'Edges' Glimpses the Timeless in a Hurried World

Edges, an Enter Stage Left production which finished its two Hopkinton performances this weekend at the HCAM-TV studios, is a kind of entertainment and a kind of media that has fallen on hard times.

It takes months, not minutes, of preparation.

You need a ticket, and to get out of your pj's, and into your car, and be at a certain place at a certain time. It’s not free, casual and instant - wherever you are.

Playwrights Benj Pasek and Justin Paul present timeless - not timely - ideas. Their ideas, not yours. In song! How old fashioned.

That bucks a pretty heavy trend. It is more modern to be first to know than first to understand. After all, there is no understanding app.

Most strangely, our modern media have permanence, whether we want it or not. Your Facebook posts, tweets and photos mark you forever!

A song cycle, like Edges, has its hour and is done. It won’t follow you into your job interview. It may mark you, but not on a screen.

Besides - that music! There is rap, punk, pop, metal, emo, blues, classical and jazz. But musical theater? Who likes musical theater?

Edges answers that question definitively. If you listen, you do. In a fractured, hurried world, give the timeless a chance.

In another section, Edges addresses the instant nature of mediated need and its resoluttion in Be My Friend, which asks Help me be alive / be my Facebook friend 505.

That sharp-edged humor seems mild when actress Charisse Shields sweetly smiles through In Short (I hope you die). The song may never be a hit - it is, after all, musical theater - but as a device to say the meanest imaginable things - really, each one meaner than before - it sets some sort of comic record that will probably never be broken.

Edges is more than jokes (though it was very funny). It's a chance to think that the kid in Pizza Hut has dreams too. Or for sisters on either side of puberty to say how they don't like what the other has become. Or for a dispirited man to wake to the world around him long enough to face life again.

In the finale, Like Breathing, Edges gives its audience a chance to consider an odd quest in 2011 - to want to search for words and not be able to find them.

With all the ideas we have access to right this very second, at our fingertips, a button-push away, this odd idea can’t be fulfilled with a device. 

And Edges, which with Shields, stars Emily Shaner, Tom Shoemaker and Tim Crepeau, and was directed by Emily Grill and Sinai Tabak, prompts these unanswerable questions.

It asks us to look not at a screen, but inside.