Drawing People to the Arts With a Little Something For Everybody

It was the history of the world in about 66 minutes at PS 21, short for Performance Spaces for the 21st Century. This is a place for chamber music, plays, modern dance, variety shows, movies and, on this particular Saturday before a hurricane, puppets. Kids and grownups, Polar Orange soda and popcorn in hand, took their seats for “To Fuel the Fire,” a message-heavy puppet show invented by Arm-of-the-Sea Mask and Puppet Theater. The performance was delayed, though, by a deafening squall pounding the open-jawed white plastic stage cover set on rolling farmland with apple trees nearby and goats and chickens and a yellow dog just outside the town of Chatham, NY. But it was not long before Dean Jones mounted his platform set with a microphone, keyboard, drums and trombone (he can play simultaneously the keys with his right hand, the snares with his left and sing, or intone), to get the show on the road. It looked like a pretty long road, though, when one black-draped puppeteer posted a sign as vaudeville shows used to: “8,000 BC.” Well, it was actually a bit earlier than that (Bachman et al. aside) with jaunty one-celled creatures merging their DNA to even their odds in a nasty world. In no time, dark figures had draped a double helix to the back curtain and, voila! We had in succession a fat red worm, then a snail, a humming bird, a polar bear and an immigrant farmer and his wife, Isis and Osiris. You remember the Egyptian King, Osiris, carved by a rival into 14 pieces, then pieced together, 13 of the pieces, anyway, by his wife and sister, Isis, who, in doing so, became pregnant (which, according to accounts, is pretty interesting since the most vital piece for procreation had gone missing). Well, just put that aside and view I & O as Gulf Coast immigrants, simple, hardworking people crushed by Big Oil and symbolizing things like magic, regeneration and agriculture. The next sign brings us to 2,400-2170 BC and I & O are keeping cows, composting, planting like mad, making soup and discussing various aspects of physics. Time marches on and monetizing is invented, and the telephone; so is the internal combustion engine, as well as global warming, industrial disasters, oil slicks and death. Don’t worry. Death is a temporary thing here. Puppeteers will do I & O, but not death. And the presentations are witty and charming and imaginative. For anyone. This is PS 21’s sixth season and the organization’s president, Judith Grunberg (a self-proclaimed “city girl and rural person”), dreaming of making the arts a unifying force in this community, bought land off Route 66 and with help from her friends built a beautiful stage with good lights and sound in a lovely place. Grunberg, at 70-something, is sharp and chatty and heedless of minutiae such as a dropped camera. “Oh, I do that all the time,” she says, picking it up and replacing it over her shoulder. She wanted to present chamber music, here, she tells me, even Bach. Her husband loved Bach. But getting people to music like this is like “pulling donkeys through the jungle.” So, she continues to stage an amazing variety of shows including improv, cabaret, clogging, films (like “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” one night, Woody Allen’s “Radio Days” another), swing dancing, plays and the annual Paul Grunberg Memorial Bach Concert which has featured Eugene Drucker performing in a trio, and this year, The Four Nations Ensemble playing the music of Bach and sons. She figures if she can get people to one kind of show, they may come back for another kind. Sometimes audiences surprise her. In what she calls a flash mob, picnickers set up tables, laid out food and wine, hung lights from the apple trees and dined under starry skies after a show. “People love this place,” she says.Coming Up at PS 21: Parsons Dance will perform at PS 21, 2980 Route 66, one mile north of Chatham, NY, Sept. 3 and 4 at 7:30 p.m. For tickets and information, call 518-392-6121, or go to www.ps21chatham.org.