THETFORD — The first time J. Bailey Burcham saw Annie Baker’s play “Circle Mirror Transformation,” he hated it.
At the time, he was an ambitious theater student in Kansas, and a show about an amateur drama class struck him as petty and insulting to the art form’s potential.
“I was so angry about it,” Burcham said in a recent interview.
But more than a decade later, Burcham is director of sales and marketing at Northern Stage, and his views on community theater have evolved greatly as he’s become more involved with it.
His opinion of Baker’s play has evolved too, so much so that this week he’ll make his Upper Valley directorial debut with a production of “Circle Mirror Transformation” at Parish Players, the community theater in Thetford.
Directing the show has been “a way for me to revisit it as a theater professional who has sort of come to grips with the importance of small theater and regional theater,” Burcham said.
The characters in “Circle Mirror” are among theater’s most humble students. Residents of the fictional town of Shirley, Vt., they’ve signed up for an adult drama class by a spirited community center director who has never before taught such a class.
Burcham likened “Circle Mirror” to “a very quiet meditation on the human condition of awkwardness,” generated in large part by the uncomfortable pauses that balloon in between bits of dialogue.
In spite of the uneasy silences, or perhaps because of them, the class participants start to attune to each other, witnessing and recounting one another’s struggles and vulnerabilities.
“What the play really poses as a concept is what it means to be present,” Burcham said.
Practicing presence can be a big ask for actors and their audiences, especially when it’s become commonplace to see someone on their phone in the middle of a movie or play.
But for Baker, whose play “The Flick” earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2014, loaded silences are “where the story lives,” Burcham said. “She’s trusting us to find the meaning in what isn’t said.”
A preoccupation with silence makes sense for a playwright whose stories focus on life’s more understated people and locales. Though Baker lives in New York City, four of her plays, including “Circle Mirror” are set in Shirley, Vt. They all share similarly simple conceits: friends hanging around a coffee shop; a lesbian couple and their neurodivergent son hosting a nude photographer; a young man returning home to his mother and her video game-obsessed boyfriend.
And then there’s the group of strangers in “Circle Mirror,” stumbling through theater exercises, tip-toeing out of their comfort zone.
Such a humble depiction of theater-making is a world apart from the culture Burcham found himself in a previous role as operations manager of the Pasadena Playhouse. Located outside of Los Angeles, the Playhouse has a longstanding reputation for staging acclaimed, original works, earning a regional theater award at the Tonys in 2023.
Nonetheless, Burcham began to feel disillusioned with the Playhouse’s “celebrity-driven theater,” he said. After he and his wife had their daughter, now 3, they started to look for a new place to live, eventually settling on the Upper Valley. Burcham’s wife found work at King Arthur Baking Company, and he got the sales and marketing gig at Northern Stage.
While Northern Stage, with its $4.5 million operating budget and vast real estate footprint in White River Junction, is a big fish in the Upper Valley’s theater scene, it’s a scrappy community theater compared to some of the Goliaths Burcham was used to in Los Angeles, he said.
Throughout his two years at the company, Burcham has gotten his hands dirty. He’s taught classes, stage managed and performed in shows including last year’s production of “Come From Away.”
While living in White River Junction, Burcham’s also explored the area’s other theater companies, including Parish Players, where he still considers himself a newcomer.
The five-person cast of “Circle Mirror,” meanwhile, features seasoned Upper Valley actors.
Darby Hiebert, who plays class instructor Marty, has performed over the years at Parish Players and BarnArts Center for the Arts, and Jon Protas, who plays James, Marty’s husband, performed in Shaker Bridge Theatre’s “Eureka Day” last fall.
Among the cast are also Dartmouth graduates Gwendolyn Dae Roland and Chloe Jung, who play drama class participants Theresa and Lauren.
“They have brought, since day one, so much joy into the room,” Burcham said.
All the actors have also shown focus throughout the rehearsal process, he added. They’re respectful and take direction well, which isn’t always a given even in big theater companies.
“They are beyond professionals,” Burcham said.
“Circle Mirror Transformation” is in production at Parish Players on June 11–21 at the Eclipse Grange Theatre in Thetford. For tickets ($15-$25) go to parishplayers.org.
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