As the year has drawn to a close, I’ve been looking back over the hundred-plus shows I’ve seen in 2014. And as the seasons begin to turn from the dark back into the light, I’ve been thinking about some of those theater moments when a dark theme was leavened by humor or—in many cases—music, when a light one was underscored by dark shadows, or when light and dark danced together in tension or harmony.

In the latter category were two one-woman shows that delved into deeply painful subjects with an exhilarating lightness of touch. In Mom Baby God at Smith College, Madeline Burrows took on the personae of various “pro-life” activists to hilariously skewer that movement’s hypocrisies. And Allison McLemore’s mercurial performance in The Amish Project at Chester Theatre Company made that multi-character investigation of a mass murder an agony to observe but a joy to experience.

The same was true of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, part of Amherst Cinema’s screenings of the NT Live on-stage series, which injected genuine, and generous, laughter into the nightmare world of an autistic boy. And in Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, Serious Play! gave us vignettes from harsh lives tempered by hope and lifted by humor.

In Clybourne Park, at New Century Theatre, scalding home truths about race relations tussled with sometimes zany humor for possession of the stage. Two intimate pieces at Barrington Stage Company showed tender relationships poised on a knife-edge of danger. Working on a Special Day explored the whimsical encounter of two lonely people in Mussolini’s Italy, while Cuban- and klezmer-flavored music enlivened The Golem of Havana’s tale of moral and political jeopardy.

Music played a lead role in several lively shows with sober themes. The UMass Fine Arts Center brought in a touring production of American Idiot, Green Day’s raucous dissection of youth culture in the suburban wasteland, and the University’s Theater and Music departments collaborated on Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, an operatic tragedy set in a bustling New York tenement.

Mount Holyoke College staged the East Coast premiere of Dark River, Mary Watkins’ bio-opera about the trials and triumphs of civil rights heroine Fannie Lou Hamer. Next to Normal, at The Theater Project, tackled knotty issues of madness, delusion, rebellion and psychopharmacology with a buoyant indie-rock score, and John Sheldon explored some of the same themes in his one-man virtuoso musical journey, The Red Guitar, with Old Deerfield Productions.

Nobody’s Girl, at the Academy of Music, unearthed a dark chapter from Northampton history in the form of a 1940s screwball comedy. Beau Jest Moving Theater put a playful spin on the film noir genre in Apt. 4D at the Ko Festival of Performance. The Lion & The Clown, from Real Live Theatre, gave a circus twist to a heartbreaking grown-up fairy tale and confirmed the fledgling troupe as the Valley’s most adventurously eclectic new ensemble.

And in the year’s most literal rendering of the dark/light theme, Silverthorne Theater Company opened its inaugural season with Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy, which takes place in total darkness after an electrical failure, but is performed in full stage lighting — a metaphor in itself for the year’s juxtapositions of gaiety and gloom, sunlight and shadow: audiences seated in the dark but illuminated, in both senses, by the radiance on stage.•

 

Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and his StageStruck blog is at valleyadvocate.com/blogs/stagestruck.