Theatre Founder Wins Transformative Grant

Stacy Klein, Founder and Artistic Director of Double Edge Theatre, has received the prestigious 2013 Artist Award from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Klein is among only twenty artists nationwide and the only Massachusetts artist chosen by the foundation to receive the $225,000, multi-year grant. The transformative award is intended to empower, invest in and celebrate artists who have demonstrated “thrilling, vibrant work that affects both audiences and the larger performing arts field.”  

This award recognizes Stacy Klein’s tremendous vision and transformation of the field of theatre, both in the evolution of its aesthetic and in the ways in which an artist relates to her community. She intends to use the Doris Duke Artist Award to create the next phase of the Chagall performance cycle (2010-2015) while further developing The Farm as a rural performance center and school. She said, “This award’s flexibility, enabling each artist to decide how it will be used, opens up myriad possibilities and options.”  

Klein has led Double Edge for 31 years, and the small resident company is now widely acknowledged as one of America’s foremost laboratory theatres. Originally based in Boston, Klein moved Double Edge to the rural town of Ashfield in 1994 with the goal of creating The Farm, a permanent center for performance, training, research, and exchange.  Beginning in 2002, she started directing an annual Summer Spectacle series—indoor/outdoor performances that take place throughout The Farm grounds.  In past years the spectacles have been based on adaptations of Don Quixote, The Odyssey, and other classical literature. The 2013 Spectacle, Shahrazad, will run from July 24 to August 19. 

Throughout the year, Double Edge offers immersive training for emerging actors, internships, workshops, public conversations, concerts, and other programs. The company tours nationally and internationally, most recently in Washington, D.C., and in Moscow. It also works closely with local schools, businesses, artists, farmers, and hundreds of community volunteers to bring Klein’s vision of “living culture” to the region.   

Stacy Klein is the recipient of the OTTO award for Political Theater (2006), and her work with Double Edge has received grants from NEFA National Theater Project (2013), Arts Presenters Ensemble Theatre Collaborations (2008, 2006), and MAP Fund (2006). In February 2013, Double Edge premiered its latest work, The Grand Parade (of the 20th Century), which uses trapeze, circus, dance, and projections to depict major events of the 20th century in a theatrical style inspired by the painter Marc Chagall’s kaleidoscopic aesthetic. 

For more information about Stacy Klein, Double Edge Theatre, and to buy tickets to Shahrazad, go to www.doubleedgetheatre.org