Don’t be too alarmed when you walk into Single Carrot Theatre’s cozy performance space and feel like you’ve entered some New Age cult. That impression is only partly true. The members of the cast flit about the space singing/chanting as if they’re auditioning for an easy-like-Sunday-morning take on Jesus Christ Superstar. Barefoot and clad in neutral costumes—guys in pants and collarless shirts, women in simple sack dresses—some light the candles that line the room; some fire up the candles in the wagon-wheel-like chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Others mill about singing along to the woman playing a drone-y violin, the man playing an acoustic guitar, the woman playing a hand drum, and the woman sitting off to the side singing in an angelic voice. You take your seat in the single row of chairs that forms a powwow rectangle around the performance space and notice that a narrow platform runs right behind you. Some cast members casually stroll around this plank, sometimes sitting down and continuing the creepily laid-back vibe. When the stage doors are finally closed and the room is illuminated only by candlelight, you’re not sure if you’re about to watch a play or be subjected to group therapy.

A little bit of both, it turns out. Chinese author/playwright Gao Xingjian’s The Other Shore is a slice of theater as a blank slate. Written in 1986 and translated into English in the 1990s, Shore is informed by avant-garde European theater (such as Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, and Jerzy Grotowski), Chinese Buddhism, Xingjian’s own experiences of political expediency in Communist China, and the rather universal experience of the imperfections of language. The Chinese title (Bi’an) refers explicitly to Buddhism and enlightenment, yet the production unfolds almost like an exercise in acting techniques more than it sculpts a narrative throughline with a beginning, middle, and end. It does offer a journey, though, and how Single Carrot navigates it—under the direction of company co-founder J. Buck Jabaily—conspires to produce one of the more powerful and ineffable evenings in local theater right now.

As Jabaily outlines in the production note, some of the parts portrayed by the 12-member cast—Sarah Anne Austin, Nathan A. Cooper, Christine Demuth, Susannah Edwards, Dennis Elkins, Nathan Fulton, Jay Michael Gilman, Maddie Hicks, Giti Jabaily, Katie Rumbaugh, Owen Scott, and Natalie Ware—change with each performance, with performers unaware of their roles until that evening. It’s one variable in a production loaded with them, as so many activities proceed with an improvisational brio. The play itself begins—the experience begins the moment you enter the space—with a man (Elkins) leading everybody in an instructional game with a rope. The rope represents a relationship between people, and that can take many shapes. People can pull in opposite directions, one can rotate around another, one can rotate in place giving the appearance of the other rotating around him, and so on. Throughout, Elkins demonstrates with a partner, and the remainder of the cast members pair up and do likewise.

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