Breaking a Leg, Breaking the Mold

Tufts theater student Kristin Baker co-founded an unconventional theater company in Boston that seeks to reinvent the concept of theater as we know it.

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [12.13.04] Tufts student Kristin Baker and her colleague, finding conventional theater at times too expensive or inaccessible, have worked to create a theater experience in Boston that is engaging, inventive and affordable. The result is The Rough and Tumble Theatre.

“We believe good theater begets theatergoers,” Baker, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in theater at Tufts, told the Boston Herald. “What we're trying to do is rediscover how to relate to audiences and make them feel taken care of.”

The Rough and Tumble Theatre, seven years young, is the brainchild of Baker, who is the managing director, and Dan Milstein, artistic director and a Yale graduate. The effort was born of their desire to create a small-theater environment that would excite the audience but not drain their pockets.

There were some personal motivations, as well: ''I was tired of being in plays that just weren't all that good," Baker told the Herald.

Baker – whose day job is with the Massachusetts Cultural Council – and Milstein set to work staging innovative performances that discarded conventional structure and dialogue, “Blah Blah Blah” and “The Silent Movie Play.” Instead, the actors emphasized movement, music and audience interaction.

Increasingly, elements of film began to creep into the theater company’s performances, culminating in last year’s “Backwater: A Movie-Play,” that focused around a failed movie director moving back home with her parents.

With its affecting plotline and creative melding of film and stage techniques, “Backwater” was received favorably by both critics and patrons, recording several sellout nights.

“People really responded to ‘Backwater’ as a movie-play,'' Baker told the Herald. “They loved the velvet rope outside and the free popcorn inside. With ‘Red Brick Line’ [a 2002 production centered on the Freedom Trail] people loved being part of a mob, and enjoyed having casual passers-by observe them as part of the action.''

The theater company’s newest play, “I’m Away From My Desk Right Now…,” is receiving positive reviews. The Boston Globe called it “a tasty supplement to your usual theater consumption.”

The “indie play,” as they call it, is being staged at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts through Dec. 18, with ticket prices ranging between $12 and $15.

“We want it to sound like what an independent movie is to a mainstream movie,” Baker described the play to the Herald. “This is an indie version of a normal play.''

Rough and Tumble strives to be original, thriving on improvisation and interactivity while drawing inspiration from pop culture. Broadway it’s not, but Baker and Milstein wouldn’t have it any other way.