There’s a train stopping in Belchertown for a short while, but the ride is never the same two nights in a row — and it might make you cry.
The theater company Theater Between Addresses will present the second and third weekends of its production of the show “Night Train” at the Barn Studios & Theater, located at 715 Federal St. in Belchertown Belchertown. Performances run from Thursday, April 23 through Sunday, April 26 and Friday, May 1 through Sunday, May 3. All shows start at either 2:04 p.m. or 7:32 p.m.
The show is billed as “a devised, immersive, participatory performance about death, grief, joy and trains.” Each performance technically begins at the “train platform,” an area right outside the theater where a busker plays pre-show music and actors in character mingle with audience members. During the show, audience members’ seats are assigned based on how much interaction, if any, they want to have with the cast.
The premise is that the audience — no more than 26 people each night — is joining eight actors and the busker as they ride the “Night Train,” which takes its guest of honor, a physics professor with dementia named Abigail Lewis, to “the end of the line.”
Abigail is dead. As she makes her way to the afterlife, her family, friends, former students and other loved ones have come to say goodbye to her one last time. In fact, Baskin requested that the Gazette not name all of the “Night Train” actors — or to mention a few other narrative elements — in this story as a way of protecting the mystery of the show.
“[There’s] a long tradition across culture and mythology of vessels that take you to the afterlife and a psychopomp, and sometimes it’s a boat on the River Styx. Sometimes it’s a train. Sometimes it’s an airplane. Sometimes it’s Davy Jones. I think we’re definitely in the lineage of that,” said co-director Ezekiel Baskin.
Summarizing “Night Train” proves elusive, as the “script” consists only of a bulleted outline of plot points. This allows the actors to reshape monologues and pivot on small details from one performance to the next.
When the Gazette went to the show’s final dress rehearsal on Wednesday, April 15, for instance, one character spoke gratefully with Abigail about how she’d helped them get into grad school, how they felt lost trying to even apply from another country, and how, because of her, they’d been able to find a happy life since then — not even as a physicist, but as a dance teacher for children.
“I dance, and I have a really good time baking, and I’ve taken the time to really enjoy life, and I have a cat, and I spend time with her, and I’m really happy, and I wanted you to know that I wouldn’t have this life without you, and so thank you,” they said.
In the script, the entire exchange is listed only as the character’s name, then two words: “shares memory.”
In another scene, a different character created a lighthearted moment in the midst of tension by mentioning someone’s collection of cuckoo clocks.
“Cuckoo clocks were new tonight,” Baskin said afterward. Throughout the rest of the rehearsal process, “They’d never existed before.”
The show began in the fall of 2019 as co-director Wynn MacKenzie’s Division III project, which is a yearlong, advanced independent study that serves as the final mandatory capstone for graduation, at Hampshire College. The group that collaborated to produce it included Baskin and several members of the 2026 cast. After a successful first run, the group wanted to put on another production in the future — and then, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic paused those plans.
In January of this year, however, the directors began convening the actors to develop their characters and the connections between them.
“Now,” MacKenzie said, “we’ve arrived.”
“I really think the purpose of this piece is a contemporary grief ritual,” they added. “I think we struggle a lot, in this moment and in Western culture, and especially in white culture, with handling grief gracefully and connectively, and I wanted to find an alternative way through that.”
Though participation in the show is optional for audience members, the performance space makes it almost impossible to avoid confronting grief — for better or worse. The “train car” is about 30 feet by 15 feet. The ride itself feels like a metaphor for a funeral, though Baskin described it as more of a “funerary ritual.”
“There are big emotions that get to come out here that don’t happen in a funeral a lot of the time,” Baskin said.
In any case, the directors want each performance to create a space outside of organized religion to give people permission to contend with grief — even if it’s for someone who doesn’t actually exist.
Tickets are $19.75 for “off-peak” shows and $23.50 for “peak” shows and are available only at nighttrain.eventbrite.com, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Guests who have questions about content advisories, noise warnings, free and reduced ticket pricing, or anything else about the production should email theaterbetweenaddresses@gmail.com.
