The Barn At Lee Announces 2025 Season: TWO BY TWO

The Barn at Lee, the artist development space and residency program known for supporting unique voices and new work in the Berkshires, launches its second season this fall with Two by Two - a duo of original productions presented over two weekends; September 4, 5, and 6 followed by September 18, 19, and 20.

The Barn's new season opens with SWEET BIRD, The Goat Exchange's stripped-down, irreverent reimagining of the Tennessee Williams classic, starring Broadway's Bianca Leigh (Oh Mary!) as Princess Kosmonopolis, alongside Marcus Amaglo (Jason, Deadclass, Ohio) as Chance, and Chloe Claudel as Heavenly. Later in September, 2024 Barn Resident Artist Ankita Sharma returns to Lee with Even Cowboys Get the Blues-a denim-clad, dance-theater fever dream about TikTok, puppets, and the digital wreckage of Manifest Destiny, created with Danny Archibald and 3ISSA.

Two by Two explores dualism in all its forms: physical and digital, past and present, reality and myth. Through diverging forms, both shows create a trick mirror, refracting the American dream and revealing the intimate strangeness of looking back. This year, the Barn becomes home to the complex figures that populate our nation's psyche: The Cowboy, The Hustler, The Fading Starlet. With this season, the Barn at Lee reaffirms its dedication to experimental theater and to emerging artists working at the edges of the form. In Sweet Bird, interdisciplinary performance company The Goat Exchange takes on Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth, transforming the classic ensemble drama (originally written for a cast of 20+) into an intimate meditation on the desperation of love and youth. 

This classic will be followed by Even Cowboys Get the Blues, conceived and performed by The Barn at Lee's 2024 resident Ankita Sharma, with Danny Archibald and 3issa. This captivating piece of dance-theater examines rurality, social media, and American mythology. Performed by Sharma themself and a cast of 9 puppets and humans, Even Cowboys is a rodeo ride of minute-long choreographic etudes that map the topography of a long-glorified American machismo and reveal the tyranny of loneliness (or the loneliness of tyranny).

Each production promises to stage tensions and contradictions, and to explore the archetypes, cultural memories, and absurdities woven into the current state of America. With Two by Two, The Barn at Lee continues to cultivate a space where emerging artists push boundaries and reimagine possibilities in theater.

"Our second season of public programming continues our vision of the Barn as a haven for artistic risk and experimentation," says Zach Donovan, cofounder. "The Goat Exchange's penchant for subverting the canon plays well with Ankita Sharma's embodied rejection of nostalgia - both compelling methods of commenting on the present moment."

This season invites audiences to confront the complex layers of reality and myth through intimate performances that challenge, question, and ultimately, illuminate. Tickets are available now for these limited-run shows, promising a season as thought-provoking as it is unforgettable.

All seating is General Admission. GA tickets start at $20, with $65 Sustainer and $125 Pay-It-Forward options for patrons with the means to support a fledgling theater organization. The Barn at Lee also offers subsidized tickets for audience members with valid EBT/WIC/CC cards through the Card to Culture program, which provides free admission to all our shows. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

This year the Barn is offering a ticket package that includes travel to and from New York City. Buses will drive audience members directly to the Barn's door on Saturday September 6th and 20th (for a small barbecue and unforgettable performance) and return to NYC that evening.

More on the artists in Two by Two:

THE GOAT EXCHANGE is an interdisciplinary performance company founded by co-Artistic Directors Chloe Claudel and Mitchell Polonsky in 2016. The company brings together artists from across disciplines to create live art, film, public installation, and experimental theater. They enjoy working with old films, new plays, verbatim transcripts, classic texts, and ladybugs. Their work is interdisciplinary and collaborative, incorporating wide-ranging influences from opera, dance, literature, classic cinema, vaudeville, slapstick, pop-culture, and public art. The Goat Exchange has developed over 20 original productions in traditional theaters and a range of site-specific venues, from a museum gallery to a swimming pool to a football stadium to a kitchen sponge.

Bianca Leigh recently concluded her run as Mary's Chaperone/Bill in the Original Cast of Oh, Mary! (Off-Broadway and Broadway). Other performances include Waxy Bush in The Nap (u/s, performed) at MTC, Frannie Halcyon in Tales of the City: The Musical in concert at the Music Box Theatre, Time/Wind in Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge, Tatiana in Trans Scripts, Part 1: The Women, Mary Ellen in the groundbreaking film Transamerica and Dr. Rachel Sandow on "Law & Order: SVU." Her writings include "Orla" in Overheard: Fourteen Monologues commissioned by the Breaking the Binary Festival. She is featured in Laverne Cox's documentary Disclosure on Netflix, and can be heard on Audible's recording of Chonburi International Hotel and Butterfly Club.

MARCUS AMAGLO is an actor from Cornwall, England. Recent projects with The Goat Exchange include Deadclass, Ohio at the Tank and the New Ohio, Jason at VAULT Festival, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival.

ANKITA SHARMA is an experimental movement-based artist invested in story-telling where content dictates genre and betrays expectation. They create to think critically, unpacking systems and symptoms of power from a queer, punk solidarity-based lens that rehearses freedom in the body and mind. In aesthetic, their work is a character-based, grungy, cheeky work of primal spirit, with physical practices rooted in Contemporary dance, Dance-Theater, and forms from both the South Asian and the African diaspora. For Ankita, audiences are agentive, sitting with and challenging discomfort in environments where sophistication and blasphemy collide.

Ankita is currently based in Brooklyn. They hold degrees in both Dance and Anthropology and have had their work performed throughout the US, including at: Denver Art Museum, Abrons Art Center, Dixon Place, The Tank, BASE, JACK, Ormao, Movement Research, The Basement, and University Settlement. They have received residencies and support from Art Omi (2025), Kalakeli Movement Arts (2025), NYSCA (2025), Brooklyn Arts Council (2025), The Barn (2024-2025), BASE (2024), GALLIM (2024), Performance Project (2022-23), MNE (2022-23), LEIMAY (2022), and Crown Goodman (2021). Ankita has also taught and presented film work internationally. In their spare time, they manage several award-winning dance-theater companies, previously including Punchdrunk's Sleep No More.

DANNY ARCHIBALD is a lighting designer, stage manager, puppeteer, and multimedia craftsman from Durham, NC. He was the lightning designer and technical director for Colorado College's Dance Workshop for three seasons. Most recently, he was behind the stage as master electrician for the American Dance Festival season, and as stage manager for Baye and Asa's 4|2|3. Inspired by his hometown puppet theatre group, Paperhand Puppet Intervention, he has started his journey into the realm of puppets with his first play The Vultures and the Sycamore, a modern fable. Hot off the presses is the puppet construction for this new work created by long time co-collaborator Ankita Sharma. In addition to the stage, he is a musician, woodworker, baker, and aspiring luthier.

3ISSA is a multidisciplinary performance artist, and community organizer invested in cosmopolitan, countercultural storytelling and magnifying the cracks left in dominant cultural and political values. Miami-reared, Brooklyn-based, 3issa roots his work in the Earth, faith systems, and the mythologies of undocumented ancestors.