17 Border Crossings at ArtsEmerson

A trip around the world via storytelling at its most effortlessly fluent, 17 Border Crossings starts with a man at a desk on an empty stage and ends up everywhere but. The itinerary: a worse-for-wear Communist-era train traveling from Prague to Belgrade, the wheel well of a transatlantic jet to Heathrow, and 15 other border crossings recreated with magnetic, offhanded charm by theater director, designer, and raconteur Thaddeus Phillips (Red-Eye to Havre de Grace). A chair, table, and bar of lights become the imagined settings for invasive body searches at Charles de Gaulle, ayahuasca experiments in the Amazon, KFC-smuggling in Palestine, and run-ins with Ace of Base on Croatian ferries in this engrossing look at the perplexing ins and outs of our fragile right of passage.