“Herons are believed to be symbols of good luck and transformation,” Travis Coe, who co-directed “The Heron’s Flight” with Jennifer Johnson at Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield, Massachusetts, says at the beginning of the spectacle. “Walk with us toward transformation.”
They lead the audience to a pond at dusk surrounded by the sound of flutes, grunts, chittering and moos. A woman in green appears out of the shrubbery and announces, “It’s midsummer night, you can we whoever you want to be.”
There’s a woman with antlers, a man with bull horns, a woman swims in the pond with a ruffled gray tail. And the heron, a woman with big white wings, on a swing suspended over the pond, sheds her wings and splashes into the water—and emerges, as a different woman, seemingly learning to walk as she strides up onto the shore. “It’s strange to be a human,” the heron-woman says. “Wings make much more sense.”
The cast leads the audience through the Double Edge’s Farm Center landscape, through the giant mouth of a cyclops into a barn, and after night has fallen, to tables set for an outdoor feast, through gardens, along creeks lit by fires. There’s a centaur and a minotaur and a phoenix, and dancing and caresses and flips and acrobatics. The show was inspired by an actual heron that lives on the property—and midway through the show the real bird glides overhead. Double Edge’s spectacles often create a dreamy hallucinatory surreal fugue state—and here they call upon the magic of a midsummer night’s dream populated by alluring and capricious faerie.
The heron-woman has given up her wings seeking deeper understanding. “Is this feeling of love and loss,” she asks, “what it means to be human?”
Double Edge Theatre performs “The Heron’s Flight” in previews on July 18 and July 19 at 8 p.m. and performances from July 23 to July 31 at 8 p.m. and Aug. 1 to 11 at 7:30 p.m. The theater says tickets are “currently sold out. To join our waitlist, please contact tickets@doubleedgetheatre.org.”
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