Double Edge Theatre confronts a crazy world with a quixotic circus act

By Chris Rohmann

In The Adventures of Don Quixote, the title character takes refuge from the absurd cruelty of the real world in a fantasy of knight errantry. In The UnPOSSESSED, Double Edge Theatre of Ashfield uses a whimsical deconstruction of Miguel de Cervantes' 17th-century classic to confront the cruel absurdities of the post-9/11 world.

When you enter the converted barn on the company's 100-acre farm-cum-theater-collective in Ashfield, Mass., the show is already in progress. The first thing you notice in the half-light is a giant representation of the novel's most famous passage. 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, well, quixotic adventures.

And there, hanging nervously from the roof beam on a long silken sash, is Quixote's squire, Sancho Panza. Where the fabric touches the floor, a pile of old books stirs and the Don himself emerges from the mass of chivalric romances in which he has—in this case, literally—buried himself.

Breaking with their reputation in some quarters for being wilfully opaque and taking their style of physical theater to the point of obscurity, each summer Double Edge becomes more playful and accessible, fashioning a peripatetic entertainment that leads its audience around the farm to various improvised performance sites. The UnPOSSESSED was created in 2003 as a summertime spectacle, then revised and compressed for indoor performance.

In the fall of 2004 it was performed—and rapturously received—at La Mama in New York, and in summer the company takes it on a European tour. For those who haven't yet caught up with Double Edge, this show makes an engrossing, often delightful, and at times visually breathtaking introduction to their offbeat stagecraft.

Like all DE productions, this one is compounded of compelling but often ambiguous images and evocative but disjointed pieces of text. You are invited—challenged, really—to draw out meaning from whatever resonates in your own emotions and imagination. Here, though the action has been adapted for the enclosed space, the expansive, circusy atmosphere remains.

The half-dozen performers bestride the stage on six-foot stilts, roll around it inside circular metal frames, glide across it on roller skates and swing vertiginously above it on fabric trapezes. They put on shadow-puppet plays-within-the-play, become huge puppets themselves, and form a ragged band to play Justin Handley's original, Fellini-esque incidental music.

In her program notes, director Stacy Klein says she started thinking about Don Quixote in the wake of 9/11, feeling herself "faced with an incomprehensible reality, one in which people would rather shoot than talk ... and one which replaces the human potential with a catatonic isolation and ignorance." In Cervantes' 400-year-old masterpiece she found "unfortunately similar dilemmas and ominously parallel questions about idealism and fanaticism, cultural wars and social decay, individual honor and the nature of patriotic rebellion."

The hour-long pocket epic unwinds in an overlapping series of dreamlike episodes extrapolated from the book. Four energetic, agile performers—Hayley Brown, Jeremy Louise Eaton, Justin Handley and Richard Newman—play all the supporting roles. Carlos Uriona and Matthew Glassman are Quixote and Sancho. They make an effective and affecting pair, Uriona giving the Knight of the Mournful Countenance a sense of dogged idealism, with Glassman charmingly bewildered as the Don's steadfast sidekick.

For Quixote's armor, Uriona wears a World War I-era pilot's leather helmet and goggles. His faithful steed Rosinante is a tricycle, and his epic quest is symbolized by a tall metal stepladder on wheels, which Glassman patiently rolls along, Uriona standing atop it like a mad sea captain at the prow of his ship.

Though no explanation is given of the show's title, The UnPOSSESSED, it reflects the company's take on the story. Where Don Quixote is possessed by delusions of heroic valor, making a demented response to hard-edged reality, Double Edge sees clearly into a world gone mad. Nonetheless, like Quixote, their response is fanciful, even hopeful. As Klein puts it, this theater piece "exists in the juxtaposition between the external nightmare that we have created and the impossible dream that we must risk creating."