They’re back from the Fringe. And they’re serious about sharing.
Area performers Paul Richmond, Tony Vacca and John Sheldon will be sharing with Pioneer Valley audiences the two productions they brought to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August as part of the Serious Play Theatre Ensemble’s “Return from the Fringe” on Oct. 5 and 6.
The two 7 p.m. shows at the new Northampton Community Arts Trust building, at 33 Hawley St. in Northampton, will present both Sheldon’s one-man tour de force, “The Red Guitar” as well as “Do it Now: Manual Override” featuring Sheldon, Vacca and Richmond.
After what Serious Play Artistic Director Sheryl Stoodley called an “amazing and exhilarating and exhausting month of two shows every night” in Scotland, the Northampton-based theater company is bringing its shows back home, as well as bringing back ideas for future Pioneer Valley performances.
Serious Play, which presented Sheldon’s autobiographical “The Red Guitar” at Edinburgh in 2016 and returned with back-to-back nightly productions during August, hopes to raise awareness and support for the continued exchange of provocative theater experiences for audiences here and in Edinburgh.
“As artists, we must be constantly growing,” Stoodley explained. “That’s why I want to go beyond the (Pioneer) Valley. … We need in our cities and our towns to reach out and connect, to build bridges and not walls. In Edinburgh, it’s small enough that if you connect, you can make very meaningful bridges. I want to bring them here, and I’d like to collaborate with international artists, to grow my work and share their points of view, because we think we know it all here. And we don’t.”
Richmond, a spoken-word artist from Wendell, said after the tour, “We saw it as a very glamorized 12 days of rehearsals, because suddenly we were given a pretty nice little venue, with a good sound system. … We tried to make it universal. … They were just glad it was out in the open, that we were open to talking about stuff.”
He added, “Everybody is wanting something real … that brings people together as humans with emotions.”
“It was very well received,” said Serious Play Managing Director Robin Doty, comparing the Amherst guitarist-playwright’s one-man show this summer with the 2016 version — in part because of a better venue, with better sound equipment, but also because of Sheldon’s tighter performance, and also because of a four-star review in The Scotsman, Scotland’s national newspaper:
“John Sheldon’s candy-apple-red Fender Stratocaster is emblematic of not just decades of popular music but of his life’s journey, mental health issues surmounted and the healing potential of music,” wrote reviewer Jim Gilchrist. “Sheldon is endearingly warm and funny, and those of a certain age and musical disposition will sympathise as he name-checks sounds that fed his enthusiasm. … Hendrix, as well as Steely Dan drummer Jim Hodder, with whom Sheldon played in a psychedelic rock band, were famous casualties. Sheldon won through, however, to share with us this heartfelt testament to his belief in the transformative power of music.”
With more than 3,500 different productions from 50 countries, the world’s largest arts festival suffers from “review inflation,” said Doty, so one key to success is building a relationship with audiences as well as reviewers there.
“There’s a tendency to overinflate the star thing, with over 3,000 different performances vying for attention,” said Doty, who was thrilled with both The Scotsman’s review as well as The Herald’s Review of “Do It Now.”
“Someone has to say, ‘This is worth watching,’ to make decisions on,” Doty said. “Pity the poor people who go to the Fringe without any idea what they want to see. You could spend your whole time in an apartment with the catalog and never figure it out.”
The two shows — with Sheldon, of Amherst, performing his 50-minute solo show at 9 p.m. six nights a week nightly before heading upstairs to join the Whately percussionist and Wendell spoken-work artist for their 10:30 gig — were especially a draw for the European audiences, Doty said.
“Particularly in these times of Brexit, Trump and politics galore going around, we saw these productions basically did the same kind of stuff for European audiences, who were very keen to hear what folks in the (United) States are saying from their perspective about things.”
Vacca reported after the four-week tour, “The folks from Europe really wanted to know, when we got to talk to people afterwards, they were fairly polite in asking, ‘Where’s America going?’”
Rob Adams, writing in The Herald, wrote that Sheldon, Vacca and Richmond “are products of the 1960s who have had enough of U.S. government policy and gun laws and gather their dissatisfaction into poetic declamation, layered and looped guitar shaping and percussive drive and precision. Part political rant, part history lesson and wholly musical … ‘Do It Now’ is a serious call to (dis)arms leavened by moments of dark humour and highly charged musicianship.”
While at the festival, Doty said, he and Stoodley went to see a new production called “Auld Lang Syne” by Mairi Campbell, the multitalented Scottish performer who Serious Play previously presented at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls.
“We’re looking at bringing Mairi back,” said Doty, adding that about four different performances caught the fancy of the theater company for its biennial exchange project.
As tricky as building the necessary relationship with Fringe audiences and reviewers for its productions in Edinburgh, Doty said, is picking through the thousands of shows at the festival there for what would work best on this side of the “puddle.”
Some of what Doty and Stoodley find at the Fringe are ideas for what would play well back home, he said. Nassim Soleimanpour’s “White Rabbit, Red Rabbit,” for example, was a play they saw at the 2016 Fringe and produced in the fall of 2017 at A.P.E. in Northampton.
“Sure, the comedy and standup over there’s very good, but it’s not our thing,” he said. “We tend to hover around the venue Summerhall,” the multi-arts complex with roughly 200 venues in some of its 600 rooms, “where we find some of the more challenging, inventive pieces. We have to dig through some of that stuff and figure out where to look for the kind of things that mesh with our aesthetic.”
The other trick, of course, is finding the funding for Serious Play — which has also had experience touring in London, Athens and Serbia, as well as New York and Boston — to bring productions to Edinburgh and to bring others back from the Fringe as well. The upcoming Northampton performances are aimed at helping with that as well.
“Return from the Fringe,” then, won’t just be a doubleheader, direct from its smash Scottish success, but also a preview of what Doty called Serious Play’s “big bold exchange going forward.”
Tickets for the “Return from the Fringe” performances are $18 in advance at brownpapertickets.com and $20 at the door. For more information about Serious Play Theatre Ensemble, visit seriousplay.org.
Senior reporter Richie Davis has worked at the Greenfield Recorder for more than 35 years. He can be reached at rdavis@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 269.