WEST STOCKBRIDGE — For Artistic Director Michael F. Toomey and the other members of the Brooklyn-based The Humanist Project, making theater is all about play.

“We believe that play is not only the foundation of great acting but also a vital force in artistic creation and human connection,” the company says in its mission statement. “… play is the essence of performance and life.”

The Humanist Project’s sense of play will be on full display at 7:30 p.m., April 26, when Toomey and company perform their newest work, “A Crucible: A Puritanical Celebration of Witches and Turkeys,” at The Foundry, where the theater piece has been developed through a special residency.

Toomey and the company have been working on “A Crucible” since December. It comes to the Berkshires after a recently concluded series of performances at the New York Fringe Festival.

“A Crucible …” is built around preparations by members of Danvers Onions, a well-intentioned, if somewhat bumbling, community theater group in Danvers, Mass., to present their annual Thanksgiving Day production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”

The fictitious Danvers Onions made their Humanist Project debut in “Mad Mad Mad,” a raw comedy about the prevailing concept of mutually assured destruction in the 1980s, which the company performed in September at Target Margin Theatre in New York.

“During that show, we started to kick around the idea of the Danvers Onions trying to do ‘The Crucible,’” Toomey said by phone from Brooklyn, As a result, many of “Mad Mad Mad’s” characters appear in “A Crucible.”

Toomey, a 20-year veteran of Shakespeare & Company and founding member of New Haven, Conn.-based Split Knuckle Theatre, formed The Humanist Project when he moved to New York in 2012. Together with another Shakespeare & Company veteran, Andrew Borthwick-Leslie, Toomey began teaching classes and supervising workshops in clowning, an area of particular skill and interest for Toomey. Borthwick-Leslie eventually moved on to pursue other interests, but Toomey continued, even through the lean years of the pandemic. Now, he says, “We are back with a vengeance.”

In addition to performances, The Humanist Project runs workshops and classes, mostly around clowning, around play and the ability of play to free creativity and fashion connection.

Like so much of The Humanist Project’s recent work, “A Crucible” is devised theater, created collaboratively from scratch, a random thought or idea, by all the members of the company — performers, designers and technicians — without a pre-existing script. What evolves is a loosely fashioned script that serves more as a scenario than a fixed text.

Toomey’s work as a director, performer and teacher is informed by his passion and artistry for clowning. He remembers in particular a student who came to him one day and said he truly appreciated what he called Toomey’s “humanist approach” to teaching clowning.

“An individual holds everything within them,” Toomey said, adding that his aim as a teacher and director is to “bring to consciousness what’s in us. Play is deeply unique, deeply personal and goal-less. The idea is play for the sake of play.”

The challenge is how one plays with others. It’s a challenge that seems to resolve itself in rehearsal and performance.

“We all [have differences]. But within an ensemble, we find that, for all our differences, we come together with a sense of fun and play,” said Humanist Project staffer Fernando Zermeno Garavito, who also plays a character named Cliff in “A Crucible.”

“The joy here is having the space to play authentically with others who also are playing authentically,” said cast member Mia Alexandra, who plays Colonel Meowski.

Playing Meowski has allowed Alexander to explore “deep parts of myself I haven’t necessarily been comfortable with,” she said. “I’ve been a person who likes to take charge in playing games. I’m also attracted to infatuation and romance. I’m happy I get to explore that (here).”

Toomey and his actors agree that this is all a game.

“You have to remember the game,” said cast member Jon-Mykul Bowen. “Everything we do is to set up the game. With the audience and with ourselves, we may all play the same way; what differs is how each of us gets into [the game].”

Ultimately, Toomey said, all this game playing is about something broader; something fundamental — building community.

“A lot of artists ask me about the value of laughter; of comedy,” he said. “I tell them it’s about community; about coming together. It’s about bringing people together and inviting them to laugh.”