Stacy Klein Photo: Joyce Dopkeen

CHARACTER SKETCH

Theater in the Straw

NAME: Stacy Klein, G88

LIFE’S WORK: Serving as artistic director of Double Edge, a laboratory theater she founded in 1982 that builds collaboration, community, and the actor’s ability to tap profound inner resources.

SOURCE OF INSPIRATION: Committed fellow artists all over the world. “In Central Europe, when I started my career, folk culture and theater culture were full of life. I saw thirty-six performances in Poland in 1976, and they were all different. Raw. Creative. Confrontive.”

PIVOTAL DECISION: Buying a 105-acre former dairy farm in Ashfield, Massachusetts, in 1994 and moving her theater there from the Boston area. The new quarters enabled Double Edge to welcome international guests and offer immersive acting workshops with strenuous, boundary-pushing physical training. It could stage dreamlike “summer spectacles” like last summer’s Shahrazad, which wound through fields, forests, and hills to evoke the mythical landscapes of the Arabian Nights. Ensemble members could form bonds not only with each other but with the land. “Moving to the farm gave me an appreciation of what it means to build a community and care for the earth. It gave my work a new meaning.”

RECENT ACCOLADE: The 2013 Doris Duke Artist Award for her contributions to American theater