Whether on stage, in a tent or under an umbrella, the annual BorderLight Festival is back. About 200 performers from the region and 16 countries are presenting fringe theater in Playhouse Square. One of the pieces, “The Right Room,” is being performed in a room at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.
“There are four different couples, and they are in four different hotel rooms across four different time periods,” said Cleveland-based playwright David Hansen. “For the audience, it's all happening at the same time in the same room. It will be a very intimate, immersive experience for those who can get in.”
Hansen said he was inspired by the interconnectedness he’s seen in his own family.
“I'm at this age where I'm looking back at my own parents’ relationship, because they've inspired a couple in this show,” he said. “My own relationship with my wife inspired one of the couples and also both sets of grandparents, my adoptive grandparents and my biological grandparents. And to see what kind of important decisions they and we have all made that basically have made who we are.”
About half of this year’s participants are from Northeast Ohio. One of them, Eric Coble, authored “The Girl Who Swallowed a Cactus.” Tia Shearer Bassett performs the one-woman show, which she said has “sort of a campfire feel.” Bassett was going to premiere the piece in 2019 at the Kennedy Center, until she was diagnosed with cancer.
“I was really hopeful that my treatment would be over by then, but it was a really grueling process,” she said. “Amazingly and wonderfully, I got through that, and I am in my fifth year of remission.”
Bassett is also part of an immersive experience that brings story time under a large umbrella, “The Peace (co)Lab.” It’s one of the family-friendly offerings that’s part of Fringe Jr. at venues throughout the festival. BorderLight Executive Director Dale Heinen said it’s an expansion of last year’s family productions that happened in a single space at Playhouse Square. They will also provide visitors with a “know-before-you-go” guide according to accessibility coordinator Heather Utsler-Smith.
“’Where are the restrooms? How do I park? Is this space wheelchair friendly?’” she said. “We'll provide some additional tools like noise-reducing headphones, sunglasses, fidgets, and then that quiet space as well. This is a space where you can be wholly yourself if you need to get up and move around and come back and sit down. That's totally okay. It's not a place where we shame one another for needing to do those kinds of things.”
Heinen said a coordinator will be onsite every day to ensure that all visitors are not just welcomed, but embraced.
“Theater is an empathy-building machine,” she said. “That's something that we need more of in the world right now, and it helps us to cross some of those divides.”
