For one night and one night only, the First Congregational Church of Ashfield will be hosting a performance of “To Serve A Hive,” a queer political thriller and a climate crisis drama set in a beehive.

Changing climates, dwindling resources, and an aging queen, what will this hive do to survive? Explore all these questions in more in an 80-minute “workplace dramedy” play which will be taking over the church on Main Street on Dec. 14 at 2 p.m. 

“It’s a play about a bunch of bees in a beehive who are struggling with limited resources and questions of succession and power,” said director Ezekiel Baskin. “On one level it’s literally a story about bees, and then on another level its pretty allegorical in thinking about our relationships with power, climate change, scarcity.” 

The play, which was originally performed in a two-week showing in Northhampton in March, is a collaboration between Pauline Productions and Theater Between Addresses, where Baskin serves as the artistic director. 

The play is being brought to Ashfield as part of the First Congregational Church’s initiative — “Young Voices: Listening to Our Youth.” This two year project is funded by the church’s Mission and Social Justice Committee, the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, and the Fred W. Wells Trust, UW-Protestant Churches, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee. 

The church has been Pauline Productions’ home base for performances for many years, said Jeannine Haas, a member of the church and artistic director for Pauline Productions, and who is also playing the Queen Bee in the play. Haas said the play was a perfect selection for the church, which wants to “highlight more arts and more youthful voices.”

“The church is wanting to use this space as a venue for more arts, so we’re expanding to make it a hive for the arts,” Haas said. “And our church has a lot of older members, and we are very curious and want to know about how you youngins think.”

“To Serve a Hive” was written by 27-year-old playwright Julia Byrne, and its cast is comprised of young adults in their late teens, and 20s. 

The performance will be a hybrid showing, with sections of staged reading with actors holding scripts, and sections of a full production with costumes, choreography, sound and lighting design. 

Sound designer Wynn MacKenzie said he wanted to create something special that would mimic the activity in a live hive. The soundtrack includes recordings of a real beehive, with layers of actors’ voices. 

“I wanted to give a impressionistic ‘we are in hive and it wants to feel busy’; The challenge of making a stage with maybe five people at a time feel like a busy hive with thousands of bees is pretty significant,” MacKenzie said. 

Following the performance will be a brief discussion with the cast and crew.

“We want to invite people to think about how this play resonates in their lives and in this political moment,” Baskin said. “After we did it the first time we didn’t have any formal discussion but a lot of people stuck around in the lobby and were talking about it.” 

In addition to adding a discussion period, the Ashfield performance will also have a new lighting design and a new rating. While the Northampton version could be considered “PG-15,” Baskin said they are toning back the Ashfield performance to a PG-13 rating and removing some curse words and a sex scene. 

The show is free to attend, but donations will be accepted and tickets should be reserved in advance. Tickets can be reserved at Ashfield Hardware and Supply or by emailing info@paulinelive.com.

Reach Madison Schofield at 413-930-4579 or at mschofield@recorder.com.