Lee — In 2021, a group of young artists founded an educational nonprofit to create programs for emerging artists. The group uses a space in Lee, a barn, to develop its programs and experimental theater art, including a residency program to allow for the development of theater art.
Three years after its founding, the organization, known as The Barn at Lee, will be holding its first season at its location on 345 Spring Street. The organization was founded by Misha Brooks, Zach Donovan, Shoshana Levy, and Julianna Azevedo Mitchell.
“This season is the first time we’ve had public programming,” Brooks, who is the Director of Programs for the organization, told The Berkshire Edge. “Our organization has had a big ramping up to get to this point, which includes renovating the barn that we are using as a theater.”
Managing Director Levy said that the barn is over 300 years old. “For the longest time it was used agriculturally,” Levy said. “Then it sat vacant for many years and fell into disrepair. It’s been lovingly restored to be a barn that can be used as a theater.”
Levy explained that the horse stalls have been converted into dressing rooms and bathrooms, but the barn itself remains pretty much as it was when it was used for agriculture. “We have gone to great lengths to care for the history of our location,” Levy said. “We see this use as adding to the story rather than writing over it.”
“I think it’s a great example of adaptive reuse of agricultural property and giving new life to it,” Brooks said. “We’re not the only theater built out of a barn in the Berkshires, but I think we may be the smallest one. I think that we can take advantage of that in our staging. The theater is intimate, and it lends itself towards experimentation.”
Brooks earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting from the Experimental Theater Wing of the New York University’s Tisch School of Arts. Meanwhile, Levy is an urban planner and affordable housing professional currently working as a project manager for the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Both Brooks and Levy told The Berkshire Edge that experimentation and having resources for young artists to create work are very important to them and the organization. “When we started in 2021 right after the pandemic, we noticed amongst our community of artists that there was a lack of space and resources for young artists to create their work,” Brooks said. “Over the past few years, there was a lot of emphasis on using the internet to develop young artists’ voices. But we feel the internet is insufficient for performing artists who need to be in physical space in front of real audiences.”
Brooks said that creating a performance space was the easiest solution to address the lack of resources for creatives. “We believe live art is important,” Brooks said. “Performance art is important to be in a community with other people to engage with ideas in real time that can’t be done on phones or computers. And we are real advocates for live art, and we know that for that to happen, there needs to be investment in the arts. And we thought, who better to invest than us, and if no one else is going to we might as well.”
The Barn at Lee’s first season begins with performances of Sophocles’ “Antigone,” adapted by both Brooks and Donovan. Performances will be held at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, September 13, and Saturday, September 14. “It’s a very old play that is still worth exploring in contemporary times,” Donovan said regarding the upcoming performance. “We think that our experiences in contemporary life can bring something into the play that maybe Sophocles couldn’t have imagined.”
Six actors make up the cast, and Brooks explained that the play has been reimagined into what she calls “pop theater.” “‘Pop theater’ is a theatrical movement about placing live theater in the context of popular mainstream art,” Brooks explained. “The play is well over 2,000 years old, but we have reworked the text and have a new adaptation.”
The second performance in the series will be “All This Newness,” which was created and will be performed by Nazareth Hassan. The original work will be performed at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, September 20, and Saturday, September 21. “Nazareth was the first person in our residency program,” Brooks said. “The idea behind our residency program is to bring emerging artists for up to 10 days at a time, twice a year, to give them a space to experiment and to hone their voice.”
Hassan won the 2017 Dramatist Guild Young Playwright award, and their play “Vantablack” was selected for Theatretreffen Stuckemarkt 2019 and was subsequently workshopped at the Royal Court Theatre and Emory University.
Brooks said that the performance “will be in the canon of work that Nazareth does.”
The final performance in the series is “My Own Private Final Destination,” written and performed by Alexandra McVicker. The one-woman show was developed by transgender actress McVicker, who previously starred as a recurring character in the 2017 HBO show “Vice Principals.” “My Own Private Final Destination,” co-developed by Donavan, is an autobiographical play about “an actress who makes the difficult decision to return to her hometown of Louisville, Ky., to portray herself in a play she wrote about her own life.”
“It’s a show we’ve been developing for the last year and a half,” Donovan said. “It’s an inquiry into how we can adapt our own life story without it being about self-indulgence and alienating. In the play, she returns to her hometown of Louisville, Ky., to produce and star in a play that she has written about in her own life with a cast of actors who she addresses but we never see. The idea is that, as she tells her stories, there is no divide between her as a performer and her as a human.”
The performances will be held at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, September 27, and Saturday, September 28.
For more information about The Barn at Lee, go to the organization’s website.
