Once upon a time, Greg Moss wrote a play

Aisha Chodat plays Jenny in the new Greg Moss play. Photo by Lydia See.

It's not like anyone hoodwinked him, he was not dragged, kicking and screaming, into the project. He went along willingly, however cautiously, saying he would kick the idea around a little, to keep an open mind, just see what happens, but with a boatload of doubt, because Gregory S. Moss, a homegrown, but lately a globetrotting playwright, just back from a French premiere of his play "House of Gold," is a little distrustful of the form — "skeptical" is how he puts it — even though some of his work is built along similar structures. So when Edward Speck, artistic director of Theater in the Open, a company Moss had been involved with for more than 15 years, approached him, asked him to do an original adaptation of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale — any one, his choice — Moss thought ... I'm probably not the right guy to do a straight adaptation, but maybe I could take a different approach. So he dug into the literature, the folklore of fairy tales. He read the usual Freudian takes about what is going on below the surface of these creepy, disturbing, if you think about it, stories — or, at least, the ones that the evil genius Walt Disney hasn't gotten his dreck-stained fingers all over, and came up with something original, spellbinding — a modern Grimm-like fairytale set in the here and now, specifically Newburyport, or "this Puritan black hole of the universe" as our 15-year-old heroine Jenny Stone (Aisha Chodat) puts it — a little city by the laughing waters that geeky Froggy (Max Vye) — a characters whose name might ring a bell with all you clever kids out there — was told to avoid at all costs.

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A deserved buzz about 'The Flies'

Theater in the Open has been messing with myth for three decades. It's  what they do, they do it well, they always have. But when someone finally gets around to writing a proper history of the troupe, the company's current production, a dizzying, kaleidoscopic retelling of Jean-Paul Sartre's epic play "The Flies," will be one of the shows they will linger over. It's a startlingly original take on the French existential drama, blending chaos and pathos, one that finds the poetry and visual clarity in a difficult and sometimes tiresome work, one ultimately wrestled into submission by director Stephen Haley. No mean feat considering the nature of the beast. Because Sartre was a philosopher, not a playwright. A straight production of "The Flies" is a gabfest, about three full hours of audience-numbing blah blah blah about the absurdity of life  — wonderful, thoughtful, perceptive blather, but treatise rather than drama, and one that doesn't really fly, so to speak, on stage. Not for the audience, anyhow. Yes, we are alone. There's no God, there's no Devil, to save us, to trick us. There's no transcendence, nothing beyond the immediate, what can be sensed. Meaning is illusion. We're condemned to live in freedom, free to curse the gods or blame the "other" political party or whatever evasion strategy is required or comfortable, but escape is not possible. Whatever is wrong can be left on our own doorstep — a terrible responsibility that we, naturally, ignore — especially, being Americans, when it taxes our attention span.

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TITO warming up to free season

The curtain is about to open on a new reality for Theater in the Open: The company, which has been performing at Maudslay State Park for most of its three-decade-plus existence, will be launching its first-ever free season, when the temperatures get up just a little higher. The season will include a little something for everybody: one of those pantos, a free-form, improvisational production with a little song, a little dance and maybe a little seltzer down your pants; a Steven Haley take on old Jean-Paul Sartre's “The Flies,” and an original adaptation of Grimm Brothers stories written by Gregory S. Moss. And, of course, free seasons don't come cheap. So, before the season officially gets under way, there's Spring Thaw, a fundraiser that will serve as a launching pad for what TITO artistic director Edward Speck hopes will be "the first of many, many years of community-supported, open theater." The show, which takes place April 28 at the Firehouse Center, will include Kristen Miller's soundtrack to a short movie by avant garde filmmaker Maya Deren; Exit Dance Theatre's "Famished," a Bugs Bunny-esque mix of slapstick and ballet centering around three people's lust for a doughnut (ummmmmm, doughnuts ...); and Haley's production of a Samuel Beckett play called, well, "Play," a 20-minute piece that deals with themes of fidelity, mortality and, despite our constant, endless jabbering, the species' failure to communicate. The company will try to keep the evening light with two short David Ives pieces, "Sure Thing," directed by Beth Randall, and "Phillip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread," which Speck will direct.

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TITO's 'Soprano' hits the high notes

Everything seems just hunky-dory, but, almost from the beginning of "The Bald Soprano," you know something is off, and if you say "off what" you are on track, in the zone, whatever that means, in this completely over-the-top absurd Ionesco classic being staged by Theater in the Open. We find the Smiths, a proper English family, which is to say circumspect and bloodless and deceptively matter-of-fact, in their living room, in an unnamed suburb of London, discussing the mundane details of their day-to-day, like the quality of the oil, both cooking and salad, which, the missus says, is delightfully not rancid, as is sometimes the case. They talk about superficially interesting, ultimately distracting facts gleaned through the course of a life well avoided, like the restorative qualities of good-quality yogurt. They talk about the interesting news of the day, like the death of family friend Bobby Watson, not to be confused with his wife, who has the same name, or his son and daughter, who also have the same name, and a chap who actually seems to have died several years before, the mister just failing to bring it up until now. And, speaking of death, they talk about those other irritating facts of life, like how the papers always seem to list the age of people who die, but never of those who are born.

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