Stone’s Throw From Sane

Like many of us with a crippling addiction to our phones, Nick awakens to the pinging sound of a new notification. “The message arrived, unknown number. ‘It’s been too long, I hope you can make it.’” A stranger? A flirtation? An ex-boyfriend? Nick’s response to this seemingly cordial invitation from is anything but elation.

“A twenty-year-old terror slipped up through the soles of my feet and shook me awake: He’s found out.”

So begins the eerie slow-burn of “The Stones,” which will have its United States premiere at Great Barrington Public Theater on the campus of Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington Mass., starting Thursday, June 15. Directed by Michelle Joyner with a one-man performance by Ryan Winkles, “The Stones” is by young London-based Australian playwright Kit Brookman. The show first premiered in 2019 at King’s Head Theatre in London and was later remounted in Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2022.

In an interview with The Signal House, a publisher of emerging theatrical work that Brookman co-founded, he described the play thematically as being “About the things that we choose not to see and the consequences of not seeing those things, fixating on things that happened in the past or that we have no control over. And all the while things that we should be seeing are kind of creeping up over our shoulder.”

Nick’s rendezvous following this mysterious conversation leads him to taking job as a tutor to two young children, and if shades of Henry James’ “Turn of The Screw” shadow across your mind, the intention seems purposeful.

As Brookman told Signal House, “Gothic stories can activate a moral dilemma and create a very striking sense of metaphor that is very easy to engage with.”

Photo By Wil Stewart/ The Signal House

Photo By Wil Stewart/ The Signal House

Photo By Wil Stewart/ The Signal House