As we arrived, the rich life of an oriental bazaar immediately gave us a sense of place, which slowly grew into a keen expectancy until the sleeping king, and by implication the audience, was finally roused when Scheherazade (cleverly played by Jeremy Eaton), perched high in a swing made from yards of flowing fabric as white as the backdrop of clouds, begins her tale. As if planned (and perhaps it was), sumac's blood-red flowers- exclamation against the sky- reminded me of the king's propensity to behead each night's deflowered bride the following morning. Scheherazade's wit and the king's love of a good story stays his hand until the 1001 night, when the king's madness, inflamed by a first love' betrayal, is finally cured by love's endurance and one woman's imagination.

The king repeatedly warns Scheherazade that he wants "no love stories!" when she veers towards romance and then archly complies by masquerading her tales as adventures that must stop at daybreak. As John Barth wrote in chimera, his interpretation of the 1001 nights, the progress of the stories "holds me like a genie's gaze." Transfixed, the king extends her life one more day as he eagerly anticipates what happens next, just as we did as we moved across the chartered landscape.

An imaginatively used landscape of diversity combined the domestic and the untamed with magical pools of water, tangled gardens of sunflowers and vegetables, wild woods and rolling hills, as we literally moved through each unfolding story. Tales came alive in scenes that were in turns ravishingly romantic, side-splittingly funny, eerily chaotic, and almost painfully lovely.

As night descended, the exquisitely lighted landscapes and painted backdrops led us, pied-piper like, to follow Scheherazade and her troupe until the exquisite final scenes, the most riveting of which was a nightmare of dead soldier-puppets running madly into the distant and wonderfully illuminated hills.

The drippingly romantic lagoon and barge scene followed, which with its floating quality was truly like being inside the mind of a visionary, the combined vision of Chagall's Arabian Nights as interpreted by Matthew Glassman, who played the king, Carlos Uriona, who played the vizier, and director Stacy Klein, Double Edge's founder and artistic director. The cast, which also includes Hayley Brown, Adam Bright, Todd Trebour, and Milena Dabova, are all accomplished actors whose athleticism is always in evidence. The climax scene (the only one that is inside) combined a magical illusion of a rolling sea with a riveting dance scene. Amidst the streaming colors, the sparkling music, the bewitching lighting, and the graceful actors, we were advised in hte closing moments to "cleave to the one you love."The whirling evening ended with a glimpse of Chagall's book of illustrations, and a glass of wine amidst the animated company of actors and audience alike. I left quickly because the transition was too abrupt: I wanted to watch the moon reflected in the water or hear an owl laughing in the night so the story wouldn't end. Stories are like life: stay until the end, as we are told, but no one wanted this night's story to end. The condition of my soul seems to have enlarged in the process of feeling inside the illusions of Double Edge's dynamic art.