The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include an original score to a hundred-year-old classic documentary played live; a site-specific theater work about Edith Wharton; a festival of new 10-minute plays; a dreamy folk-rock duo; and a whole lot more.
After a triumphant performance at last September’s FreshGrass Festival, Pioneer Valley-based indie-folk group Parsonsfield returns to MASS MoCA in North Adams on Saturday night at 8 to play their original live score to the iconic Richard Flaherty documentary “Nanook of the North.” Parsonsfield is a western Massachusetts homegrown band that is rising in international acclaim. During their six years together, the five musicians have developed an ear for elegantly exciting entanglements of jazz, bluegrass, and folk. “They harmonize; they play saws, mandolins, and pump organs; they back their songs with crickets and squeaking screen doors; they are boisterously youthful yet deftly sentimental,” says The New York Times. The film Nanook of the North explores a year in the life of an Inuit family on the subarctic eastern seashore of Canada’s Hudson Bay. Filmed from the inside out and employing filmmaking practices that include cinéma vérité, stagings, and simulations, the 1922 documentary cemented its place in cinematic history by sparking conversations about the potential of the medium, challenging the genre of documentary before it even existed. The event promises to be an innovative fusion of one hundred years of film and music history.
“Leisure & Lust,” a unique, immersive, site-specific theater experience written by Sara Farrington and inspired by Edith Wharton’s life, love affairs, marriage, and writing style, receives a limited run at The Mount in Lenox, Mass., tonight and tomorrow. The play is the story of Grace Hunter, a brilliant woman with an insatiable hunger for romance, and her tortured husband Harry, a closeted man rapidly losing his grip on reality. “Leisure & Lust” is a theatrical and psychological journey through the ravages of poverty and the oppressions of affluence in New York City in 1907.
Berkshire Playwrights Lab is launching the inaugural Radius Playwrights Festival in its new home at Saint James Place in Great Barrington this weekend.Radius Playwrights Festival features new short plays created by local writers. BPL will present fully staged readings of the six selected plays in the much-anticipated new performance space located in downtown Great Barrington tonight at 7 p.m. and tomorrow at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. The six 10-minute plays chosen for the inaugural event are A Layover by Andy Reynolds, Broken by James McLindon, Cirque du Dismay by Maizy Broderick Scarpa, Ein Kleiner Kosmik Joke by Rachel Schroeder, Going Out Dancing by Katherine Burger, and It’s a Tragedy by Steven Otfinoski.
New York-based female folk-rock duo Overcoats brings its captivating, intimate harmonies and subtle, electronic soundscapes to Club Helsinki Hudson tonight at 9pm. Described as a cross between Chet Faker and Simon & Garfunkel, the duo’s voices glide over shivering chords and minimal electronics. Their songs alternately surge with dance-floor energy and unfold in gentle, soulful waves. Now that sounds like a tonic for our times.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of Berkishire Daily and the Rogovoy Report, available online at rogovoyreport.com