Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

On a chilly Friday morning this past March, I was joined by three companions—Martha Coigney, the veteran international theatre specialist, and Lucy and Sandy, my two travel-loving papillons, comfy in their Sherpa bags—for a car trip north from Manhattan. Our destination was Ashfield, an ostensibly unremarkable village in west-central Massachusetts, in the foothills of the Berkshires.

We had a mission there. Martha and I were scheduled to take part in a discussion series called "Conversations"—webcast roundtables devoted to different aspects of contemporary performance—convened by our colleague Philip Arnoult, of the Center for International Theatre Development, and the Ashfield-based Double Edge Theatre, a rural performance ensemble of considerable reputation that I had never visited before.

A scant four hours after Manhattan had disappeared in the rearview mirror, we wheeled off Mass. Route 116 and onto the damp, spring-green grounds of the old dairy farm—Double Edge calls it The Farm, in caps—that has been the company's performance base and living quarters since 1994. Lucy and Sandy were liberated to sniff out their first impressions of the place and make friends with the farm dogs; Martha and I were welcomed into the cozy den of the main house to join four or five of our "Conversations" cohorts and await the arrival of our host, Double Edge founder and artistic director Stacy Klein, who was busy with afternoon rehearsals.

Thus began a long weekend during which our talk-about-performance mission soon came to seem almost extraneous as we set about experiencing performance in the flesh. Martha had seen Double Edge's work on past visits—but perhaps we'd been seduced into making this particular trek to Ashfield, I began to think, not so much to contribute to some abstract discussion but to be wholly immersed into the heady mix of theatricality and camaraderie and intensely personal artistry that pervades this place.

That was precisely the case, of course, as anyone who knows Philip Arnoult's modus operandi could have predicted. He and Stacy wanted us outsiders to get to know Double Edge on a sensual, immediate basis, in our bones. That could only happen—and it did—by spending time with this one-of-a-kind company on its one-of-a-kind home turf.

You'll share some of what we experienced—I think of it as an absorption into the spirit of a place—as you read documentarian Kevin Landis's richly detailed feature in this issue about the artists of Double Edge, their creative life on the farm and their relationship with the town—an anything-but-unremarkable community, it turns out—in which the company has found a literal as well as an artistic home.

Even in the flush of getting-acquainted excitement, Martha and I managed to carry out our designated missions: Our "Conversations" turned out to be spirited and engaging. (Audio recordings of my panel, devoted to "Writers on Laboratory Theatre," and hers on "Bold Women" in the theatre, can be accessed at www.doubleedgetheatre.org.) What I'll remember in the long run, though—embedded like unexpected treasure in the antic exchanges of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, in the dancing klezmer rhythms of Bruno Schulz's pipe dreams, in the fertile stillness of the farm itself—is the passion and commitment of a troupe of extraordinary artists for whom life and art have indelibly converged.

By the way, Lucy and Sandy had a helluva time, too.