp the airfare.

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During an evening of intense celebration following their success at a regional exhibition, several students of the Groton Academy of Dance [photograph background] procured the studio’s riding mower [photograph mid-ground] for a mechanically-enhance impromptu encore of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty on the Academy’s lawn [photograph foreground]. The introduction of a spindle prop with which the wicked Carbosse could pursue Aurora was later hailed by several of the younger students as being effectively menacing; however, the performance concluded prematurely when the mower crossed the Nashua River Rail Trail [photograph vantage point] and proceeded immediately into the Nashua River.

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REVERE BEACH TO WONDERLAND

Scene: An empty subway car dressed in the style of the MBTA’s Blue Line. Through the windows, the audience sees Revere Beach Station’s cheery amusement park murals; beyond them, the sea and the sky. The doors open, allowing the audience to enter.

V/O:  A chime, then: Revere Beach. Bus connections. Please watch your step while exiting the train. Please take your personal belongings with you when you exit the train.

The doors close. The view outside the windows begins to shift, discarding the view of the station and taking up the low business and high hotels of the beachfront—all viewed from the back, of course.

V/O: A chime, then: Next stop, Wonderland.

Scrubby brush and trees whip by faster even than the buildings, apparently growing but a few feet from the windows.

V/O: A chime, then: Entering Wonderland. The doors will open on the right side of the train.

The images slow and rise—the train is meant to be descending into the station. The windows catch a building of white and glass, a strange arc over the road—and then the interior of the station, a squat brick heart surrounded by modernity.

V/O: A chime, then: Wonderland. This is the last stop. Bus connections. No passengers please. Please watch your step leaving the train.

END

Unlike 4:33 writer John Cage, Revere Beach to Wonderland author Joy Felipe claims no copyright on her provocative work, stating “The text is mostly original, of course, it’s nearly all mine. But the play? The dramaturgy? The performance? No, no, no. There, I am infringing on the creative efforts of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority.”

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Three masked students—appearing to come from nearby Boston University—will often hop onto this disused sidewalk-abutting loading dock to perform scenes adapted from ABC sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. Also identifiable by their light-blue frizzy hair, the shortest of the three invariably plays Peter Boyle’s character Frank Barone; the other two students, meanwhile, have no fixed nor even favored roles, ranging from Raymond himself to their infrequently-featured children, as well as additions to the original scripts like show producer Phil Rosenthal; Knarf, a representation of Frank’s fading sense of propriety; and ∞, a neighbor of the Barones who has been shattered by the realization that she is on a television show that has entered the endless causal limbo of syndication.

If this performance series has a message, thesis, or indeed any kind of explanation, it yet eludes the performances’ viewers—who, admittedly, are primarily pedestrians conspicuously avoiding eye contact and BPD officers seeking proof of performance license (and, for that matter, permission to use the intellectual property of ABC.)

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On the cozy almost-island of Nahant sits an Atlantic Ocean-facing town park of short grass and low trees hanging onto the bedrock of the Massachusetts coast. Harsh coastal weather and glaciers carved near-vertical inclines into the rock, giving the further-inland portion a tremendous view of the park, the sea, and the quaint white pavilion. Save for a whatever strains of brass and voice are carried up to the cliff-side benches by the wind, very little of what is performed on the stage can be heard by the onlooker—but this, to local mystery author Katharine Oscar, offered a finer opportunity than any over-engineered acoustics could provide.

Her play No Rain Date for Murder allows its attendees to see all the action on the pavilion (and around the faux-feast-filled folding tables nearby), but to hear only the radio-chatter of the caterers (and later, the police) over a short-wave band radio placed beside the benches. Fitting the 1970s setting, the radio is a era-appropriate piece restored by Katharine’s mother Rachel Oscar, a CB enthusiast and former communications technician. Rachel Oscar also plays the Anthropologist, one of the six suspects; the other five suspects—the Clam-Digger, the Ferryman, the Perpetual Student, the New Chaplain, and Well, It’s Classified—are played by other members of the Nahant Historical Society, encouraged to participate by the play’s dive into Nahant’s use as a naval base during the Second World War—an effect heightened for the viewer by the immense concrete observation towers just visible over on the other side of the island whenever the audience looks behind them.

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Halls of Power casts this brutal rail bridge over the Hudson River as the corridor leading into the throne room of a defunct galactic empire, the seat of a royal line given the barest show of fealty necessary to legitimate the factions who won its power. The comings and goings of their courtiers through this space are put in context by the skeleton crew of servitors who are forever striving—and failing—to hold back the palace’s decay. The play initially presents these handmaidens and janitors in the usual comedic fashion we’ve come to expect from tales of nobles and lords. We soon realize, though, that they are as trapped in theatre of the court as those they serve; for all that they labor in incredible opulence at the center of the galaxy, there is no escape now from the system their forefathers achieved at the hilt of a laser-sword. The courtiers, meanwhile, flit from world to world, unburdened by the weight—always increasing—that they lay on the Court to divest its last shreds of power. The Empress, however, never appears in the corridor—her presence is only felt in the maneuvering of her court and the distant, injured roar that closes the performance.