The play, based upon tales known in the Middle Eastern culture as "The 1,001 Nights," almost didn't take flight. Although co-director and actor Matthew Glassman and actor Carlos Uriona were strongly attracted to the work, the company's artistic director, Stacy Klein, had misgivings.

"I thought it was too racy," she said, a few days after a performance."The book has a lot of sex and sexuality.

As discussions continued, the trio became aware of the Russian artist Marc Chagall's post-World War II color lithographs devoted to the theme of "The Arabian Nights." The artist, best known for his childlike dreamscapes of flying lovers and airborne animals, won a Venice Biennial award in 1948 for the series. The imagery won Klein over and provided a fresh idea for the play.

"I saw Chagall's paintings and then realized that it could be much less (about sex) and more about flying and magic," Klein, the play's director, said.

As the story begins, you're outdoors in a courtyard where actors in simple costume juggle and balance, craft instruments, sell wares, and make music. A dozen feet above you, Scheherazade (Jeremy Eaton) views the scene from an aerial rig. With a nod to Chagall, throughout the play, actors will often perform above your head in unusual perspectives. The stories are also often told against painted backdrops evocative of Chagall's style.

For the uninitiated, in the original story, the king (Glassman) has found his new bride to be unfaithful and she is killed. He then believes all women to be impure and each new virginal bride he takes invariably ends up on the wrong sides of the grass by morning. Certainly he's in a rut and, demographically the kingdom is running out of virgins. Streamlining the story, Scheherazade, as his new bride, chooses to entertain the king with nightly cliffhanger tales to be continued the next evening. This dramatically hampers his homicidal urges while sparing her life for almost three years. As with any great plot, you're not certain as to the outcome.

"Join me!" the vizier (Uriona) says as the play begins."I'm about to put an end to your uncertainty.

Thematic pervasiveness

There's no argument that "The Arabian Nights" has been as influential, and probably more pervasive, as Shakespeare in modern storytelling. You can trace a spider work of themes that have influenced writers as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe ("The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade") and novelist Jorge Luis Borges to L. Frank Baum ("The Wizard of Oz") aand even Stephen King ("Misery").

The first English translation seems to pop up around 1706 and fragments of original stories found in Syria date as far back as 800 AD. As children, we learn of Ali Baba, Aladdin, and his lamp and "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad." These stories are indeed genuine to the Middle Eastern culture, but only appear in later additions to the text.

The complexity of "The 1,001 Nights" influence is that it provides the first known form of several narrative dynamics, such as the "framing" device. Sinbad's heroic tales are framed around him, just like the episodic journeys of "Alice in Wonderland", or, for that matter, James Bond.

Within the tales there is also foreshadowing, the use of the unreliable narrator, the first murder mystery, the use of the story-within-a-story, and a whole smorgasbord of plot mechanics that can fill up an expensive semester of film script writing courses.

"The Arabian Nights" are deep in our culture, ranging from a recent mini-series, numerous films and rock band lyrics to Rimsky-Korsakov's 1888 classical composition "Scheherazade," in which he set four stories to music.

Cartoonish to the surreal

What sets Double Edge's production apart from much summer fare is that you're viewing veteran, professional actors at their craft. The company was first begun in a Boston suburb in 1982 and moved to Ashfield in 1994.

Internationally known as a world-touring acting troupe, its educational program takes in four apprentices for a two-year hitch, as well as 16 internship students annually. Another 18 students are enrolled for an intensive course during the month of June. Participants this year have included students from Ireland, Bulgaria, Spain, and other central European Countries.

Productions that may be performed in Poland, Romania, South America, or Asia may require a year or two or preparation. Creating "The Arabian Nights," Glassman said, was a one-month marathon.

"This is more like a sprint," he said. "It's every day that you're running very hard. Therefore, you try to do each day with as much creativity and productivity as possible."

Although a later, indoor production of the play may carry a PG rating, the current 80-minute work provides theatrical energy and excitement that even attentive 10-year olds would find enjoyable. Scenes range from the cartoonish and the surreal to the cinematic, A fisherman's family is depicted as cardboard cutouts that spring up suddenly from behind tall grasses with a baby's cry. In the theater's 2,400 square-foot barn, Sinbad's seas roll and crest through the clever manipulations of enormous bedspreads.

Again outdoors, in the darkness, a floodlit field conjured up a nightmare of Sinbad's, when he sees the Dancing Dead, tall haunting puppets off in the distance. The late filmmaker Federico Fellini would feel at home in this moment.

There are whirling dervishes, a magic carpet ride, a cartwheeling temptress and, well, most everything but a hookah pipe. The admirable performances of Glassman, Uriona and Eaton are well supported by the athleticism and charm of Hayley Brown and the three dashing characters performed by Adam Bright.

As to the play's message, Glassman said,"I think perhaps it's the importance of the imagination. Regardless of its rhyme or reason, it's beauty and depths that can be found with one's imagination."